Former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson says he emailed Prince Harry and his wife Meghan on Christmas morning apologising for a controversial column in a British tabloid which called for the Duchess of Sussex to be paraded through the streets naked with faeces thrown at her.
In the column, published in The Sun on December 16, he wrote he was "dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, 'Shame!' and throw lumps of excrement at her".
The column was pulled, per Clarkson's request, and The Sun apologised after it received 20,000 complaints.
The 62-year-old took to Instagram today to issue his own lengthy apology "all the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head".
The game show host said while he typically reads his columns aloud to another person before sending them to the newspaper, he "was home alone on that fateful day, and in a hurry".
"When I'd finished, I just pressed send. And then, when the column appeared the next day, the land mine exploded."
While he initially ignored the "slow rumble" of criticism which followed, "the rumble got louder".
After picking up a copy of The Sun, Clarkson said he felt "sweaty and cold at the same time" as the realisation dawned on him that he had "completely messed up".
"I couldn't believe what I was reading. Had I really said that? It was horrible."
He also expanded on a tweet published several days later, in which he wrote "I've rather put my foot in it".
"In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I'm horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future," he tweeted at the time.
He explained today that he had been thinking of the fantasy television series Game of Thrones at the time of writing "but I'd forgotten to mention this".
"So it looked like I was actually calling for revolting violence to rain down on Meghan's head."
The British broadcaster said he was "very angry" with himself, adding that while he was often "accused of all sorts of things" during "all those controversial days on Top Gear", it was "very rarely sexism".
"I'm just not sexist and I abhor violence against women. And yet I seemed to be advocating just that.
"I was mortified and so was everyone else. My phone went mad. Very close friends were furious. Even my own daughter took to Instagram to denounce me."
He said there were "calls for me to be sacked and charged with a hate crime" following the publication of the column.
Clarkson said he "wrote to everyone who works with me saying how sorry I was" after more than 60 MPs called for action to be taken against him, and ITV and Amazon were "incandescent".
He also emailed an apology to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on Christmas morning.
"I said I was baffled by what they had been saying on TV but that the language I'd used in my column was disgraceful and that I was profoundly sorry."
He then mused about whether he would be able to move on from the controversy, writing, "It's hard to be interesting and vigilant at the same time.
"You never hear peals of laughter coming from a health and safety seminar. But I promise you this, I will try."
He concluded, "Who knows? Very soon now I shall be a grandfather in the future, maybe I'll just write about that".
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