Charles’s Aston Martin is powered by cheese and wine. Aren’t we all!
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 I was at a 90th birthday party for media tycoon Rupert Murdoch at his Henley home tonight when Jeremy Clarkson came up to congratulate me on rejoining Murdoch’s company News Corporation, for which I will anchor a new global TV show.
‘Ah, Morgan,’ he bellowed, ‘I was going to text you to say well done on your brilliant new deal, but then I thought you’d just put that in your column, and I can’t be seen to be saying positive things about you, obviously. So I decided to tell you in person tonight instead.’
‘Thank you, Clarkson,’ I replied, involuntarily fingering the scar on my temple from where his fist once gouged a hole during a less amiable phase of our relationship. ‘Just to clarify, you’re paying me a compliment to my face so you can later claim you never said it?’
‘Yes!’ he chortled.
‘Plausible deniability?’
‘Exactly!’ he guffawed.
Others were happier to commit their good wishes to technological receipt record.
‘Just read about your new media deal,’ said a text from a number I didn’t recognise. ‘Congratulations!’
‘Thank you!’ I replied, ‘but who is this? Name didn’t come up?’
‘Ivanka,’ came the reply. ‘Hi! With my father and Jared and they send their regards.’
It’s been a while since I had any contact with the Trumps. ‘Thank you!’ I replied. ‘Tell your dad… I nearly miss him.’
MONDAY, OCTOBER 4 I was very sad to hear that Only Fools And Horses star John ‘Boycie’ Challis has died. A lifelong Arsenal fan like me – the wicker casket at his funeral contained a flash of red to celebrate his devotion to the Gunners – John and I regularly ‘chatted’ on Twitter where, as you might expect from someone who played such a forthright and opinionated character on screen, he was a provocative voice who shared my frustrations about our football team, and more especially, about the insufferable woke brigade wrecking the world.
When I raged about universities banning clapping to avoid triggering snowflake students’ anxiety, he tweeted: ‘Piers, if you rob an actor of his or her, or any of us who isn’t quite sure, applause – then we will die.’
And after the wokies tried to cancel Disney’s Snow White because the handsome prince kisses the heroine ‘without consent’ while she sleeps, Challis bemoaned to me: ‘Will panto have to be cancelled forever?’
More recently, Jennifer Saunders said Absolutely Fabulous wouldn’t get made today because it would be deemed too offensive, and I commented: ‘Of course it wouldn’t. No fun or “inappropriate” humour is allowed in the drab, dreary fascist world of wokedom.’
To which Challis, whose own brilliantly non-PC Boycie will inevitably be cancelled by these puritanical imbeciles too, replied: ‘What’s anybody doing about it?’
The answer is not enough, but I intend to do a lot more about it with my new show.
Just wish he was going to be around to see it.
RIP John, and thanks for all the laughs.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 Challis and I would have shared the same eye-rolling view about Sir Keir Starmer’s absurd virtuesignalling demand that the next James Bond be female.
Though I think he’d have chuckled as loudly as I did tonight when Have I Got News For You guest host Stephen Mangan quipped: ‘The producers of the Bond movies have already said the next James Bond will not be a woman, but just to annoy Piers Morgan, the person who makes all the gadgets will be called LGBT-Q.’
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11
Prince Charles has revealed his 50-year-old Aston Martin is now powered by cheese and wine. Aren’t we all, Your Royal Highness!
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12 The first official report into the UK Government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is a damning verdict, with the cross-party group of MPs declaring it ‘one of the most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced’.
They lambast dithering Boris Johnson and his woeful Ministers for a litany of fiascos, including delayed lockdown and social distancing, ‘light-touch border controls’, a shambolic testing system, pursuing a ‘herd immunity’ policy and throwing care homes to the Covid wolf.
These were all the things I ferociously attacked Ministers for at the time, believing their lethal mistakes were costing thousands of lives, as the report now confirms they did.
I was roundly abused back then by people accusing me of ‘scaremongering’, and rattled No10 ordered an eightmonth boycott of all
Ministers appearing on Good Morning Britain to stop them being held to proper account for the unfurling disaster. Boris’s former chief aide Dominic Cummings was once again giving it the big ‘not me guv!’ one on TV and Twitter today, desperate to avoid any blame for his own culpability over the scandal, so I reminded everyone that it was him who stopped journalists like me asking vital questions when it most mattered.
‘I banned them ’cos we all had better things to do than waste our time on a vain tool shouting angry soundbites and calling it “news”,’ he snapped back.
This response – the first direct contact I’ve ever had with Cummings – perfectly encapsulates the blinkered, nasty arrogance of a man whose own shockingly hypocritical actions did so much to damage public confidence in Government policy.
‘I don’t think you’re in any position to throw around the “vain tool” slur,’ I replied, ‘but good to see you finally admit you stopped me holding Ministers to proper account for their failures that cost 1000s of lives.
‘Gutless & pathetic, like your lies over Barnard Castle.’