Piers Morgan has one major talent: attention-seeking. This man is the Michael Phelps, Lionel Messi and John von Neumann of attention-seeking. He could get attention on a quiet afternoon in the Sahara Desert.
Yet attention-seeking is not an essentially valuable skill to anybody but the person who wants attention. A lunatic running buck-naked through Westminster would get attention.
Comparing a lunatic running buck-naked through Westminster to Piers Morgan is unfair — unfair, that is, to the lunatic. After all, you could say what you like about a naked lunatic in Westminster but only people unfortunate enough to be out and about in central London would see his shrunken genitals. Most of us, if not all of us, have had to see and hear Piers Morgan at one time or another.
Why do I dislike Piers Morgan so much? (As a public figure, of course — I don’t know what he is like in person.) Imagine that you took Donald Trump’s ego and amorality and blended them with Meghan Markle’s sanctimoniousness, Uriah Heep’s sycophancy and your Facebook-dwelling uncle’s sense of humour and you have something close to the soup of vices that make up Morgan’s public persona.
This is a man for whom truth and principle are at best rhetorical devices. This is a man who published fake photos purporting to depict British soldiers abusing detainees. This is a man who denied ever meeting Jimmy Savile after previously boasting about how he had met him. (Morgan claims that he simply forgot their encounter.)
It would be wrong to claim that he never has the right opinion. Opposing the Iraq War as editor of The Mirror was correct, for example (at a time when most people were wrong). But his standards make him an aggressively unhelpful representative of a good cause. Again, recall those photographs.
As the host of Piers Morgan Uncensored, Morgan poses as the voice of reason. He does this by promoting the loudest and stupidest voices on different sides of a debate. It is easy to be the voice of reason when you are sitting between the drunkest and most obnoxious people in a bar. But at least those people are only in a bar. Morgan will give, say, Candace Owens and Shmuley Boteach a major platform, as if they will offer keen insights into the Israel/Palestine conflict rather than into the nature of personality disorders. Morgan likes arguments but not for their substance. He just likes the sound and fury.
So, we have this book — or what passes for a book. Woke Is Dead betrays no sign of intellectual curiosity or stylistic flair. It is a book that seems to exist solely because Mr Morgan knows that he can sell one. More creative effort goes into a pop star slapping their name on an inedible ice cream. Within a few pages, Morgan is reprinting a long, long quote from a “top criminal lawyer” about the rightness of Piers Morgan. Can’t Morgan demonstrate the value of his opinions himself? And did it make sense to republish an email from someone who is clearly a better stylist than the author of the book we are reading?
Woke Is Dead is a rambling collection of grievances. Almost every paragraph could begin with the words, “And here’s another thing … ” If you want to be informed then you’re out of luck. There is no serious attempt to define what “woke” even means. Morgan describes it with a lot of adjectives — “negative, accusatory and dismal”, for example — but he does not describe its ideas and aims in any sort of coherent fashion. “Resistance to alleged systematic biases related to race, gender and sexuality”? “The attempt to take egalitarian premises to egalitarian ends by way of social shaming and reverse discrimination”? “Leftism turned up to eleven”? All very much imperfect I know. But at least I’m trying.
He could well be the most professionally successful journalist in the world, but here he’s not even trying
How has wokeness died? The fightback “all started” in 2020, Morgan claims. What about in 2016, when Trump was elected the first time around? And if wokeness was at “the height of its powers” in 2020, as Morgan writes, how can he claim that its “era is over” because Trump has been re-elected? Clearly, its existence has been compatible with Trump being president.
This is a polemic rather than a work of political philosophy. But while we all accept that a pizza is not the stuff of fine dining, it should still taste good, and while a polemic need not be the stuff of ageless analytical genius, it should still be at least somewhat coherent and substantive. Morgan, on the other hand, cannot go two pages without contradicting himself. He gives Andrew Tate credit for saying that “failure is your own responsibility, not everybody else’s”, but this comes in the middle of a chapter that blames the failures of young men on society being rigged against them.
None of this makes sense. Morgan claims that the “green scare is coming to an abrupt end” because Gen Z likes Kim Kardashian and Bitcoin (work it out for yourselves … ). Meanwhile, Ed Miliband is all that stands between Britain and blackouts. You realise how empty Morgan’s celebration of the death of wokeness is when you read him praising Tony Blair for a “very good piece” advocating a more sensible progressivism. If the prime minister of mass non-EU immigration, university expansion and the Iraq War is Morgan’s ally in his “common sense revolution”, how good can it be? The problem is that Morgan has no real ideas or values. He dislikes shouty activists and preening celebrities on a gut level, but if their ideas are being expressed by smooth politicians who sound somewhat down to earth, he’s all in favour of them.
The blurb promises Morgan’s “trademark wit”. This is like referencing Hunter S. Thompson’s “trademark sobriety”. Morgan is as witty as JFK is alive. He is the sort of wit who puts “crying with laughter” emojis next to his tweets because it needs emphasising that he is trying to be funny. Some people have preferred pronouns? Well, says Morgan, his pronouns are “Hot/Hotter/Hottest”. Never mind that pronoun jokes got old almost ten years ago. This doesn’t even work. “Piers Morgan is a journalist. Hot has written a book.”
Morgan is obsessed with “hypocrisy”. “Hypocrisy is the easiest vice to diagnose,” I wrote elsewhere, “Because one only has to hold one’s rhetorical opponents to their standards and need not articulate one’s own.” Again, this suits a man with limited ideas and values. But Morgan is also a massive hypocrite himself. Did you know that social media uses “conflict” to “retain your eyeballs for as long as possible”? Mr Morgan, have you ever seen your show? My brain almost exploded when I read Morgan finishing a whinge about “non-binary” people with the claim, “I find the insatiable thirst for attention quite exhausting.” You, Piers Morgan — YOU, Piers Morgan — object to attention-seeking?
But Morgan is infinitely softer on himself than he is on other people. Pondering his COVID hawkishness, he regrets being “overly censorious” of people who refused to take the vaccine. What Morgan said was that vaccine refuseniks “should be refused NHS care if they then catch covid … Let them pay for their own stupidity & selfishness”. I’m not sure that “overly censorious” is an accurate description of advocating that people be left to die.
Listen, I appreciate that I’m being pretty venomous in this review. If I was writing about someone who was struggling to be successful, professionally or creatively, I would never dream of being so harsh. Piers Morgan is doing neither. He could well be the most professionally successful journalist in the world. On the strength of his work — and above all this book — he is not even trying to do anything creative. I can call him all I want and he will remain rich and influential. But if you’re a young journalist, don’t aim for this. God knows there are few people in our industry who have a chance of being rich and influential anyway. But that’s not the point. The point is that before dreaming of wealth and fame we should strive to write, say, or do things that make us proud.
I suppose Piers Morgan might be proud of Woke Is Dead but, then, a lunatic running buck-naked through Westminster might be proud of his bare buttocks.
