Why does Clarkson 'hate' Meghan?

It's to do with brain drain.

On Friday 16 December, Jeremy Clarkson wrote in his column for the Sun newspaper that he hated Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The piece was taken offline after a storm of protests including one from his own daughter.

Clarkson had said he dreamed of seeing her paraded through Britain, being pelted with excrement by the crowds. That ‘dream’ was a reference to a scene in Game of Thrones: Queen Cersei’s ‘walk of atonement’ for her sins, in Series 5 (and she’s not the first to do it.)

Clarkson’s comments were nevertheless seen as excessive. Critics wove their reactions into the fabric of their pet narratives: misogyny, bullying, violence against women.

Twitter users exploded - as they do at almost everything. The stroke of genius of that website was to create a readers’ comments section without needing to invest in magazine articles - cut straight to the chase, the miserable bickering. Clearly that’s what millions love most, and it’s made Jack Dorsey a billionaire.

But this incident opens a door into a wider issue, and the key is Clarkson’s statement that he loathes Meghan ‘on a cellular level.’

He means that he’s had a natural, instinctive response to narcissism - or attention-seeking, if you prefer a less Freudy term. If someone says ‘look at me!’ there has to be a good reason; they have to pay a fair rent on your brainspace.

For the conscious mind is always juggling. Say you’re driving: while listening to the radio and mulling over problems, you have to watch the road and manage the controls… but you may also be getting messages from your heart and lungs, muscles and joints. Failure to prioritise correctly could be fatal.

In Meghan’s case, she has barged into our brains but paid us negatively with slurs on our Royal Family and our society generally. It’s certainly got her noticed and it hardly matters to her in what form the attention has come. It’s also earned a lot of money and the stagey, shocked sympathy of TV billionaire Oprah’s ‘What?’

There’s something wrong with her. Shouldn’t Meghan’s scant involvement with her father and siblings have rung warning bells? And her previous divorce, which while always a sad business can sometimes call into question the character of one partner or the judgment of the other?

In private individuals the greed for limelight is to be as much pitied as deplored, but in public figures it can be harmful to the community. Think of the manipulative, mendacious narcissist Tony Blair, so desperate to play with the big boys that he fell in with Bush’s plans for Iraq, so keen for his place in history that he was willing to wreck our Constitution. For her part Meghan is happy to play a Mirror of Erised, exploiting Harry’s longing for a lost, loved mother and inflicting reputational damage on our Head of State and his family.

It won’t stop. Nothing will ever be enough for this type. I fear that one day, when the spotlight threatens to drift away, there may be a spectacular marital issue to draw it back.