Wake Up

As with woke celebrities calling for the White House to be blown up, the constant self-serving hysteria helps him more than it hurts him. It also, more importantly, diminishes the significance of times when Trump does stuff that really does deserve massive critical attention.

Despite all the hysteria, or perhaps partly because of it, Trump now has the perfect platform for an incumbent US president to start re-election year. The US economy is purring along nicely, two of the world’s worst terrorists have been taken out in the space of four months and the US is striving to end its involvement in cripplingly expensive wars. Unfortunately, the rigid nature of modern illiberal liberalism doesn’t allow for him to get any credit for any of this. And if he wins again in November, they will only have themselves to blame. Jeremy, my army colonel brother and no fan of Trump, explained succinctly, ‘It seems to me that there is a direct correlation between noisy liberal angst and silent popular voting.’ The stats are on Trump’s side: historically, 70 per cent of presidents who run again get re-elected. If they run on a soaring economy, that probability rises to over 90 per cent.

The way for liberals to beat Donald Trump is not by wishing him dead or screaming about him 24/7. It is by using everything in the American democratic system to defeat him by fair means not foul. That means at the ballot box. Though the president should be mindful of the warning from former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who when asked what was the greatest challenge for a leader, was supposed to have replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

There are still ten months until the election and anything could happen.

THURSDAY 9 JANUARY

Bombshell news: Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have announced they are quitting the royal family.

In a statement released tonight on their glitzy new website, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex revealed they’re relinquishing life as ‘senior royals’ with all the tedious duty that entails, and instead now want to be a ‘progressive’ force within ‘this institution’. In other words, they want to be super-woke royals (with all the ‘do as we say not as we do’ hectoring hypocrisy they’ve already brought to that status) who get to keep all the trappings of royal life without any of the hard, boring bits.

In their lengthy list of pronouncements, Harry and Meghan say they will now be spending much of their time in North America, where they’ve just recently been lounging for six weeks’ ‘much-needed holiday’ – a holiday from what, exactly? – at a multi-millionaire’s waterside mansion in Canada. Oh, and they’re going to seek to be ‘financially independent’. It’s only when you read the details of this ‘independence’ that you realise what it actually means is they want to live off Harry’s dad’s money, off Prince Charles and his Duchy of Cornwall.

They have also informed us they intend to continue living for free, when they grace the UK with their esteemed presence, at Frogmore Cottage, their palatial home in Windsor that was gifted to them by the Queen and which has been refurbished to their specifications at a cost to the taxpayer of millions of pounds. Oh, and they expect to continue having royal protection too – at further vast expense to the taxpayer – and all the other stuff that goes with that like VIP royal travel. We all know there’s nothing these two fearless eco-warriors like more than stomping down their giant hypocritical carbon footprint one private jet at a time.

They also, hilariously, laid down their new rulebook for the media, saying they’re getting rid of the traditional royal rota system and will instead be inviting special favoured journalists to attend their events and write nice positive things about them. I chuckled with disbelief as I read this. Even Putin wouldn’t pull a stunt to control the press like that and it doesn’t seem to fit very well with their woke world view. There is zero chance of the media following any ‘rules’ for covering these two, now they’ve swapped royal duty for money-grabbing celebrity stardom. If Meghan and Harry want to be the new Kardashians, that’s fine, but they’ll get treated like the new Kardashians. But, honestly, who the hell do they think they are?

I’ve seen some disgraceful royal antics in my time, but for pure arrogance, entitlement, greed, and wilful disrespect, nothing has ever quite matched this nonsense from the ‘Duke and Duchess of Sussex’. I put inverted commas around those titles because I sincerely hope they won’t exist much longer. Indeed, if I were Her Majesty the Queen, I would unceremoniously strip these deluded clowns of all their titles with immediate effect and despatch them back into civilian life.

Nobody tells the Queen what to do. She’s the most powerful, respected person in Britain. And right now, she’s facing a direct threat to everything she has worked so hard to maintain. Harry and Meghan’s astonishingly brazen and selfish antics have left her no choice but to cut them loose and fire them both from the royal family. The Queen should get rid of these whining, ego-crazed leeches – before it’s too late.

