PIERS Morgan – 7.3 million Twitter followers, friend to President Trump, co-presenter of Good Morning Britain – is the kind of journalist who can make headlines as a matter of routine.
He has now told CNN that Mr Trump has been “failing the American people” so far as the coronavirus pandemic is concerned. He and Boris Johnson have an apparent inability to segue from being populist politicians into being “war leaders ... they’re still playing the old games of party politics”.
Could you elaborate on what he’s said about Donald Trump?
With pleasure. “I’ve known him a long time, I consider him to be a friend. But I’ve been watching these daily briefings with mounting horror, frankly, because this is not what the President should be doing.”
Ouch.
“And he won’t want me saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway. The President of the United States right now is an incredibly important person in the world, and not least to Americans, who are dying in their tens of thousands from a disease that we don’t know much about yet ...”
Take it he didn’t stop there?
Indeed. Morgan said a leader like Mr Trump needed to be calm, authoritative, honest, accurate and empathetic. “And on almost every level of that, Donald Trump at the moment is failing the American people. He’s turning these briefings into a self-aggrandising, self-justifying, overly defensive, politically partisan, almost like a rally to him”.
Any truth in what he says?
If you’ve watched any of Mr Trump’s briefings you’ll realise – and this writer hates to say this – but Morgan is on the money.
Piers Morgan. Remind me.
Gossip/showbiz writer at The Sun. Edited the News of the World then the Daily Mirror. Sacked from the latter for publishing pictures of British soldiers apparently abusing Iraqi civilians. Claims grew that the pictures were fake. The Express called the Mirror “liars”. Morgan’s reaction: “Being called a liar by that lot is like being called a halfwit by the village idiot”. In the end, he was let go.
And then?
He’d already done lots of TV but now he took to it with a vengeance.
He was a judge on America’s Got Talent and on Britain’s Got Talent. He was one of the judges blown away by Susan Boyle’s audition of ‘I Have a Dream’ on Britain's Got Talent. “Without a doubt”, he told her, “that was the biggest surprise I have had in three years of this show”.
Anything else?
He presented a show on CNN. He’s written a couple of books, The Insider, and Don’t You Know Who I Am?, in both of which he name-drops at a furious yet admittedly entertaining pace.
Good Morning Britain, too, of course.
On which he plays the bad cop to Susanna Reid’s long-suffering good cop. He positively thrives on controversy. But he’s pretty good at it.
** All columnists are free to express their opinions. They don't necessarily represent the view of The Herald.
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