Copyright newstatesman
Something spectacular happened to Piers Morgan the night before I interviewed him. He was in London’s Mayfair, trying out Carbone, Major Food Group’s much-hyped new restaurant in Grosvenor Square. He had taken Joan Collins and a few friends out to dinner, and the Italian-American meal – whether it was the cake tray wheeled from table to table or what Morgan would later describe on Instagram as the “iconic spicy rigatoni” – was met with his approval. What he loved most was the exclusivity of the clientele. The Clooneys were only a few tables away. Also present were Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie – “They’re very nice, those girls; they’re both really nice.” Meanwhile, their disgraced father was presumably sulking in a black box in Windsor, without any iconic spicy rigatoni to comfort him. Carbone had only been open for a few weeks, but it reminded Morgan of the old Covent Garden Ivy in its starry, early-Noughties pomp under restaurant power couple Chris Corbin and Jeremy King. Hard to get a table. Celebs climbing the walls. Comforting menu. But what clinched the evening for Morgan was the presence of Mikel Arteta at a nearby table. The notably circumspect Arsenal manager had so far managed to avoid meeting Morgan – the notably uncircumspect and voluble Arsenal superfan – since taking over the club in 2019. Morgan bounded over to Arteta’s table to discuss transfers. Arsenal had a busy summer window, spending a club record-breaking £257m. That included £63.7m on the clumsy Swedish striker Viktor Gyökeres, who, with three goals in eight Premier League games since his big move, has more closely resembled a slow-turning basking shark that occasionally gets hit by a football than a world-class forward. Morgan loved Gyökeres, though, and told Arteta. “Why?” asked Arteta. “Because his work rate is unbelievable. He takes two defenders off whenever he goes,” Morgan replied. Then, according to Morgan, Arteta went: “Exactly!” The leading strategist in English football agreed with the leading journalist in the English-speaking world. Spectacular. Morgan works most Mondays and Wednesdays in the News Building, a glass-and-steel Death Star owned by Rupert Murdoch that squats next to the Shard and overlooks the River Thames. HarperCollins and the Times and the Sunday Times occupy the top-floor offices, where imperial views encompass all of London – and, beyond the city, seemingly the whole world. Morgan’s seismically popular Uncensored YouTube show is located in a basement – or, at least, down a flight of stairs from the first floor, deeper in the building’s bowels – where I am ushered to meet him in his admirably small dressing-room-slash-lair. Framed splashes, a typographic print of a Winston Churchill quote and magazine covers about Piers Morgan swarm the walls beside a sofa. I sit down. The self-described liberal wants to talk to me about his new book, unambiguously titled Woke Is Dead. But it’s also a big news day. In Morganese, it’s “sensational” and “massive”, it’s “huge” and “explosive”. Donald Trump rattled into the Holy Land yesterday, releasing several doves over the bloodthirsty warring tribes there – apparently bringing peace to the region and the surviving hostages back to Israel. Lions, at last, were lying down with lambs. Roses were shedding their thorns. Should Trump – whom Morgan considers a mate – get the Nobel Peace Prize? “Why shouldn’t he?” Morgan shoots back. He’s dressed in blue suit trousers, a white shirt and shiny black shoes. He has a large forehead, surrounded by an even larger face and small, clever eyes. He looks steamed somehow – pinkish – as if he’s been simmering in a pot on the stove for a couple of hours.He swivels on a chair in front of a dressing mirror and looks at me. The small eyes grow smaller. “I’m serious!” exclaims Morgan, grinning. He wants to know how the New Statesman could possibly suggest that Trump is not worthy of the prize, something we never suggested. He’s rolling now: “Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize after eight months in office and two fancy speeches, and did nothing to warrant it all; why would Trump not get one?” I realise Morgan would like a row, but I find him too funny and interesting for that. He speaks in perfect tabloidese: irreverent, indignant. Every question is answered either with a baiting return serve or a completely unambiguous statement. Listening to Morgan is like travelling back in time to hear him dictate copy to a cringing leader