FRIDAY 10 JANUARY

I posted a new Daily Mail column attacking Harry and Meghan’s statement, and it was met with people either furiously agreeing with me, or furiously disagreeing and accusing me of being ‘obsessed’ with Meghan because she’d ghosted me (for a brief period several years ago, I’d considered us to be friends), ‘persecuting’ her, ‘damaging her mental health’ and claiming, most absurdly, that I was only attacking her because she’s black.

The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr even branded me ‘a bully in a country which has institutionalised bullying via popular press’. I found much of this reaction absurdly over-the-top. My criticism of Meghan has nothing to with her gender or skin colour. Nor is it ‘bullying’ to hold people to account if they’re on the public purse.

As for the ‘obsessed’ charge, it’s true that I’ve written and said a lot of stuff about Meghan and Harry, but that’s because they’re huge global celebrities who keep doing things that dominate the news cycle, and every time I write about them, the columns get massive traction, suggesting enormous public interest. I can’t pretend the way she personally treated me – I was dropped like a stone the moment she met Harry, after 18 months of friendly communication originated by her, and a very cordial meeting, at her request, in my local pub when she pumped me for advice on how to handle the media – hasn’t informed my view of her now, especially as I’ve seen her do the same to many others. It would surely influence anyone’s thinking if someone they considered a friend suddenly ghosted them without explanation? As Maya Angelou once said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’

MONDAY 13 JANUARY

The fallout from Harry and Meghan’s royal resignation has grown unbelievably toxic. Like everything else these days, you must either love them or hate them, there can be no middle ground. And social media has turned into a vicious battlefield with me at the centre of much of it.

The narrative has firmly positioned Meghan and Harry as victims, and people like me as the heartless tormentors. The first problem I have with this tactic from these lazy ‘woke’ activists is that it represents a deliberate attempt to shut down freedom of the press, and discussion on important cultural and societal issues. But there’s a wider concern: casually chucking around serious accusations of sexism or racism to stifle criticism is also designed to encourage the general public to take a binary, one-sided stance which risks creating further division in our increasingly divided society.

I’ve been watching this unedifying saga unfurl over the past few days with mounting fury. Predominantly, at the disgracefully disrespectful way the Sussexes are treating the Queen. But I’m also enraged by the specific growing narrative that the only reason Meghan’s been so harshly criticised by the media is because we’re all a bunch of racists living in a racist country. I just won’t accept that.

From the moment Meghan came on the royal scene, and it was revealed she was from a mixed-race background, she was welcomed with warm, open, tolerant arms by a wonderfully multi-cultural and diverse modern Britain that was thrilled to finally see a non-white member of the royal family. She was showered with almost universal praise, especially when the engagement was announced. The media, in particular, was unanimous in its verdict that this was a great thing for the country. In fact, I haven’t seen a press so united in joy for anything royal since Diana first became Charles’s girlfriend.

This extraordinary tidal wave of goodwill continued through to the big wedding in May 2018 which, by common consent, was a triumph. As I wrote myself in the Mail on Sunday the following day, ‘it mixed the best of traditional British pomp and majesty with large dollops of Markle Sparkle and the result was a bi-racial, Hollywood-fused union of very different cultures that worked magnificently well’. I added, ‘It’s hard to overstate the significance of this ceremony, beamed live around the world, to black people everywhere. To borrow the words of Dr King, this was a day when little black girls could watch TV and genuinely share little white girls’ long-held dreams of one day marrying a Prince.’

These words, I would politely suggest, do not indicate the thoughts of a racist. Yet that is what I, and others working in the British media, have now been shamefully branded for daring to criticise Meghan for her – and Harry’s – erratic and spectacularly ill-advised behaviour since the wedding.

