Nobody can say what heaven is like, but there must be a fair chance it resembles the Scarsdale Tavern on a warm summer’s afternoon. If it does, then kill me now.
Cities of nine million are not meant to feel bucolic. The pretty square in Kensington, west London, where the pub sits is so verdant it makes the standard cliche for such environs – leafy – seem pitifully inadequate.
Golden sunshine streaks through gaps in the green canopy above. People sitting outside the Scarsdale bathe in the light like lizards on desert rocks. As they nurse cooling pints, most seem as if they haven’t a care to rub between them.
Even the dogs are stupidly happy on this cracker of a day. A spaniel asleep at the pub door looks so content it could be lying in a bed of treats on a fluffy cloud over rainbow bridge.
RM Block
I wait at the Scarsdale for its most famous regular, journalist Piers Morgan, who lives nearby. If his public persona as the irascible interviewer of the stars holds true, perhaps he’ll throw some shade on this sunny day.
Prince Harry once said thinking of Morgan made him feel “sick”. The late AA Gill thought him “objectionable”. Jeremy Clarkson punched him in the head. Two weeks ago even George Galloway called him “slippery”.
So when Morgan (60) enters the Scarsdale, I half expect him to be hard to handle. Instead he’s disarmingly dead-on, a picture of casual charm as he reveals his plan to conquer the new media world. He also has a new book, Woke is Dead, out in October.
The baroque Scarsdale is the kind of place that serves Barolo wine behind the bar. Yet Morgan is happy with a simple pint of Harvey’s Bitter. I join him. Two nervous 20-somethings ask for a selfie and he obliges with grace. He is chatty, friendly. Hell, he probably helped an old lady carry her shopping on his way across the square.
Where is the snarling television talkshow pugilist, the inveterate controversialist who makes princesses sad?
“I don’t think my views are controversial. Maybe I express them in a controversial way,” he says. “I’m more frank and strident than most people. Perhaps they’re scared, but I’m not. If someone wants to take me on, I’m up for it. I’ve thick skin, as thick as the skin of a thousand miners. But I can also be perfectly nice.”
You can tell that he has probably never experienced a moment’s doubt in his life. He says he developed his penchant for robust speech, his calling card on television, growing up in his family’s Surrey pub.
“The egalitarian pub crowd, the brickie arguing with the lawyer ... My family was also very opinionated. Throw it all together and I was brought up in a world of strong opinions.”
Morgan’s birth father, Eamonn Vincent O’Meara, who died when he was one, was an Irish dentist from Galway. Morgan was born Piers O’Meara, before taking Welshman Glynne Pughe-Morgan’s name when his mother, Gabrielle, married again.
I want to create passionate, fiery debate. But I don’t like it when it becomes a circus
Through his birth father, however, Morgan retains strong family links to Offaly. Is he familiar with the term Biffo [big ignorant f**ker from Offaly]? Indeed he is, as he gamely acknowledges the gentle taunt.
“I can plausibly deny being a fully paid-up Biffo,” he says, laughing. “My connection to Offaly is only that my aunt, my father’s sister, moved to Banagher where my cousins grew up. So I’m not actually a proper Biffo at all. But my DNA – and I got it tested – is predominantly Irish. Whether Ireland wants that or not, you’re getting it.”
He says he is in the process of getting an Irish passport.
The outline of Morgan’s long, unremittingly high-profile career in journalism is well known. He started on the rambunctious UK tabloid the sun, where he was a showbiz reporter who became almost as famous as the stars he chronicled.
In 1994, when Morgan was 28, Rupert Murdoch put him in charge of the News of the World, making him Fleet Street’s youngest editor in decades. He later edited the Daily Mirror, from which he was sacked in 2004. He moved into television, later branching out into the US market. America’s Got Talent; Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice; NBC; CNN ... His star continued to rise, despite setbacks and controversies along the way.
He returned to Britain a decade ago and co-anchored Good Morning Britain on ITV, before quitting in 2021 in a row over his ferocious personal criticism of Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s wife. According to Morgan, she “ghosted” him in 2016 after they met for drinks in the Scarsdale, just before she met Harry.
When we meet, we sit at the table next to the one where Morgan says he drank with Markle.
Morgan later joined Murdoch’s fledging Talk TV to host a strident big-game chatshow, Piers Morgan Uncensored. Talk TV flopped as a linear channel and moved online. Earlier this year, Morgan bought his Uncensored show from Murdoch’s empire and runs it himself as a ratings-crushing YouTube channel.
This week it passed four million subscribers. Morgan suckles happily on his Harvey’s as he reveals his plan to, as a freshly-minted sexagenarian, summit the world of digital media in the vein of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro or Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger stable of The Rest Is ... podcasts.
“Look at younger generations. They consume everything digitally. Talk TV was worth a go. But if you judged us by Talk TV alone, we were a failure. Yet on YouTube with the same content, we were a spectacular success. My Cristiano Ronaldo interview had 100 times the views on YouTube [that it got on Talk TV].”
His argumentative Uncensored showdown with Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, about the Israel-Hamas conflict, garnered 23 million views online.