writer on the Daily Mirror circa 2002. Did he meet Obama when Morgan replaced Larry King at CNN during the former president’s first term? “Yes, once.” What was he like? “Frosty.” We both laugh. Morgan says he was about “number 1,800” in a 3,000-person queue at a meet-and-greet with the Obamas at some overwrought Washington DC comms event back in the day. While Morgan scrolls through his phone to find a picture of himself with the president and Michelle, I tell him a rumour I’ve heard about one of them. “Really?!” Morgan looks up from his phone. I can almost see the screaming headline flashing in his mind: “BARACK OBAMA REVEALS…” He turns the idea over in his mind for a couple of seconds. Ten years editing both the Mirror and the News of the World have given him a nose for bullshit. “I would be astonished if that was true. I think that’s wishful thinking.” Still, it’s clear he prefers the current president to whoever Obama was back then – or has become now. He last spoke to Trump on 18 September, the morning after the state banquet at Windsor Castle. I mention that a member of the cabinet thinks Benjamin Netanyahu is the most “alpha” politician in the world – this is genuinely the kind of thing politicians talk about in WhatsApp groups. Morgan is having none of it. Only his man Trump has the “alpha personality” and all the “alpha moves.” I realise that Morgan’s swivel chair is much higher up than the blue sofa I’m sitting on. He towers over me, despite being shorter. Alpha move. Morgan is by some distance the most successful British hack of his generation. His life reads like a schoolboy’s dream of journalism realised in every detail. Born 1965. Grows up in an East Sussex country pub. Dad, a dentist, dies very early. Mum, usefully discreet and immensely supportive. Local news reporter. Then showbiz reporter at the News of the World. Rupert Murdoch makes him editor of the most ferocious tabloid in the Anglosphere at 28. Sensational. Unbelievable. World exclusive. Defects to edit the Daily Mirror just a year later. Jaw-dropping. Huge. Truly staggering. Fired in 2004 after dragging the paper into a no-holds-barred confrontation with Labour over Iraq. Morgan wouldn’t apologise for publishing images of British squaddies appearing to abuse Iraqi prisoners that many thought fake. Horror show. Gutted. Derided. Loses his chauffeur. Writes The Insider, the funniest book written about British journalism in the past 30 years. Moves into television. Britain’s Got Talent. Absolutely massive. Moves over the Atlantic. Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN in 2011. Bigger, better, bolder, but bad ratings. Show axed. Complete disgrace. Back over the Atlantic in 2015. Good Morning Britain. Storms out amid controversy after he’d called Meghan Markle a liar. Farce. Rehired by Murdoch for TalkTV. Staggering. But the channel bombs. Disaster. Morgan buys the rights in 2024 and moves the whole show to YouTube. It explodes. Interviews, debates, world exclusives. The editor has become the ringmaster of the internet’s biggest talk show. “I’m my own boss,” he tells me proudly. Millions of followers, subscribers and views. Millions of pounds in revenue. Gigantic. Global. They know him in India now. I looked before the interview for a photo of Morgan in the past 30 years where he isn’t beaming like a nutter. Impossible. The guy just loves it. We only have 45 minutes, although we end up talking for an hour. I get Morgan to rattle out some instant op-eds. He would still have dinner with the thrice-disgraced Peter Mandelson, but he knows it’s over for him in terms of public life: “I feel sorry for him.” Likewise, Prince Andrew deserves to be banished to the outer darkness, because you can’t carry on with a paedophile like Jeffrey Epstein once you know he’s been convicted. British print journalists are facing a reality check: “Newspapers are dying.” Morgan thinks Keir Starmer is a dud, with Labour “awful” since they took power, but he is fond of Wes Streeting, “a skilful politician”. Nigel Farage is the “best communicator in politics”, but his economic policies “are a massive Achilles heel”. Prince Harry is “as dumb as a rock”. The monarchy itself is “quite a tenuous thing now”. What about GB News co-owner Paul Marshall? “Paul is a smart guy.” Why didn’t he join the channel? They made Morgan multiple offers, but he doesn’t think he’s right-wing enough to take his show there. He saw Murdoch – “driven, genius, forward-looking” – this time last year. They lunched. Murdoch had just