The state of opinion forming (not informed opinion)
My contribution today comes from my perspective as a privileged, white, sixty-something male with no particular political axe to grind – which description in itself probably marks me as someone who has as many weaknesses (and lack of appreciation of the world’s problems) in terms of his genes, circumstances and personal experience of life as anyone you could possible imagine or nominate.
However.
Piers Morgan is a motormouth personality and bore who knows exactly what he is doing.
While the BBC1’s Breakfast Show is the epitome of its cosy, ‘woke’ – now Salford-based, of course, in order to virtue-signal by ‘taking its productions away from London’ – output for the masses, he’s been hired by ITV to spice up its competitor Good Morning Britain and create something more controversial and ‘entertaining’ and thereby hopefully attracting a different, ‘modern’, younger, more social-media aware audience … and bigger audiences/ratings.
It’s probably working because even your author habitually tunes to it from 6.00am onwards, in my case for two reasons.
Firstly, because it’s the antithesis of the BBC competition and, secondly, because Morgan provokes in the onlooker a mix of admiration and derision via his pompous, opinionated, “shock-jock” ranting and disrespectful treatment of those who dare to come on his show which is co-hosted by vanilla former BBC stalwart of breakfast telly Suzanna Reid.
Already this week Morgan has twice demonstrated his approach with bells on.
First up, he interviewed the American lawyer Earl Gray, acting for Thomas Lane – one of the four police defendants in the George Floyd ‘murder’ case that has been dominating the news.
As I understand it, at the time of the incident Lane had been taking part in his fourth-ever shift since joining the local Police department and was under supervision/training by Derek Chauvin, the officer who held his knee over Mr Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, thereby killing him.
After some opening ‘establishing’ pleasantries, Morgan set about his premeditated attack.
Having detailed the alleged number of times that Mr Floyd pleaded for help and/or gasped “I cannot breathe” Morgan then tried to put Mr Gray on the spot by asking him his personal opinion of whether this should not have prompted his client Mr Lane to do something/anything to suggest, demand and/or plead for officer Chauvin to desist in his act.
For me, this placed Mr Gray in an impossible position.
He had been hired solely and exclusively to represent Mr Lane in what was about to become a criminal case, not to attack officer Chauvin or indeed comment upon any aspect of the incident bar his client’s defence and certainly not give a personal opinion upon the alleged facts.
As a lawyer involved in the case, Mr Gray wasn’t going to go there – and for Morgan to press him for his personal view(s) … and then berate him loudly for minutes at a time for declining to give any … was not only bad form but insulting.
That’s how I saw it, anyway – and, judging by his reaction, so did Mr Gray.
I had sympathy for him.
Eventually, after struggling to get a word in edgeways for about five more minutes – one of Morgan’s tactics being to ask a loaded question and then constantly interrupt as his interviewee begins to respond, Mr Gray brought proceedings to and end by losing his rag somewhat, saying that if he’d be advised in advance that this was how he was going to be treated he wouldn’t have bothered to stay up into what was the middle of the night (for him) in order to appear on British television … and summarily “signing off”, leaving his screen blank.
Morgan thereafter spent the rest of his show regularly returning to the episode and effectively criticising Mr Gray for epitomising all that was wrong with American society in the Trump era.
No doubt merely another case of “Job Done” for Piers Morgan and his ITV masters.
Secondly, there was a Zoom (or similar) three-contributor ‘discussion’ chaired by Morgan against the background of the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the UK springing from the aforementioned killing of Mr Floyd in America, with particular reference to the pulling down and chucking into a local dock’s waters of the statue of Edward Colston, the 17th Century slave trader, in Bristol.
The participants were the black lawyer and activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, historian Professor Kate Williams and the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
It would be fair at this point to state that the first two of the above were broadly in favour of the pulling down of Colston’s statue, pointing out that local people had been campaigning for over a decade for this to happen – without managing to persuade the local authorities to budge an inch on the issue – and so, in that sense (against the background of the world-wide impact of the Floyd incident and the resulting Black Lives Matter reaction in the UK) the action in pulling it down during the Bristol march/rally was ‘justified’.
However, my point today concerns the contribution of Nigel Farage – for whom, I should add, generally speaking, I have very little time.
Asked to give his reaction to the pulling down of the Colston statue, it seemed to me – to the extent he was able to participate at all as Morgan constantly interrupted him with minutes-long rants, the lady contributors also challenged everything he said and eventually Suzanna Reid pitched in as well – Farage’s main (only) point was that in his view mobs going around “pulling down” statues was the wrong way of going about the goal.
He maintained that instead such things should be done by “the authorities” after a democratic process. He cited Germany’s example of passing a law banning all public representations of anything to do with its Nazi era.
Morgan immediately asked Farage if he agreed with what Germany had done.
He said yes.
So, Morgan continued, why did he not agree with the Colston statue incident, given that local people had been trying get the statue removed for years?
“Because it’s not the right way to do it” was the gist of Farage’s (to my mind relatively-innocuous) repeated reply, albeit thereby possibly implying to some that he was ‘neutral’ on the issue of whether Colston’s statue should be removed or not – whereupon he was immediately jumped upon by Morgan, Reid and the lady interviewees and harangued for the remainder of the “discussion” by them all as if he was a pariah who ought to be banned from expressing his views in public.
Just “another day at the office” for Piers Morgan …