I’ve been harsh in my criticism of the way they have treated and disowned Meghan’s father Thomas after he foolishly but naively colluded with the paparazzi. But that’s got nothing to do with her skin colour and everything to do with her tendency, as I discovered personally, to get rid of people in her life when they cease to be of use to her or become ‘problematic’. My other criticisms have been centred around their hypocrisy: Meghan having a $500,000 celebrity-fuelled baby-shower party in New York, including a lift on George’s Clooney jet, on the same day she and Harry tweeted a plea for people to think of the poor; the ridiculous lengths they went to hide basic details of their baby Archie’s birth from the public that pays for much of their lavish lives; and the way they used Sir Elton John’s private jet like a taxi service after repeatedly lecturing us all about the importance to watch our carbon footprint. None of this was racist, either overtly or subliminally. People might not agree with all or any of my criticisms, and perhaps the rhetoric I’ve occasionally used to reflect them has been a bit over the top, but they are all perfectly justified ones to make, which is why so many others have made them too.

Yet this hasn’t stopped a Twitter-driven bandwagon developing that says all criticism of Ms Markle is racially motivated. In a disgraceful column for the New York Times headlined ‘Black Britons Know Why Meghan Markle Wants Out – It’s the Racism’, author Afua Hirsch attacked the ‘racist treatment of Meghan’ and said, ‘The British press has succeeded in its apparent project of hounding Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, out of Britain.’ She cites, as examples of the supposed press racism, two things that appeared in the Daily Mail.

The first was a headline saying she was ‘(almost) straight outta Compton’, one of the most gang-ravaged parts of America in south central Los Angeles, immortalised by rap group N.W.A. Now, I’ll accept that headline was a bit misleading; Meghan actually comes from Crenshaw, a few miles from Compton, but also a place with a lot of gang-related crime. I don’t believe this piece was used as a stick to racially insult her, but as simply an interesting observation about her undeniably very different upbringing to normal royal brides. Hirsch also lambasted a journalist, Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel, for saying Meghan had ‘exotic DNA’. I can understand that to some this carries connotation of ‘othering’, suggesting Meghan is somehow a lesser royal due to her background. And Rachel could certainly have used a less inflammatory phrase to make the point that Meghan is very different to any previous royal bride.

But, again, I would argue there was no intent to be offensive. I know Rachel well and she would never have intended it to be a racist jibe. Yet, according to Ms Hirsch, this is all hard damning evidence that the British press is inherently racist and has deliberately driven out Meghan because we can’t stand the fact she’s only half-white. What a load of inflammatory bilge. Hirsch should be ashamed of herself for spewing such hateful, race-baiting nonsense in one of American’s most prominent newspapers. But she’s not been alone.

Other mainstream news outlets like CNN and the Washington Post have published similar pieces intimating it’s all about racism. Harry started all this when he attacked the media soon after their romance was made public, claiming non-existent ‘racial undertones’ in the tabloid newspapers. I saw none then and I have seen none since – because there have been none. This disingenuous nonsense is now being extended from a charge against the media to even bigger targets, with sinister threats of a ‘tell-all’ TV interview in which Meghan and Harry might apparently level sensational charges of racism at the door of other senior royals and their households.

More importantly, by crying ‘RACISTS!’ in the face of perfectly legitimate criticism, this petulant duo have made a mockery of true victims of racism. The reality is that Meghan and Harry have brought this ugly situation entirely on themselves and should somehow find the strength in their faux-victim-ravaged, virtue-signalling, self-obsessed souls to admit it has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with their fragile egos and a simmering feud with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who will always be more important in the royal family as they will one day be King and Queen.

TUESDAY 14 JANUARY

There are so many strange double standards these days. Take ‘sexism’.

Today, GMB’s excellent meteorologist Laura Tobin wore a very striking pair of skin-tight red trousers, so I jokingly complimented her for ‘parading around in hot-pants’. We get on well and often exchange such light-hearted ‘banter’. But I was immediately accused of being ‘sexist’ by several viewers on Twitter, so I read out their criticism and said, ‘When a female presenter parades herself in skin-tight leather trousers to do the weather, you are going to get people going “wow”.’

Laura, 38, clarified her outfit wasn’t made of leather. They were, apparently, ‘sustainable trousers’. ‘They’re certainly sustaining me,’ I laughed. Of course, this prompted more furious tweets, which I also read out, including one that read, ‘Well out of order, the sexist comment on Laura Tobin’s trousers. A woman should be able to wear what she likes without it being sexualised.’

