Once again, Piers Morgan has showed he simply did not know when to stop.
Seventeen years ago, he was fired as editor of the Daily Mirror after publishing faked Iraqi prisoner abuse photographs. A decade later, he was axed by CNN after he lost his US audience over a series of lectures over gun control.
Yet, until now, Morgan has found a way of bouncing back, able even to justify failures that would have killed other careers. But his persistent attacks on Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, appeared increasingly insensitive, to the point where even he could no longer justify them.
Instead, the man so normally full of words simply stormed off the set of Good Morning Britain, the show he had hosted for six years. Facing criticism from co-presenter Alex Beresford, a visibly enraged Morgan could only manage “I’m done with this” as he got up and as he headed out “See you later, sorry I can’t do this”.
A day earlier, Morgan attracted widespread criticism – and over 40,000 viewer complaints – after saying he didn’t believe Meghan’s disclosure that she had considered taking her own life and was rebuffed upon asking internally if there was a way she could get help: “I don’t believe a word she says, Meghan Markle. I wouldn’t believe her if she read me a weather report.”
It was a car crash that, in retrospect was easy to see coming. Morgan had been criticising Meghan in extraordinary terms for months. When she and her husband, Harry, announced they were stepping down as working royals he accused them of being “grasping, selfish, scheming Kardashian-wannabes”.
Once, remarkably, the two were even friendly – a disclosure that made the recent attacks harder to stomach. They met up in 2016 in a London pub after she had come to Wimbledon to watch another of her friends, multiple champion, Serena Williams, but he complained that she had dropped all contact with him once she had met Harry.
“I still like Meghan, notwithstanding her disconcerting tendency to ‘ghost’ people when they’ve served their purpose,” Morgan tweeted in 2018. It was something he sought to remind viewers of in the run-up to the Oprah interview, complaining she had “ditched [him] like a sack of spuds” – suggesting his criticisms of her were driven largely by little more than personal animus.
It was far from the only row Morgan had been embroiled in in recent weeks. Just a month earlier, 1,200 TV executives signed an open letter accusing the presenter of being engaged in public bullying of Adeel Amini, who had worked with him as a researcher on Life Stories a decade earlier.
When Amini, now a producer, tweeted that he would not take the job today, Morgan hit back on the social network, claiming he would “rather employ a lobotomised Aardvark”.
Breakfast show co-host, Susanna Reid, recently admitted that in the early days working alongside Morgan made her cry. “I used to get a lot of targeted abuse because someone didn’t like what the person sitting next to me said,” she said. Relations had improved, she added, but the dynamic on the show was never easy, she said, in a recent interview. “We do fight like Punch and Judy, verbally.”
Last year, Downing Street boycotted GMB for months after Morgan had engaged in a couple of combative interviews with care minister Helen Whateley, which critics described as bullying. In one she accused him of repeatedly interrupting her – he insisted that she “didn’t have any answers” over the numbers of Covid tests being carried out.
That led to something of a brief revival of Morgan’s reputation in some circles, as angry No 10 advisers refused to allow ministers to go on the breakfast programme and the presenter took the opportunity to lambast the government in its absence for its handling of the first wave of the deadly pandemic.
It was typical of a man who seemed to be addicted to getting into fights, and who was long ago described by Rupert Murdoch, his former boss at the News of the World, where he was editor before the Mirror, as having “balls bigger than his brains”.
Some of the skirmishes along the way were legendary – including a punchup nearly two decades ago with Jeremy Clarkson following a particularly boisterous night at the British Press Awards. A drunk Clarkson punched Morgan, who had allegedly insulted his wife, at around half eleven – leaving visible bruises on the then tabloid editor’s forehead.
But there were many examples of other more serious misjudgments. At the Mirror he successfully survived one scandal, buying shares in a company subsequently tipped by the newspaper’s business columnists, the City Slickers, by claiming he knew nothing of their intentions.
An eight-year reign at the leftwing tabloid ended when he was sacked for publishing what turned out to be faked photographs that purported to show British soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees. Characteristically Morgan had refused to even apologise as it became clear his job was on the line. “If nobody knows the provenance of these photographs, why should we apologise?” he said on the day he was forced out.
Only Morgan could revel in the prospect of such falls from grace. His Twitter profile has long contained the quote “One day you’re cock of the walk, the next a feather duster” attributed to his grandmother. But his comments about Meghan put him in a position where he is at risk of being swept aside.
