Piers Morgan aces Tucker Carlson interview audition to be Fox’s next toxic gasbag

Pat Stacey

Having flounced his way out of a lucrative job on ITV’s Good Morning Britain a month ago, Morgan has found sympathy and succour in the welcoming arms of Fox News’s dead-eyed, wax-faced, wind-up hate geyser Tucker Carlson

Piers Morgan

April 07 2021 10:11 AM

THE more you think about it, the more Piers Morgan’s three-year stint as Larry King’s replacement on CNN from 2011 to 2014 seems like a singular aberration.

For one relatively short, extremely strange spell, Morgan, who’s widely loathed in Britain, drew a degree of grudging admiration from his detractors in his home country for taking a tough stance with the NRA.

I don’t know why. It’s not hard for a non-American to be on the right side of that particular debate, especially when they’re employed by the USA’s most liberal news network.

Throw a pen in the CNN newsroom and you’ll hit someone in favour of gun control every time.

It wasn’t the gun nuts that drained Morgan’s audience; they don’t even watch CNN. You can’t turn off something you’ve never turned on.

Nor had it, as he claimed at the time, anything to do with his funny (to American ears) English accent. The Birmingham-born John Oliver has never faced any such problems because of the way he sounds.

Nope, it was Morgan —sometimes ingratiating, sometimes aggressive, but always, always self-serving — and Morgan alone who drove viewers away.

For anyone who thought Morgan and CNN was the most unlikely pairing since Alice Cooper and Ronnie Corbett appeared together eating bacon and eggs in an advert for Sky television, the good news is that order has been restored in the universe.

On Monday, Tucker — a man whose name is only one wrong initial letter away from a perfect description of him as a human being — gave over the full hour and 17 minutes of his show Tucker Carlson Today to Morgan.

The programme goes out on Fox’s streaming service Fox Nation, but has been leaking all over the internet like pus from a burst abscess.

It wasn’t so much the meeting of two minds as the collision of two turds, gently bobbing and banging against one another in a slime-covered pool, the water becoming more polluted with every smear of mutual admiration.

The world has moved on from Marklegate. Clearly, Morgan hasn’t, insisting: “I still don’t believe what they were saying, and in particular, I don’t believe what Meghan Markle said.”

Yawn.

Gammon-coloured face ablaze, he spluttered and frothed more than we ever saw him do on GMB.

This was really about Morgan getting the chance to do what he loves to do: play the martyr; blame someone else. He was the brave defender of free speech (he whipped out a Winston Churchill quote, inevitably) who’d been brutally silenced by the mob.

And all this after he’d been responsible for GMB’s audience trebling. “You’d imagine they would have thanked me,” he bleated. Obviously, the million quid a year tight-fisted ITV reportedly paid him wasn’t thanks enough.

Instead, he was “bullied by the woke brigade” and labelled with the “disgusting slur” of being a racist.

Meghan Markle even rang up his boss at GMB to complain, said Morgan, neglecting to mention that 41,000 viewers who aren’t Markle also complained.

“They got you sacked,” said Carlson, pouring another shot of venom into Morgan’s already overflowing glass of the stuff.

I don’t know if Morgan is a racist. Don’t much care one way or another. I’m not overly interested in Meghan and Harry, either. But “ironic” isn’t a big enough word to accommodate the absurd spectacle of two extremely rich, privileged white blokes discussing how non-racist one of them is.

It would have been comical if it wasn’t so nasty. And it was extremely nasty at times. The mask of affability Morgan wore for his maudlin celebrity interviews on Life Stories slipped when he took a cheap pop at Alex Beresford, the former GMB colleague who called him out, as just “a part-time weatherman”.

If this was Morgan’s informal audition to be Fox News’s next toxic gasbag, he aced it.

On this performance, he’d be right at home there. He and Tucker could even get a room at the weekends.