been to a Starlink satellite launch site run by another Morgan mate, Elon Musk. “He was absolutely blown away by it all.” Morgan is houndishly loyal to his old masters. He talks about Murdoch and Simon Cowell the way the Pope talks about Jesus and the Virgin Mary. “He was like a teenager talking with excitement about what he had seen. That’s Rupert’s mind and that’s what Elon is like. The really transformative figures in our world, in our lives, are the people that always look forward.” I ask Morgan if he’s sentimental about anything. “Not really, no.” Even Arsenal? “No. I always look forward.” Woke Is Dead feels like a bit of a period piece. Woke definitely is dead thanks to Trump’s re-election last year, although I suspect Morgan thinks it is alive and well at the New Statesman. Disappointingly for him, I basically agree with the parts of the book I skim through before going back to The Insider. (I find it impossible to resist a text that describes the late Queen Mother like this: “Absolutely tiny and moves very, very slowly – like a little shrew moving through a sea of treacle.”) Still, I suppose we must argue about what Morgan refers to during our conversation as “woke”, “wokeism”, “the woke mob”, “the woke brigade”, “the woke outbreak”, “the woke mind virus”, “the woke ideology” and “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”. If we take “woke”, broadly, to mean altering the balance of societies to enhance the rights of women and minorities, in order that they achieve equity with other groups, wouldn’t a totally “woke” world actually be a happier place? Would it be terrible for Pakistan to become woke? Or Chad? Morgan cuts me off. He looks like a python that’s about to pounce on a cornered gerbil. “Are you woke?” “Not really,” I confess. He suddenly looks sad. “I’m not even sure people will admit to it any more.” I try to make him answer the question: surely a “woke” Chad would be a better Chad? “I don’t buy that argument.” He says it’s contradictory for “people on the woke left” to support Hamas. I point out that if the Gaza Strip were ruled by a “woke” dictatorship, there probably wouldn’t be much room for Hamas there. “The woke wouldn’t be in charge,” Morgan says, with some menace. But if they were? “Right, well, if Mother Theresa ran the world it would be a nicer place. You can take a hypothetical to the nth degree. It’s not gonna happen.” Is Susanna Reid, his former co-host on Good Morning Britain, woke? “She’s pretty woke, yeah,” Morgan chuckles. Although, when he watches her now, she “sounds increasingly less woke”. Morgan 1-0 Reid. I change the subject from “woke” by asking Morgan a question he asked Gordon Ramsay in 2005. “If you could have sex with one other woman with your wife’s permission before you die, who would it be?” Morgan bursts out laughing and doesn’t stop for a while. “Did I really ask him that?!” I tell him he did. “Hmmm. With my wife’s permission…” He looks thoughtful for a vanishing split-second. “I think the gentleman in me is going to have to take a pass on that.” He applauds the New Statesman for asking him one of his own questions, though. “The Morganisation of journalism is complete!” He’s probably right about that. Journalism is barely recognisable from the industry that Morgan bombed out of in 2004. Anybody with a phone can have a go at it. While traditional reporters are tethered to paralysing libel rules, podcasters like Joe Rogan can and do say anything they like. Social media revealed that far from the tabloids being as uniquely cruel as they were thought to be in the News of the World’s phone-tapping heyday, there is a miniature, fulminating Piers Morgan or Kelvin MacKenzie inside each and every one of us, merrily posting trash online. Is daily life more or less cruel for not being dominated by tabloid headlines? You can find the same stuff every day in Facebook groups or X threads. Morgan has to go. A gleaming black Mercedes is waiting for him outside the News Building. He doesn’t want to stop talking. We argue about Trump. Morgan thinks he will respect the results of the next presidential election. I tell him about a conversation I had with a senior diplomatic source who thinks Trump will run again. We are standing outside the office. Journalists stream past us. “I bet you £100 Trump will step down,” says Morgan. I accept. “Only £100, though,” he cackles, “I would go higher but I know you can’t afford it!” He steps into the powerful car. Alpha move. [Further reading: The Wonderful World of Prince Andrew]
