Lots of people are claiming to feel sorry for Piers Morgan, the professional loudmouth supposedly driven from his breakfast TV show for having incurred the wrath of Meghan Markle and her woke mob. But I’m not one of them, not least because of a strange incident involving a recent BBC News interview with Andrew Neil.
Neil was asked whether he’d consider giving Morgan a job at the new TV channel he is launching, GB News. He replied that he thought Morgan would be a “huge asset” and that he’d be delighted to talk to him “if he were up for it.”
This was then written up in the Sun newspaper, as though it were all just a random, spur-of-the-moment question and answer, with Neil having previously never given a moment’s thought to the issue.
Hmm. Perhaps I’m being cynical but I know how the media works. I’d say it’s extremely unusual, indeed unheard of, for a presenter of Piers Morgan’s celebrity to quit one lucrative, prominent position without having another one ready and waiting for him.
Morgan said of Markle’s performance in that Oprah Winfrey interview, “I don’t believe a word she says. I wouldn’t believe her if she read me a weather report” — prompting more than 41,000 viewer complaints and a petition signed by more than 88,000 people demanding that Morgan be sacked from his job at Good Morning Britain.
But to paraphrase Morgan, I don’t believe a word of this narrative.
Sure, I’m not disputing that Markle’s fan club tried to get Morgan sacked on the spurious grounds that his remarks were somehow insensitive or racist or something.
Many, many charges could be laid against Morgan. But I don’t think racism is one of them. On the contrary, he is quite insufferably woke…
What I’m definitely questioning here is the idea that Morgan is just another helpless victim of the cancel culture witch-hunt mob.
Piers Morgan and Meghan Markle have a lot more in common than they would care to admit. Both are media show ponies who will do almost anything to get attention. I expect the thing which troubled Morgan most about the interview was that Harry and Meghan chose to give the exclusive to Oprah and not himself.
Of course Morgan stormed off set during a studio discussion on Meghan Markle. What else could he possibly do when someone else — a media operator at least as canny and manipulative as himself — had stolen his limelight?
Morgan will, no doubt, turn the publicity to his advantage by waltzing into another lucrative media job. He may very well have had one lined one up already, long before his staged hissy-fit.
But I must admit, part of me feels dirty in even broaching this subject at all. Why, exactly, are so many of us obsessed with what two entitled millionaires had to say about their mostly imaginary problems to a billionaire interviewer in LaLaLand? And why do we care what a blustering, bullying, treble-chinned TV buffoon has to say about any of this?
Morgan reminds me of no-one so much as Caesar Flickerman, the grotesque, shallow, cynical, smarmy TV host in The Hunger Games series (brilliantly played in the movies by Stanley Tucci). All right, Flickerman has much more charm, grace, and style than the potato-ish thug Morgan, but they serve exactly the same purpose: to distract the mob with bread and circuses. The mob is you and me, out there in the various districts of Panem, while the nauseating, corrupt elite in the Capital conspire against our interests and treat us like cattle.
Though Morgan masquerades as a populist — the honest, blunt, Iago-like character who professes to tell it like it is — he is actually very much a creature of the liberal-left Establishment elite. He invites professional race-baiters like Afua Hirsch onto his show, to “debate” faux-contentious issues like whether or not Nelson’s Column should be taken down from London’s Trafalgar Square because Nelson was racist, supposedly.
But outside the columns of the largely unread Guardian, no-one believes this nonsense. It’s an extreme minority position — borne of a Marxist-Leninist philosophy that constantly seeks to undermine the reigning hegemony by seeing how far you can push palpably absurd ideas.
In the pre-internet world, it is fair to say, this nonsense would have been confined predominantly to nutcases writing angry letters to themselves in well-chewed red crayon.
When Morgan “confronts” these issues in his loud-mouthed way, he fools a gullible section of the public into thinking that he is their man. “Good old Piers!” they think. “He’s not falling for any of that woke nonsense!”
Actually, though, he is promoting and amplifying the woke nonsense. If he didn’t invite people like Afua Hirsch onto his breakfast TV show, barely anyone outside those Guardian circles would have even heard of this private-schooled, Oxford-educated child of privilege and her stupid, troublemaking, race-baiting ideas. What Morgan does is take this stuff mainstream — thus enabling it to become more and more prevalent in the broader culture.
Morgan, in other words, is no more a victim in this charade than his pantomime villain antagonist Meghan Markle.
They’re both the slipperiest of operators, pitched against each other in this media game. If only they could both lose.