‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ asked a Spectator writer last weekend. The answer, according to slavishly pro-Israel commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti, is that I’m now ‘darker’, ‘degraded’, ‘dismal’ and ‘debase(d)’ – because I’ve become more critical of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza. For a long time on my YouTube show Uncensored, I defended the country’s right to defend itself after 7 October attacks. But I now believe Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has crossed the ‘proportionality’ line with its recent food and aid blockade and relentless bombardment of civilians. Self-evidently, Israel is failing in its mission to eliminate Hamas and get the remaining hostages released. Its forces have been killing and starving a horrendous number of children as they go after the terrorists – and if finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is to be taken at his genocidal-sounding word, its new mission is to kick all Palestinians out of Gaza, which would constitute ethnic cleansing. Even former Israeli prime ministers now say it’s committing war crimes. When I defended Israel, I was subjected to a ferocious onslaught from pro-Palestinian trolls who branded me a ‘Zionist genocide-enabler’. Now, I’ve had an equally vile barrage of abuse and threats from pro-Israeli trolls branding me a ‘Jew-hating anti-Semite’. How can I be both?
Amid the pro-Israeli hate, I criticised Dawn French for offensively downplaying 7 October as just ‘a bad thing’ in a mocking video, and I described the insufferably tedious Greta Thunberg as an attention-seeking narcissist for preposterously claiming she’d been kidnapped by the IDF on her puerile selfie-yacht stunt. I was instantly attacked as an Israeli stooge by the same pro-Palestinian trolls who’d been lauding me and praised by the pro-Israeli trolls who’d been howling ‘Hamas lover!’ at me for days. ‘You can’t win, Piers,’ I hear you say. But for a journalist to be attacked by both sides in a war of this historical complexity is a win. It means I’m doing my job properly. The answer to ‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ is that I’m right where I want to be.
‘Cambio de Tercio tonight? x’ read the anonymous text as I attended the Champions League final. I was intrigued; that’s my favourite Spanish restaurant in London. ‘Who’s this?’ I replied. ‘I’m in Munich.’ ‘Rishi.’ I’ve regularly texted with our former prime minister, and Cambio is also one of his favourite restaurants, so this made perfect sense. ‘Ah! You’ve got a new number. Are you there tonight? Let’s have dinner soon.’ ‘I have a new number. Would love dinner. Will you be in LA over the summer?’ (Rishi and I, with our wives, dined together in Beverly Hills last August.) ‘Great,’ I replied, ‘And yes, will be in LA.’ He then said he’d get one of his advisers, a mutual friend, to sort the date. ‘PSG ripping Inter Milan to pieces,’ I added. ‘I’m watching on TV,’ he said. ‘I was rooting for Inter, always backing the underdog!’ Again, very Rishi. It was only the next day that I spotted the ‘x’ at the end of his initial message and alarm bells rang. Rishi and I are friendly, but not ‘x’ friendly. Sure enough, our mutual friend confirmed it wasn’t him.
Coincidentally, during my trip to Qatar to attend the Emir’s state dinner for President Trump, one of the latter’s aides reminded me of the time a prankster once chatted to The Donald on the phone by pretending to be me. Incredibly, the imposter persuaded the White House switchboard to put ‘me’ through to Trump and they had a lengthy conversation. Obviously, all hell broke loose when one of his team later asked me how the call had gone and I said I hadn’t made any calls. The aide said they assumed the fake chat would get leaked somewhere, and prompt several firings, but nothing ever appeared. Which raises the question, as with the fake Rishi: why do it?
Five years ago, on a family villa holiday in Saint-Tropez, we were burgled by a gang that broke in while we were asleep. A local detective revealed they were ruthless teenage girl thieves with petite mains or ‘little hands’. This week, Deadline Hollywood announced that Universal Studios and Working Title had won a ‘ten-way bidding war’ to land a rights deal in the ‘six-figure against seven figures’ for my wife Celia’s new novel Little Hands, about a gang of girl thieves operating on the French Riviera. And they say crime doesn’t pay.
I’m 33-1 to be London’s next mayor. In light of Sir Keir Starmer’s winter fuel allowance U-turn, broken tax promises and unachievable plan to build 1.5 million new homes during this parliament, if I ever do become a politician, my only pledge will be to make no pledges.
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