IOW, you do in fact agree that “race played any part in that comparison”. Okay then.
I think it suggests the same “realities of race perception in modern societies” as the Sunak and ElBaradei examples. Namely, skin color is perceived to be strongly determinative of whether somebody “looks like” someone else, or even like something else.
For example, for over 20 years on these boards we’ve been occasionally revisiting the issue of a white grandparent upset at the prospect of a non-white daughter- or son-in-law on the grounds that his grandchildren won’t “look like him”. There are, of course, hundreds of significant ways in which you can physically resemble a grandparent without having the same skin tone as your grandparent. But skin tone as a race marker is very disproportionately weighted in most people’s unexamined perceptions of what constitutes “looking alike”.
Which—in a triumphant quadruple pivot back to the actual topic of this thread—is significantly relevant to the high levels of popular antagonism towards Meghan Markle, and probably was a major factor in Clarkson’s surprise at the degree of pushback against his offensive remarks about her.