by If all had gone as planned, the chairman of the UK’s top press regulator would have spent Monday night enjoying a private dinner at Rupert Murdoch’s Mayfair flat.
Instead, Edward Faulks canceled his plans after being asked by the Guardian why he had booked a dinner with the billionaire media mogul.
Faulks, a peer and former Conservative cabinet minister, is chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organization (Ipso), which oversees the production of Murdoch’s British newspapers.
His organization is evaluating Murdoch’s Sun for a potential violation of press standards. He has spent the last 48 hours dealing with thousands of complaints about Jeremy Clarkson’s column on Saturday about the Duchess of Sussex, in which the columnist said he hated Meghan “on a cellular level”.
The Sun has now removed Clarkson’s column from its website, while the piece has drawn 12,000 complaints – almost as many as Ipso has received on all stories in all of 2021.
He wrote that he “dreamed of the day when she would be forced to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chanted ‘Shame! and throw pieces of excrement at him”.
He added: “Everyone my age thinks the same way.”
The column – which Clarkson said referred to Game of Thrones – was widely criticized for its misogynistic tone. Critics included her own daughter Emily, who said: ‘I want to make it very clear that I take exception to everything my dad has written about Meghan Markle.
After facing backlash over the comments, Clarkson released a statement, “Oh my God. I rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made an awkward reference to a scene from Game of Thrones and it went wrong with a lot of people. I am horrified to have done so much harm and will be more careful in the future.
Oh dear. 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.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) December 19, 2022
\n”,”url”:”https://twitter.com/JeremyClarkson/status/1604826179999076352?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet”,”id”:”1604826179999076352″,”hasMedia”:false,”role”:”inline”,”isThirdPartyTracking”:false,”source”:”Twitter”,”elementId”:”3cba0977-843c-47eb-a423-ed1214a78d2e”}}”>
Oh dear. I rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made an awkward reference to a scene from Game of Thrones and it went wrong with a lot of people. I am horrified to have done so much harm and will be more careful in the future.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) December 19, 2022
It’s unclear which of Ipso’s current rules might have been engaged because it doesn’t reprimand member newspapers for offending and has general guidelines for commentary articles.
A spokesperson for Ipso confirmed that Faulks had canceled plans to attend the private dinner with Murdoch and other executives from his News UK media company following Clarkson’s attention-grabbing comments.
They said: ‘As part of his role as Chairman of Ipso, Lord Faulks often meets with editors and publishers. Lord Faulks was due to attend a long-running engagement tonight hosted by Rupert Murdoch and attended by News UK executives. Due to the volume of complaints about Jeremy Clarkson’s column, Lord Faulks felt his presence would not be appropriate at this time and explained this to the organisers.
The incident sheds light on the workings of the press regulator which is overseen by Faulks, a prominent QC and brother of writer Sebastian Faulks. Although his salary is not public, his predecessor in the role reportedly earned £150,000 a year in 2014 for part-time work.
Ipso was founded by media groups trying to stave off the threat of legal regulation of the press after the Leveson inquiry. Its main backers are Murdoch’s News UK, the parent company of the Daily Mail, and Reach, publisher of the Mirror and Express. The Guardian is not a member of the organization and has its own internal complaints process.
Close scrutiny of how the UK media reports on Meghan at her peak following the release of Netflix’s documentary Meghan & Harry, which included the couple alleging widespread racism and sexism in the UK newspaper industry. The couple have filed several lawsuits against UK news outlets, with at least four lawsuits against Ipso members still pending.
News UK declined to comment.
