Commiserations to Jeremy Clarkson: now his Sun column has been taken down, the celebrity must forfeit his chance to win the UK media’s most demented attack on Meghan award, 2022. Fairness requires his article to be available for comparison with work from names including, in no particular order, Dan Wootton, Piers Morgan, Nigel Farage, Tom Bower, Brendan O’Neill of spiked and the Spectator’s Freddy Gray, not forgetting Richard Tice, Toby Young and Rod Liddle. Energised, perhaps, by the abundant material issuing from Montecito, more and more commentators are realising that a media career really can be based on, or refreshed by, repeating that the Duchess of Sussex is any or all of a talentless (yet cunning) mansion-dwelling liar, narcissist, bully, gold-digger, hypocrite and republic facilitator who stole “our” prince (Morgan: “dragged him out of the country off to your California mansion to fleece your royal titles”) whom she will dump – thanks to the demagogue-psychic Farage for this insight – when the time is right. To which the popular psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson tweeted: “This seems highly probable to me.” Having said that, the trade is harder than it might look; the successful Markle-detractor must not only sustain Morgan-rivalling levels of abuse but produce some signature excuse for his feelings. An honourable mention, then, to Peterson who, new to the specialism, brought a scholarly perspective to bear on a Markle “archetype” podcast in which he’d been quoted (saying “I don’t think that men can control crazy women”). While compliant with Goldwater constraints on psychological speculation, Peterson added to his academic defence of “crazy women” the objection that Markle’s voice “just grates on me”. Elsewhere, the recently arrested career misogynist Andrew Tate seems to be the first of this men’s group to call her a bitch and worse. Why the anger? Unclear, but, invited on Morgan’s show, Tate recently regretted that “a lot of age-old traditions are being destroyed in real time”. The above list should not, incidentally, be interpreted as some innate female inferiority in reviling Meghan. Credit is due, in fact, to the Daily Telegraph’s female team. The judges of this award are not, however, so “woke” as to favour less obsessive and comparatively pallid contributions to Meghan-hating by women, simply for the sake of diversity. If it is any consolation to Clarkson, last year’s anti-Meghan content included work so outstandingly malignant that even after his article provoked international condemnation and record-breaking complaints, he may not have triumphed. True, the description of Meghan as worse than the serial killer Rose West is memorable, likewise his dream of the day that Meghan – since the writer hates her “on a cellular level” – “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”. But original? Our judges noted that this sort of sexualised, unashamedly pathological fantasy about a determined and attractive woman would probably be considered fairly basic in online groups favoured by resentful incels. Moreover, one of the challenges for specialist Markle-baiters is to balance, as Clarkson did not, the disturbed with the publishable. As familiar as it is for some men to be triggered by female success into the sort of behaviours academics have summarised as “masculine over-compensation”, the Meghan-averse, like Greta Thunberg’s haters (as Clarkson shows, there is significant overlap), must keep in mind the need not to come across as worryingly invested or, to borrow Peterson’s jargon, crazy. Tom Bower, a strong contender for this year’s award, could probably have pulled off his Nazi analogy, “Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist, would look with real awe at what the Sussexes and Netflix have achieved”, and even his conspiratorial “Doria plays a really sinister role in this whole story”. It helped that he was speaking on a channel where Meghan hysteria is pretty much normalised. But people noticed when he told viewers of Good Morning Britain: “It’s Meghan I’m after.” That the would-be shit-pelter Clarkson is to keep his TV shows and newspaper columns should not, as much as it has thrilled his fans, be taken to mean less eminent contributors would survive. Careful misogynists might be better advised to study the way his rivals will, for instance, elevate otherwise standard exercises in vituperation with a dash of compassion, a mention of the cost of living crisis, learned regret for Meghan’s limitations. “In a strangely lobotomised way,” Gray says of his muse, “Meghan seems to have been influenced by the theories of Carl Jung.” Alternatively, notice how seasoned Meghan antagonists offer deep constitutional feeling as a justification for their insults and disgusted faces: “Princess Pinocchio”, “your narcissistic delusionist (sic) wife”, “the ginge”, “poisonous rats”. The guild’s settled understanding, after the Netflix series, that the Sussexes represent, in Morgan’s words, “an existential threat to the British monarchy”, allowed for some peerless abuse from lead members of the fraternity, notably in the popular Meghan-hating double acts. The aim of this collaborative format being for participants to goad one another into ever more extravagant denunciations of the Sussexes. In particular the Wootton-Bower combo reliably appals, the host nodding while the writer insists, for example (confident that Wootton won’t mention Andrew Morton), that Diana was never, like her son, “duplicitous”. Wootton (confident that Bower won’t mention Panorama), agrees that Diana never did anything so vile as criticise the institution. To pick a winner from this wealth of invective has occasionally felt like an impossible task. But the most precious is, surely, a piece by the distinguished Marxist turned Markleist, Brendan O’Neill. Not for pyrotechnics but for so brilliantly encapsulating Meghan’s often fascinating effect on the male mind. “Go away,” he begs the belle dame of Montecito, “Leave me alone.” He made the same request in 2020. Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist