It was the plot-twist in the Covid drama nobody expected. At the start of the pandemic, Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan quickly became the self-appointed Robespierre of the lockdown movement. Anyone who broke the rules, or did not support tighter restrictions, was in his eyes a killer, responsible for untold deaths as the virus spread.
But is Morgan now realising things are more complicated than that. This week Morgan criticised Labour’s Barry Gardiner for breaking lockdown to attend a non-socially distanced Black Lives Matter protest. Then Guido Fawkes revealed that Morgan’s son had attended a Black Lives Matter demo in London. At the moment it is still forbidden to congregate in groups of larger than six with those in another household, even if everyone remains 2m apart. It goes without saying that the recent BLM demos have involved more than six people, and many in the crowd were not socially distancing anyway.
Strikingly, Morgan did not condemn this flouting of lockdown rules. Instead, he doubled down, saying that he was ‘proud’ that his son attended the protest and ‘he maintained social distancing as best he could in the large crowd’.
This morning, the TV host went a step further. Morgan defended his son’s behaviour by suggesting that going to the supermarket was a ‘mass gathering’ and that his son had ‘tried hard’ to socially distance.
Let’s set aside how many supermarkets have ‘thousands’ converging on them. Could Piers finally be coming around to the fact that people should be allowed to exercise their common sense? He might have gone further and said that, in a London where barely two dozen are diagnosed with the virus every day, it’s quite rational for people like his son to exercise their freedoms and liberties. Especially because, for his son’s demographic, the risk is negligible.
Mr S hopes Morgan’s most recent thoughts mark the beginning of what one might call ‘a journey’. Not only should mini-Morgan have the right to protest in a city that’s almost virus-free, but children should be able to go to back school. Or adults go back to save their small business. The school-leavers desperate to find work should also be allowed to find that foothold, in a reopened economy.
We look forward to the next Piers Morgan campaign: end lockdown now.
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