When I meet Piers Morgan, he warns me he’s glued to the ‘moment in history’ happening on his TV screens that morning. He is watching Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages as part of the peace deal negotiated by his old friend Donald Trump.
The two have known each other for 17 years, first meeting when Morgan appeared in – and won – Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. He tells me that Trump’s final words to him on the show were: ‘Piers, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re almost certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the Celebrity Apprentice.’
‘You cannot be prime minister of Great Britain if you think women have penises. It’s a red line’
Eight years later, when Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Morgan sent him a card saying: ‘Well, Donald, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the President of the United States.’
It hasn’t always been such plain sailing between the two. Morgan recalls a time when Nigel Farage attempted to sabotage a planned interview by furnishing Trump with a dossier of every negative column Morgan had written about him, including the statement that he should be ‘barred from ever running for president again’. The interview was salvaged only when Morgan mentioned that he wanted to ask about Trump’s recent hole-in-one on the golf course.
‘Trump as a friend isn’t easy,’ Morgan muses. ‘He can be incendiary, his rhetoric pisses people off, he can be very shoot-from-the-hip.’ But in spite of all this, he’s not surprised that Trump may be the man to secure peace in the Middle East. ‘[Is there] anyone else who could get an agreement from Middle Eastern countries to end this war now?’ he asks. ‘I don’t think there is.’
Morgan says the two talk constantly. The morning after Keir Starmer handed Trump the invitation for his second state visit, for example, the President phoned the former Daily Mirror editor, un-able to decide between Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle for the state dinner. ‘You’ve got to go for the castle – looks better,’ Morgan advised. When Trump rang the morning after the banquet, he reported that he loved it. ‘He’s a sucker for pomp and pageantry,’ Morgan says. And just the other day, Morgan tells me, Trump called him to let him know: ‘Piers, you’re looking good on the TV.’
The self-confessed ‘rampant egomaniac’ who used to party with the stars as the Sun’s showbiz reporter isn’t one to shy away from criticising those he considers to be friends. Despite regularly texting Starmer to discuss Arsenal, he doesn’t think the Prime Minister is doing a good job. ‘Domestically’, he says, Starmer has ‘been a failure so far’. Perhaps this is why Starmer won’t sit down with him for an interview. He had said he would do so after Morgan gave him ‘an unwanted lecture on how to run the country’ at a party, but so far he’s not made good on his promise to appear on the YouTube show Piers Morgan Uncensored.
‘If you’re going to run the country you better be able to deal with an interview with me,’ Morgan says. ‘He’s a bit like Boris Johnson when he ran into that fridge on Good Morning Britain.’ Scared, in other words.
On the subject of Johnson, he’s pretty damning: ‘Beneath the buffoon exterior may lie an actual buffoon.’ And he doesn’t stop there: ‘Until he learns to comb his hair, I’m not interested.’ What does he reckon about the current Tory leader? ‘Reports of her political death may have been exaggerated.’
He’s less kind about Farage, predicting that with ‘his current economic policies’ Reform won’t win the next general election. ‘He has momentum but how you pay for things matters.’
It’s the Green party leader Zack Polanski who bothers him most, however. The two got into a spat on his programme earlier this month and Morgan tells me now: ‘He’s just not impressive at all. You cannot be prime minister of Great Britain if you think women have penises. It’s a red line.’
Polanski embodies the ‘woke’ culture Morgan loathes. His latest book, Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness, was published this week. He’s returned to the theme in print five years after writing Wake Up about the war on free speech. ‘They [the left] ignored me and got more insane – and then suffered electorally.’
So is he pleased that the Democrats were punished at the US ballot box for adopting ‘woke’ causes? No, Morgan says: ‘I’m a centrist… Socially, I’m pretty liberal.’ But for now, ‘they’ve demeaned the American justice system’ in their attempts to block Trump. ‘They got him for shuffling a bit of paper over and alleging a one-night stand with a porn star… [It’s] trivial and ridiculous.’
And while he might be right that the Democrats got a beating for hitching themselves ‘to an ideology most Americans rejected… Trump’s re-election was a repudiation of it’, has woke been abandoned in quite the same way this side of the pond? After all, Green party membership has now surged past that of the Conservatives. ‘It still pops up like weeds, and we need to root it out when it does,’ he says. ‘This is an important moment to draw a line and lay groundwork so it doesn’t come back.’ That’s what the book’s about. We need, he tells me, an ‘industrial woke weedkiller’ ready for when it next rears its head.
For Morgan, it seems personal: he appears to genuinely care about the victims of cancel culture. The plight of ‘teachers, nurses, professors’ who have lost their jobs plagues him. ‘They should get medals,’ he says. He reserves deep sympathy for J.K. Rowling because of the abuse targeted at her for her views on single-sex spaces, despite conceding that they ‘don’t get on personally’.(She once described him as a ‘fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologising celebrity toady’. In return he called her ‘superior, dismissive and arrogant’.)
Perhaps his sympathy for her comes about because of the abuse he has received himself. After the ‘Meghan Markle saga’, which saw him storm off Good Morning Britain after criticising the duchess, ‘they came for me and targeted my kids’, he says. His son received a death threat on Instagram, but after months of investigation the police said they couldn’t find the identity behind the anonymous accounts.
Has this experience shaped how he views Elon Musk and his running of X? Musk, Morgan says, has joined Johnson and Starmer in dodging him for an interview – so far, the tech mogul has cancelled twice. Could this be owing to the famous feud between Musk and Morgan’s pal Trump? He’s dismissive of that idea and thinks Musk and Trump could make up at some stage. They met at Charlie Kirk’s memorial recently and may do business together again – though Morgan doesn’t think ‘that relationship will ever be quite the same again’.
Were he to sit down with Musk, the subject of anonymous accounts might form part of the interview. While he praises the fact-checking of X’s AI chatbot Grok, Morgan is damning about the types of accounts that threatened his son: ‘Death threats aren’t free speech.’ He’s also unhappy about the accounts that go too far: ‘Kanye West should be banned for anti-Semitic hate; Alex Jones, too, for the Sandy Hook lies [that the massacre was faked].’
How would the man who played a not insignificant role in killing woke culture like to be remembered? ‘That I didn’t die wondering.’ For him, his most important legacy is his children: ‘They still want to hang out with me in adulthood – that’s a success.’ And he still wants to hang out with them. On two conditions, though: that they stay loyal to Arsenal, and never, ever go on I’m a Celebrity.
Comments