Piers Morgan

‘Mr Morgan,’ said the faux-regal voice at the end of the line, ‘this is Earl Spencer. I’ve got you now, you bastard.’ Suffice it to say, this call didn’t happen last week after the alleged ‘historian’ was forced to publicly apologise for publishing a lie about me in his new book. (He accused me of being Mirror editor in 1993 when it published gym photos of Princess Diana in a notorious invasion of her privacy that cost £1 million in damages – but I didn’t join the Mirror until 1995.) However, the irony of what that call was about isn’t lost on me, 31 years later.

Arsenal’s triumph in finally winning the Premier League again after 22 long, often eyeball-wrenchingly tortuous years has gone down like a Keir Starmer motivational ‘I’m not leaving!’ speech, which is ironic given the Prime Minister is an avid Gooner like me. It’s hard to understand why a club that boasts a fanbase including us, Jeremy Corbyn, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, the late Osama bin Laden and Prince Harry (whose matchday allegiance has followed a similar path to his royal duties, in that he never turns up) attracts such opprobrium that we were recently named the ‘most-hated supporters’ in the league. But as with Millwall in their hooligan heyday, if no one likes us, we don’t care.

‘The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,’ espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past fortnight in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add ‘shame’ to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying.

‘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.

Two months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the habitual liberal hysteria about his rollercoaster presidential style is reaching shrieking banshee levels again. But as always with my friend in Pennsylvania Avenue, I urge patience and a focus on what he does rather than what comes out of his inflammatory machine-gun mouth. I sense cold, calculating method to all the apparent madness, entirely in keeping with Trump’s election campaign pledges, and predict that – after the current bumpy ride – he will get the US economy purring again, America’s border under firm control and win the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Oh, and he’ll annoy a lot of the right people in the process.

My old mucker Donald Trump’s return to the White House has predictably sent the woke brigade into hysteria. From posting demented videos and shaving their heads to banning Trump supporters from having sex with them, it’s been a masterclass in the sore loser mentality they profess to despise so much in him. The Guardian is suffering a particularly embarrassing outbreak of PTSD (post-Trump-success distress). The editor’s email offer of support therapy to traumatised staff made me laugh out loud, as did the paper joining the liberal exodus from Elon Musk’s X in an equally comical fit of pique.

When I interviewed Rishi Sunak in February, I told him I thought his Rwanda plan for ‘stopping the boats’ was an expensive, unworkable dud and offered him a £1,000 bet to be paid to a refugee charity that he wouldn’t get any asylum-seeker planes taking off before the next general election. To my surprise, the Prime Minister clutched my outstretched hand and accepted the wager, sparking considerable revulsion. As the HBO comedian John Oliver put it: ‘Set aside the grossness on display here, imagine what a monster you have to be to put me in a position of genuinely wanting Piers Morgan to win something?’ Now Sunak has admitted no planes will leave for Rwanda before 4 July. Therefore, I told him on X that I’d like the £1,000 to go to the British Red Cross. But No.

My instantly infamous interview with Jeremy Corbyn, in which he refused 15 times to say if Hamas is a terrorist organisation, prompted many to ponder what on earth possessed him to do it in the first place? After all, the modern-day Wolfie Smith must have known I’d ask him the same question I’d asked many guests during the crisis, and his spluttering determination to avoid stating such a basic fact – well, unless you work at the BBC – made it obvious what he thinks and was always going to earn him the opprobrium his terror appeasement deserved. Rishi Sunak hammered him in PMQs, and Keir Starmer declared Corbyn will never stand as a Labour MP again. That wasn’t the only lifetime ban dished out: ‘I’M NEVER COMING BACK ON THIS SHOW!

What an emotional wringer the royal family has put us through in the past two years, from the sadness of Prince Philip’s death to the joyful Platinum Jubilee, then Queen Elizabeth II’s own extraordinarily moving funeral, and now the coronation of her son. I’ve felt so privileged to have been at Buckingham Palace for the last three events, anchoring Fox News coverage in America. After we came off air on Saturday, I mused with my two US co-presenters about what may be the next major royal occasion: a wedding, a funeral, a silver jubilee (Charles would have to live as long as his grandmother for that to happen)? Or God forbid, will the British monarchy itself be terminally contaminated by the increasingly pungent whiff of republicanism sweeping the Commonwealth?

‘You’d need to live on the moon not to know about Cristiano Ronaldo’s interview with Piers Morgan,’ said England footballer Jesse Lingard. I doubt even that would provide adequate protection. I’ve never experienced such global attention for anything in my career, and it reflects Ronaldo’s status as world sport’s biggest star. In fact, given he has 25 per cent more Instagram followers than anyone else – he passed 500 million this week, 123 million more than his nearest rival, Lionel Messi – I’d argue he’s the world’s biggest star of any kind. The interview’s been watched 15 million times on YouTube alone, which already makes it the most-viewed sports interview ever.

As you may have heard (if you haven’t, I’m losing my narcissistically self-promotional touch) my new TV show Piers Morgan Uncensored launches soon and will air daily in the UK, America and Australia, thus fulfilling my long-held ambition to become a global irritant. The title provokes mirth among those who feel I’ve never shown any sign of being censored.

Following my abrupt departure from Good Morning Britain after declining to apologise for disbelieving Meghan ‘Princess Pinocchio’ Markle, I’ve been riding a rare wave of public popularity, with my anti-woke, pro-free speech book Wake Up becoming a no. 1 bestseller and people stopping me in the street to offer support. A lady named Marion from Eastbourne wrote to compare my campaign to that of John Lilburne, the 17th-century English political leveller who coined the term ‘freeborn rights’ and became a champion of liberty. She wrote: ‘Lilburne spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, and for this he was whipped, pilloried, half-starved, exiled, imprisoned and twice put on trial for his life by Oliver Cromwell. He never gave up.