A popular British radio host was fired Thursday by the BBC for a tweet that depicted the royal baby as chimpanzee.
Danny Baker, 61, posted an image Wednesday of a couple holding hands with a chimp dressed in a bowler hat and an overcoat, and captioned it, "Royal baby leaves hospital."
The now-deleted tweet came shortly after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex showed off their baby boy, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, to the public for the first time.
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The image appeared to mock the heritage of the former Meghan Markle, whose father is white and mother is African American.
A BBC spokesperson said that the tweet was "a serious error in judgement" and that it "goes against the values we as a station aim to embody."
Baker denied there was any racist intent behind the image in a series of follow-up messages.
"Once again. Sincere apologies for the stupid unthinking gag pic earlier,'' he wrote. "Was supposed to be joke about Royals vs circus animals in posh clothes but interpreted as about monkeys & race, so rightly deleted. Royal watching not my forte."
In another he wrote, "Would have used same stupid pic for any other Royal birth or Boris Johnson kid or even one of my own. It's a funny image. (Though not of course in that context.) Enormous mistake, for sure. Grotesque. Anyway, here's to ya Archie, Sorry mate."
Baker faced swift backlash online.
Baker then tweeted Thursday that the call by the BBC to fire him "was a masterclass of pompous faux-gravity. Took a tone that said I actually meant that ridiculous tweet and the BBC must uphold blah blah blah. Literally threw me under the bus. Could hear the suits knees knocking."
He had hosted a weekly show on the BBC radio station 5 Live.
The issue of race is one that the Duchess of Sussex has dealt with for a long time. She wrote about the prejudice she has faced in a 2017 issue of Allure.
In an essay for her now-shuttered lifestyle website, The Tig, she revealed her frustration about the "countless black jokes people have shared in front of me, not realizing I am mixed, unaware that I am the ethnically ambiguous fly on the wall."
The relentless media scrutiny she faced when first dating Prince Harry in 2017 led him to issue a rare public statement, in which he condemned racist and sexist press coverage of her.