In March, Murdoch’s News UK sold the show and YouTube channel to Morgan’s Wake Up Productions. There was no fee upfront, but News UK got a four-year deal to share online ad revenue. Morgan leases from News UK the same London studio and office space he used before, and the show’s 15 or so staff moved over on to his payroll.
He intends to expand the Uncensored brand into different areas such as sport and history, with content aimed at the monster US market. He is also talking to investors.
“We’re in the top three in the world on YouTube for news and opinion. No mean feat in three years. In the end I may not need [more] investors. When I started talking about this, everybody began contacting me looking for a piece of the action.” It’s understood Karl Brophy, who recently sold Red Flag Consulting, has invested in Morgan’s company.
Morgan likes the freedom of being his own boss. He often films the show abroad – he owns a house in Beverly Hills and filmed Uncensored remotely from a trailer in his front driveway there. “I spend three or four months a year in the US.”
Originally a writing journalist, the love of ink hasn’t washed away. At the start of the pandemic, he released a book, Wake Up, warning people against what he saw as the danger of “woke” culture and politics that he believed was smothering society.
“I wrote it as a clarion call to my fellow liberals to wake the f**k up, otherwise you will ‘woke’ yourself into oblivion. You deny science. You virtue signal to your heart’s content, but you get little done. You call everything racist and transphobic. You want to cancel everyone who wants to deviate one inch from your world view.”
Five years on, however, he believes the “woke worm has turned” and the movement has weakened. It is not dead yet, he says, and his new book is meant to help “cremate” it. Did he write Woke is Dead as a sort of valedictory lap of the pitch? “A little bit,” he says.
Meanwhile, those who see themselves as the victims of the demise of “woke”, such as trans people, are left to deal with the consequences of a retrenchment of their rights and their sway in public discourse.
Morgan credits his on-off-on again friend, Trump, with helping to vanquish “woke”, or at least the left-wing variety of it; he agrees that there is also an emerging right-wing woke variety every bit as shrill, paranoid and unyielding as its ailing left-wing counterpart.
[ Hugh Linehan: Wokeness is on the wane almost everywhere – except the rightOpens in new window ]
“Trump sees through all the bulls**t. A lot of Americans [before the last election] just looked at Trump and thought ‘he’s the guy to call this stuff out’.”
As for the receding “woke tide”, he believes errant liberals, by alienating people such as him who identify as moderates, “brought it on themselves” and Trump is the result.
He and the US president have been close since Morgan won Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. Over the years, their relationship went through rocky patches, such as after January 6th in 2021, when Trump supporters invaded Capitol Hill. Morgan castigated Trump for that, as he did in 2020 for suggesting bleach could treat Covid.
“Trump is transactional. He does value loyalty. If he thinks you’ve whacked him a bit too hard, you get sent to Siberia for a bit. But with me, I found the phone goes a few months later and it is Trump, back like nothing happened.”
Currently their relationship is good, he indicates. Morgan says they were texting “just the other day”.
He bumped into UK prime minister – and fellow rabid Arsenal fan – Keir Starmer at a party in recent weeks and advised him to stop doing U-turns and making pledges he might struggle to keep, such as building 1.5 million homes.
Starmer became prime minister a year ago this week. “I told him ‘year two is a big year for you. You’ve got to make us feel like we’re on the right track’.”
Starmer recently tangled with Belfast rap trio Kneecap, following the band’s fierce criticism of Israel over its war in Gaza, and also the band’s strident public support for Palestine. Band member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh has been charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly draping himself in a Hizbullah flag and shouting “Up Hamas, up Hizbullah”. Starmer wanted them banned from Glastonbury, which Morgan agreed with.
He describes the alleged flag incident, which Ó hAnnaidh has signalled he will deny, as “pathetic at best and dangerous at worst”. Morgan dismisses the argument that the band’s statements, such as “kill your local MP”, are ironic or hyperbolic and not meant to be taken literally.
“This is not a free-speech issue. All it takes is one lunatic in the crowd to do something. If people think that doesn’t happen, MPs Jo Cox and David Amess were killed by nutters who were inspired by things they heard and read. So it does happen. We live in a free world, but you are not entitled to act without accountability.”
Morgan moves easily between topics such as the war in Gaza, where he has grown increasingly critical of Israel, and other hot-button issues such as trans rights and immigration. His views are broadly moderate, but he expresses them with an edge.
As we draw the conversation to a close, Morgan is keen to portray himself as “an arbiter of common sense, and not a woke basher. I want to create passionate, fiery debate. But I don’t like it when it becomes a circus.”
In the week or so before we meet, both Galloway and [Jake] Paul terminated Uncensored interviews early in fiery rows with Morgan. Days after we meet, Morgan also issues a blunt response to British chancellor Rachel Reeves crying in the House of Commons: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
He tells me: “I have a lot of firepower on social media, which I can unleash to promote our stuff. That generates a lot of heat, which brings eyeballs, which generates a lot of money.
“But I don’t need the money. I need the buzz.”
