Piers Morgan goes full gammon in Woke is Dead

Seriously, though: it must be exhausting to be as performatively angry about everything as Piers Morgan claims to be. His goat is perpetually got. In his new book, Woke Is Dead, he turns himself from pink to puce to the full gammon as he rails against the gender divide, the apparent destruction of free speech, sundry climate activists, and anyone who favours a plant-based diet. Along the way, there are many sidebar potshots: Meghan Markle is a “whining actress”; the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar merely “unmemorable”; and the Bafta-winning TV drama Adolescence he considers “frankly boring”.

Even when applauding JK Rowling’s controversial stance on trans rights, he manages to get in that he’s not a fan of Harry Potter. “I’d rather paint over my TV and watch it dry.” If by the end of his book, Piers himself doesn’t need a lie down, the reader well might.

With its subtitle “How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness”, Woke Is Dead endeavours to eradicate forever the “woke brigade”, that overly sensitive modern demographic likely to “throw their toys out of the pram” at the slightest ruffling of their tender feathers. It is because of woke, he argues, that we can no longer enjoy – well, take your pick: flirting, sex, politics, holidays in the sun, a cheeky Big Mac and fries. Even films have gone rubbish. “The great 007 has been emasculated, with a papoose-wearing Daniel Craig playing him as an emotional wreck who wants to talk to women about his feelings instead of sleeping with them.”

The assertion of a person’s pronouns – she/her, they/them – irritates him (“I self-identify as hot/hotter/hottest”), as do virtue-signalling vegans. “I’ve waged a private war on loudmouth vegans for several years now.” Why? Because he thinks they’re hypocrites. Research has shown, he says, that “large-scale production of avocados is disastrous for the environment”.

The central tenet of his book is that woke, which used to mean “awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination”, has been co-opted by upstarts who’ve seen it as an opportunity to grind their own axe as publicly as possible, and each has an ostensibly bullying agenda designed to “suck all the joy out of life”. Those who dare disagree with them are threatened with immediate cancellation, and so what more proof do we need of this “woke mind virus” that’s sending people “utterly stark raving bonkers”?

In America, he writes, Obama was so ruinously woke that Donald Trump needed to be elected just to bring back a prevailing sanity. His “stunning” election victory last November became “the single most vivid illustration of woke’s demise… [slamming] the door shut on a frenzied decade of outrage, sensitivity and censorship with a defiant barrage of straight-talking common sense that many people feared was gone for good”. With Trump back in charge, “everything felt reassuringly normal” again.

If he is in any way hesitant to make such claims of a man whose grip on America feels dangerously authoritarian – to say nothing of the fact that he’s a convicted felon and proven misogynist – Morgan doesn’t show it. He’s not about to let anyone get in the way of his thesis. Especially snowflakes.

Piers Morgan, 60, is a highly effective communicator and, these days, a perpetual TV pundit, happy to offer up a voice of reason to any political panel show that needs one. No longer shackled to a terrestrial television channel – he hosts a talk show on YouTube – the former tabloid editor is proudly (and boastfully) cancel-proof.

The topics he addresses in this, his 12th book – the gender issue, trans people in sport, and the desire of many not to rewrite history but understand it more accurately – are fascinating and timely. But they are also complex, sometimes confounding, and require much nuance when examining them. The trouble with nuance, however, is that it doesn’t make headlines. In so many of his arguments, cogent and otherwise, he draws his always emphatic conclusions with self-satisfied one-liners (“I knew I was right”; “I was right about that too”), and so by the time he jokes about university courses entitled Introduction to Contemporary Piers Morgan Theory, and refers to environmentalists as “Enviro-Mentalists”, losing the ‘n’ but gaining a hyphen to better emphasise their “madness”, you feel he is simply writing for an audience of two: himself and Alan Partridge.

Morgan is a liberal. He stresses this point. He stands for equal rights for women, for gay people, and for Black people. But it’s all got out of hand. Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter were good and necessary, but they’ve been taken to such extremes, he claims, that everyone now is afraid of being branded sexist or racist or homophobic, when the vast majority of us aren’t. This has resulted in, among other things, a crisis in masculinity. A shame, he says, that society has forgotten just how appealing the male sexual drive can be. “Men scale dizzying peaks when they find chemistry with a woman. Suddenly, they become unstoppable machines with boundless energy and a wit sharp enough to slice concrete.”

And so little wonder young men now look up to problematic role models like Andrew Tate. Because who else? Certainly not Hollywood’s current crop of alphas. “We used to have Bruce Willis and Jean Claude van Damme. Now,” he laments, “we have Timothée Chalamet and Paul Mescal.”

Morgan is adamant that the movies have lost sense of their own plot. He references 2023’s The Marvel, about “a girlboss who regards men with profound disgust”, which lost $237m at the box office, while the recent sequel to Top Gun, featuring a “jet-fuelled, balls-out, supersonic rampage with cocksure men who bond over fixing engines”, raked in $1.4bn. One might point out to him that Barbie, the Greta Gerwig blockbuster that reimagines the titular heroine as a feminist icon, made even more money ($1.45bn), but Morgan is ahead of us. Barbie, he says, was “unwatchable”, largely because it bandied the word “patriarchy” around, and who wants to hear that over popcorn and a Diet Coke?

Perhaps the strangest aspect of this book is his belligerent fandom for Donald Trump. When earlier this year the President signed an order banning transgender athletes from competing in US women’s sports, the accompanying photo opportunity saw him surrounded by smiling schoolgirls. “Trump has been smeared as a bigot, a misogynist, an abuser and worse.” Not any more. “This wholesome, almost grandfatherly scene was a spectacular repudiation.”

How much you agree with this assertion will determine just how well you get along with this book.

Woke Is Dead is not a missed opportunity. Morgan has written precisely what he wanted to write. But how much more interesting – how useful, too – it would have been if, instead of poking fun at his target, he tried to understand it better. The world feels terribly divided right now, and if quite so many feel it to be problematic and outright hostile, then is it not worth listening and engaging further? Might that not result in, for all of us, a better world in which to live side-by-side?

But some folk don’t want to fully explore such complicated debates; they’d sooner perpetuate them. Few are quite as adept in this as he.

‘Woke is Dead’ by Piers Morgan (HarperCollins, £22) is out now