Oh no. Clarkson has decided to issue a lengthy and grovelling apology to the Woke Queen Meghan and her snivelling ‘spare’ sidekick, for the apparently heinous crime of a misjudged joke.
“I really am sorry,” says our farming friend. “All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head.”
He has done this either to try to keep his Amazon show, or because he genuinely means it. Both are bad.
The latter is more simple. He is making the classic mistake of apologising to merciless ideologues with no mechanism for forgiveness, as well as a baying mob who will only be excited by this next whiff of fresh blood.
This approach can never work, as was confirmed immediately by H & M’s infuriatingly pompous statement, by way of reply:
While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his longstanding pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny.
Unless each of his other pieces were also written “in a hurry”, as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.
In other words, Clarkson must capitulate fully to woke norms, where everything is misogyny and all political opponents are ‘hateful‘, yet when they destroy someone it is simply a case of ‘consequences’ and ‘accountability’.
Never mind Harry’s hate towards his ginger nemesis Rebekah Brooks, or the many other targets in his book, the sequel to which could easily be called Overshared in Hate.
So that was a massive fail from Jezza. But chances are he knew that and was apologising simply to appease Amazon, which is a more complicated proposition.
Why would Amazon want to lose someone who is, ostensibly at least, one of their most bankable stars? Some on the left claim that the sole aim of corporations is to make money, and that, for instance, the existence of so many woke films is simply because executives believe that is the content that will maximise profits.
It is an obviously flawed premise, since woke movies consistently tank at the box office. What seems more likely to me is that corporations are now just as interested in social engineering and control as they are in profit. Much like the idiot child Justin Trudeau, they look to China with admiration. Presumably, this is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washingon Post: influence is now a greater currency than the rapidly diminishing dollar.
Some will stick with the simple dollars-and-sense argument and say Amazon suspects it’ll lose more subscriptions by backing Clarkson over Meghan. I find that unlikely. The issue was essentially buried. The Clarkson fans – who probably hate Meghan on at least a cellular level, if not deeper – would have continued to watch his farm show. And Meghan fans will continue to use Amazon for whatever it is they buy (perhaps a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince?).
No doubt there is pressure from the woke employees within the company to engage in these struggle sessions. Or maybe Bezos just wants to fit in at his dinner parties with the elites, enjoying his virtue points over a main course of synthetic meat and Adrenochrome.
The Telegraph, however, has come up with a more compelling argument on the financial side: apparently Clarkson’s numbers just aren’t cutting it on a global scale. According to this theory, the whole Meghan thing is just a convenient excuse for Amazon to send Clarkson to the knacker’s yard, while he can save face by claiming to be another victim of cancel culture. In our fallen world, this has a cynical ring of truth to it.
Then again, at the time of writing, ITV is now distancing itself from Clarkson too. Is Who Wants to be a Millionaire? also failing? Or is this a co-ordinated ‘Matrix attack’, like when Andrew Tate suddenly lost all his social media accounts in one day? At the rate this is escalating, I expect by the time of publishing Clarkson will be languishing in a Romanian jail under accusations of sex trafficking. I mean, who suddenly decides to run a ‘farm’ in middle-age with no prior experience? It all starts to make sense.
Whichever theory you go for, it all comes back to Meghan. Even if Amazon is just using her as the scapegoat, she is still suspiciously near the crime scene. Why did the furore die down, only to suddenly flare up again? This has Markle written all over it. Just as she got rid of Piers Morgan, she’s now taken another gammon scalp. Clarkson fantasised about her being paraded through the streets naked like Cersei, and now, as if to continue the Game of Thrones analogy that he failed to spell out for the slow kids, she will get her revenge by blowing up his career.
What is so disappointing is that Clarkson hasn’t even gone down fighting. By backing down from his slightly misjudged but clearly satirical column, he has taken a massive L. With the initial Twitter apology, the private Christmas apology, and the new, novella-length apology on Instagram, Clarkson is already three apologies in. Yet his Grand Apology Tour is, I suspect, only just beginning.
I for one hate it on a cellular level.
Stop Press: Allison Pearson in the Telegraph says she’d prefer a world full of Jeremy Clarksons than Meghan Markles.
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