Susanna Reid, my long-time co-presenter, immediately sprang to her defence, branding me ‘slightly creepy’ and saying ‘people don’t want to be objectified at work’. When I pointed out that the women on our show often compliment their appearances on air and off, Susanna retorted, ‘Complimenting each other is not the same as sexualising each other. You’re saying “hot” as an alternative to “sexy”.’ I laughed, ‘What’s wrong with being sexy?’ Laura was the least offended person. ‘Thank you for noticing and giving me some airtime!’ she declared.

But some viewers were having none of it. ‘Piers Morgan showing that making women feel uncomfortable in the workplace for how they dress is still with us in 2020!’ Another seethed, ‘Piers just went into creepy perv mode over Laura’s trousers. Very disturbing viewing.’

Various online newspaper stories erupted about me ‘humiliating’ Laura, until she eventually addressed them on Twitter, saying, ‘Lots of reaction to my trousers today, I’m not humiliated by @piersmorgan. They’re just a pair of trousers! I thought I was being stylish!’

This prompted a wave of people supporting me. ‘It’s called banter,’ one viewer tweeted, ‘having a laugh, like we used to be able to do years ago.’ Another observed, ‘I’m sure if Laura Tobin was humiliated, she’s a strong enough person to have put Piers in his place and told him so.’

All of this just left me exhausted. One of the problems with the feminism debate these days is that some women want to have their hypocritical, sexist objectification cake and eat it too. When each new series of Poldark comes out, for example, the amount of drool spewed by Britain’s women over lead actor Aidan Turner could fill an ocean, and his half-naked body fills the front pages. No man I know gives a damn about the way he’s objectified, and I bet he doesn't either, but if we did the same to a female TV star now, radical feminists would rip us to shreds.

The double standards are laughable. Take, for example, US talk-show star Ellen DeGeneres, the darling of the woke community and a woman who drips unctuous sycophancy and virtue-signalling from every pore. Nobody has been more censorious about the behaviour of ghastly lecherous men than Ms DeGeneres, who identifies as a lesbian. Yet when she appeared at the People’s Choice Awards in Los Angeles – accepting, of course, the award for ‘Favourite Humanitarian’ – she said the following: ‘You know, here’s the thing, awards are great. But what really makes me happy is making other people happy. And tonight, I want to make you happy, so – I’ve brought a shirtless photo of Chris Hemsworth to share!’ Gigantic images of the Australian actor stripped to the waist instantly beamed onto the big screens in the theatre, and to millions of viewers at home. Women in the audience screamed and howled with laughter as Mr Hemsworth smiled sheepishly and blushed. ‘You’re welcome!’ cackled Ellen, as she left the stage delighted that her gag had gone down so well.

Sexism is a bad thing – let’s all agree on that. But so is hypocrisy. Ms DeGeneres is a serial offender. In 2017, she wished Katy Perry happy birthday by posting a photo of herself leering at Perry’s cleavage with the caption, ‘Katy – it’s time to bring out the big balloons!’ Think I’d have got away with that? No, of course not.

It’s time for women to either view male humour, and obvious harmless compliments such as mine about Laura Tobin’s trousers, in the same way they view their own, or to be as indignant with themselves as they are with men when they feel the line gets crossed.

THURSDAY 16 JANUARY

James Bond will remain a man.

This shouldn’t be a sentence I ever have to write, but sadly I do. The news was revealed by Barbara Broccoli, who has run the 007 movie franchise since the death of father Cubby, in an interview with Variety.

‘James Bond can be of any colour,’ she said, ‘but he is male. I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it. I think women are far more interesting than that.’

Thank God for that. I’ve waged a lengthy campaign to save Bond from the clutches of radical feminists, who take the very laudable cause of feminism and apply a totally uncompromising intolerance to anyone who strays from their rigid belief of what is acceptable. And these radical feminists have proven far more dangerous to Bond’s existence than Jaws, Blofeld or Oddjob. After all, as a white heterosexual man who kills people, seduces random women, brazenly chats up female co-workers, drinks, gambles, smokes cigars and cracks inappropriate jokes, Bond represents the very antithesis of everything the PC-crazed snowflake world stands for, so must of course be eliminated from public life.

