Piers Morgan arrives for the 2019 British Academy Britannia (BAFTA) awards. File/AFP
Gulf Today Report
Piers Morgan is certainly going all guns blazing when it comes to the much-talked-about Harry and Meghan interview. Far from apologising or scaling down his attacks on the couple, particularly Meghan Markle, he has only ratcheted them up.
Weeks after the embattled Good Morning Britain co-host was forced to step aside— after he said he “didn’t believe a word” of Meghan Markle’s racism claims in an interview with Oprah Winfrey— Morgan has doubled down on his criticism of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in a scathing op-ed that appeared in the UK’s Mail on Sunday.
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The Duchess told Winfrey she had experienced racism while as a member of the royal household and that she had felt suicidal and was offered no help from Buckingham Palace.
In his lengthy column, Morgan addresses the backlash he received for doubting the couple and also writes about how some of his friends, including The Talk personality Sharon Osbourne, found themselves cancelled by the “the ultra-woke crowd in Hollywood” for defending him.
But Morgan also took digs at Prince Harry after he alleged that his father cut off his money and security, according to the website of a well-known Canadian newspaper.
“I expected such disingenuous, self-serving wrecking-ball stuff from a social-climbing Hollywood actress like Ms. Markle, but for Harry to publicly shred his family and the Monarchy like this, while Prince Philip was seriously ill in hospital, is so out of character for a man who once bravely served his Queen and country in war,” Morgan wrote.
The former America’s Got Talent judge also dismissed several bombshells in the couple’s interview with Winfrey, including Meghan’s insistence that she never Googled Harry when they first met and her assertion that their son Archie did not receive a Prince title because of the colour of his skin.
“It sounded complete nonsense when she said it, and it is; he’s not a Prince because, technically, the great grandchildren of the Monarch are not bestowed with titles ‘Princes’ or ‘Princess’ unless they’re in the direct line to the throne … regardless of the child’s mother’s ethnicity.”
Morgan wrote that he was “angry to the point of boiling over” the morning after the couple’s interview aired.
The 55-year-old British TV personality also took on critics who accused him of “bullying” Meghan over her race. “It didn’t matter that I’ve never said anything racist about her or that my only comments about her race have been to repeatedly say how great it was that a bi-racial woman married into the Royal Family.”
Asserting that Meghan hasn’t been treated any worse than other royal brides, including the late Princess Diana, Morgan alleged that the “Twitter troll mob” has targeted his sons with one angry social media user threatening to kill him in front of them.
Morgan also defended his friend Osbourne, who supported him on a segment of The Talk earlier this month.
“What’s happened to @MrsSOsbourne is an absolute disgrace that shames CBS,” he tweeted. “Bullied out of her job for defending me against an invented slur of racism because I don’t believe a liar.”
In his Sunday column, Morgan continued his defence of Osbourne, who stepped down from The Talk on last Friday following her on-air row with co-host Sheryl Underwood after the latter accused him of being a racist
“Educate me, tell me when you have heard him say racist things?” Osbourne said in an exchange with Underwood. “I very much feel like I’m about to be put in the electric chair because I have a friend, who many people think is a racist, so that makes me a racist?” Osbourne later tweeted an apology that declared she does not condone “racism, misogyny or bullying.”
Markle, Morgan wrote, is “just one of the many whiny, privileged, hypocritical celebrities who now cynically exploit victimhood to suppress free speech, value their own version of the truth over the actual truth, and seek to cancel anyone that deviates from their woke world view …”
Morgan added that he could have kept his job with British broadcaster ITV if he had been willing to apologise, but he opted against doing that when he twigged that one mea culpa would just lead to the “woke cancel culture” demanding more.
“The woke brigade would keep coming for me, demanding I apologise for everything else they find offensive — which of course, is absolutely everything.”
Concluding his rundown of the past few weeks, Morgan ended by invoking a Winston Churchill quote and taking potshots at liberals looking to silence dissenting opinion.
“It’s time to cancel the cancel culture before it kills our culture.”