Piers Morgan: I’m not claiming to be Mr Perfect – I can be abrasive and obnoxious

Professional firebrand Piers Morgan discusses Donald Trump, his curious year and whether or not he’s part of the polarisation problem. Luke Rix-Standing reports.
Piers Morgan has a new book called Wake Up. Photo: CNN/PA.Piers Morgan has a new book called Wake Up. Photo: CNN/PA.
Piers Morgan has a new book called Wake Up. Photo: CNN/PA.

On New Year’s Eve, 2018, Piers Morgan tweeted the following: “My New Year’s Resolution for 2019 is to be just as annoying, argumentative & insufferably right about everything as I’ve been in 2018. Zero apologies in advance to the whiny PC-crazed snowflake imbeciles who will be horrifically offended by absolutely everything I say or write.”

You may well not need an introduction to the 55-year-old veteran journalist and Good Morning Britain presenter, but if you do, that tweet is probably it. Many replies were supportive, a few lightly critical, a few more veered into the unprintable – a standard response to a Piers Morgan Twitter outing.

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Morgan will happily take on anyone, anywhere. In the past year, he’s enraged parts of the left with his take on trans rights and backing Boris Johnson’s Brexit agenda, despite voting remain in 2016. He’s since given the same treatment to the pro-Boris right, and appears to have been boycotted by the Government after savaging their handling of the pandemic.

Piers Morgan with GMB co-presenter Susanna Reid. Photo: Ian West/PA.Piers Morgan with GMB co-presenter Susanna Reid. Photo: Ian West/PA.
Piers Morgan with GMB co-presenter Susanna Reid. Photo: Ian West/PA.

“It’s been a curious year,” he muses. “In December, I was hugely popular with Boris fans and Brexiteers, but then during the pandemic, I began to be heavily critical of the Government, and all my Brexiteer fans suddenly started to hate me. All the liberals that had taken a dim view of me not joining the ‘remoaner’ campaign all started to fall in love with me again.”

His new book, Wake Up, is likely to swing the dial back again, and he’s already “expecting some horrific reviews from the ‘wokies’”. He’s quick to disassociate ‘wokie’ from ‘the left’, and even from the original meaning of ‘woke’. “The history of ‘woke’ is completely laudable, it’s about having an awareness of social and racial injustice, and if that was all it was, I’d be woke myself. But it’s been completely hijacked, and ultra-woke liberalism is bordering on fascism.”

Formerly editor of the Daily Mirror, Morgan identifies as a ‘liberal’, but he’s equally firm over what the word should mean. “I want liberals to go back to being liberal. There’s been a lot written by liberals about how the right-wing are intolerable, intransigent, and self-righteous, but many liberals are now behaving the same way or worse. Everything is offensive to the ‘wokies’, and they don’t believe in freedom of speech.”

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To long-time Morgan-watchers, these will not be new sentiments, and on the page and in person, he’s as strident as you’d expect. Pugnacious and polemical, the book barrels along at scorching pace, taking aim at everything from cancel culture and veganism, to the role of modern masculinity.

Originally planned as a set of extended essays, the madness of 2020 convinced Morgan to rejig the work into a set of retrospective diaries, and personal asides sneak in amidst the argument avalanche.

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Not overly troubled by self-doubt, Morgan embraces his role as a provocateur – in fact, he considers the word a compliment. “I’m a deliberate provocateur – my whole life is spent inspiring arguments. But I’ve got Susanna Reid next to me, who disagrees with me all the time. We’re a perfect template for liberals – you should able to passionately debate everything, but remain friends.”

He’s been called plenty of nasty names down the decades, but he sees himself as one of the good guys, “albeit with flaws”. In person, he is courtesy incarnate, more considered if no less confident than the bullish battering ram that graces morning television.

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Though the culture war stuff will doubtless claim a lot of column inches, Morgan reserves perhaps his strongest language for the Government. “Their incompetence has made me very angry, and the boycott is a pathetic, cowardly dereliction of public duty to our viewers. I make no apology for going after them so hard, because we’ve had the worst death toll in Europe, and the worst economic record. Frankly, it couldn’t be any worse.”

Piers’ prose is certainly impassioned, but there will inevitably be allegations of hypocrisy. He slams woke hysteria, but hit the roof when Gregg’s released a vegan sausage roll. He staunchly defends nuanced discourse, but calls his opponents ‘purple-haired, ring-nosed, meat-hating, man-detesting lunatics’. He criticises fellow broadcaster James O’Brien for the title of his book, How To Be Right, but issues that tweet from New Year’s Eve.

To his credit, he doesn’t shirk the criticism. “I’m not claiming to be Mr Perfect – I’m totally aware that I can be abrasive and obnoxious. Sometimes I join in the pile-ons, sometimes I go a bit over the top, and in that sense, I have been part of the problem. But I’m absolutely prepared to listen to people and debate with them, and then not fall out with them at the end. I’d be a hypocrite if I wanted to cancel people. I’ll defend my right to hate vegan sausage rolls for the rest of my natural life, but I don’t want to ban people from eating them.”

He’s similarly philosophical on allegations of bullying, which, to my surprise, he does not dismiss out of hand. “I don’t reject it completely. The key thing is to always punch up, not down, and I do look back at certain debates and think ‘that person didn’t really have enough tools to compete’. That’s never a good look, and I’ve tried to evolve.”

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When you do look back on his debates – and boy, are there a lot of them – what stands out most is his relentless energy. Whether sparring on social media or powering through crack-of-dawn production meetings, Morgan lives at a mile a minute, and his commitment and ability are hard to question. “I think every journalist is exhausted this year,” he says, “but there’s no doubt 2020 is exhilarating from a news point of view. If news is your trade, you’ll never have a bigger story than this.”

Morgan was born in East Sussex in 1965, and became the youngest newspaper editor in the country when he took over at the News of the World aged just 28. He then spent nine years helming the Daily Mirror, winning Newspaper of the Year in 2001, but was sacked three years later.

Victory in the American Apprentice brought a much-debated friendship with Donald Trump, which went on to include TV interviews, fulsome praise, searing criticism, and finally Trump unfollowing Morgan on Twitter. “I don’t see myself as a political animal,” he says. “I see myself as a journalist, and despite being a friend of his, I’ve always tried to be fair-minded.”

Given the complaints he has about the present, Morgan is remarkably positive about the future. “Things will get worse before they get better, but I’m an eternal optimist. I say to people ‘I know it’s tough, but this will be over, and when it is, head to your favourite pub, have a curry, drink ten pints and toast freedom’.”

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