Broccoli spoke out after rumours began to run riot that Bond would be turned into a woman. The warning signs came with alarming regularity via leaks from the set of the latest Bond movie, No Time to Die. First, it was reported that the script began with James now retired and temporarily replaced as 007 by a black woman, played by Lashana Lynch. Then it emerged that producers had determined James must now ‘navigate the #MeToo movement’, which apparently involves him becoming a hyper-sensitive, emotionally aware wokie who cries in front of women rather than beds them. Yet is that really the kind of Bond that women want?

The campaign to neuter the most masculine icon in movie history reached an entirely predictable nadir with a call for him to become female. Astonishingly, it was actively encouraged by former Bond stars. ‘Get out of the way, guys!’ demanded feminist-by-proxy Pierce Brosnan, who played 007 four times, ‘and put a woman up there! I think it would be exhilarating, it would be exciting!’ Curiously, I don’t remember Mr Brosnan suggesting this when he was 007.

This is not about equality. I don’t object to women playing Bond because they somehow lack the requisite skills to do so. I’m sure there are many female spies operating right now who are just as adept at killing people, seducing members of the opposite sex, chatting up co-workers, drinking, gambling, smoking and cracking inappropriate jokes.

No, I object to it because James Bond is a man, was always intended to be a man by Bond writer Ian Fleming – and should therefore remain a man. As Broccoli said, you can make Bond a black man – I’d love to see Idris Elba take over from Daniel Craig – or a man of any other ethnicity for that matter, but you can’t make him a woman. If Pierce Brosnan needs someone other than me to explain why this is a dumb idea, then he should ask Rosamund Pike, who co-starred with him in Die Another Day.

‘James Bond is a character that Ian Fleming created,’ she said, ‘and the character is a man. It’s a very masculine creation. Why should a woman get sort of sloppy seconds? Why should she have been a man and now it has to be played by a woman? Why not be a kick-ass female agent in her own right?’

Exactly. By all means create your own super-spies, ladies, but for Christ’s sake, leave our guy alone. Bond, like him or loathe him, is a male, straight, womanising loner who likes killing bad guys and prefers wearing tuxedos to dresses. That’s just who he is. And that’s why he’s been so beloved for so many decades and retained such a powerful place in British culture. As Sean Connery once put it, ‘Bond is important: this invincible superman that every man would like to copy, that every woman would like to conquer, this dream we all have of survival.’

As with all these stupid ‘woke’ campaigns, very few people outside the radical liberal bubble actually want it to happen. On GMB, we ran a poll asking if Bond should be a woman and 86 per cent of viewers (in a very large response) said no. So, this is yet another example of the troubling modern phenomenon of politically correct subservience to the outraged whim of a small minority against the wishes of the vast majority. I suspect there were even more women than men voting against it, because for many women, and I hate to break this to you my darling feministas, James Bond represents gloriously macho fantasy escapism.

Unfortunately, the war on Bond is part of a wider war on masculinity. I say this as a man who’s actually proud of being a man, and who also likes being masculine. I realise this is a horrendous thing to say, and I can only offer my insincere apologies to all the radical feminists now exploding with rage. If there’s one thing they loathe even more than the M-word, it’s the longer M-word. But why? Masculinity simply means ‘having qualities or appearances traditionally associated with men’. That’s it, nothing more sinister.

It dates back to the Latin word masculus meaning ‘male, worthy of a man’ and has been widely used in the English language since the middle of the fourteenth century. By the 1620s, it was further taken to mean ‘manly, virile, powerful’.

So, for nearly 400 years, it was assumed to be a positive word, one that represented the very best of men. Not anymore.

Thanks to women of radical feminist persuasion who’ve gleefully hijacked the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns to serve their own man-hating purposes, masculinity has become the most controversial, detestable word in the English lexicon. And it’s now impossible to be ‘masculine’ without also being accused of ‘toxic masculinity’. The best conversation I’ve had about all this was with the singer Annie Lennox, who said it was ‘important to bring men with you’ on the feminist journey. ‘But,’ she cautioned, ‘the debate has to be less hostile to men for that to happen.’ Sadly, the opposite has happened and there is now constant outright hostility towards men and masculinity.