The Times Magazine 13shouted the odds about athlete Simone Biles
pulling out of the 2020 Olympics on the
grounds of mental health.
Surely it must bother him too, I say,
people accusing him of racism, or – worse yet
- racists viewing him as “onside”.
“The evidence is all to the contrary. I’ve
spent my life as a journalist in newspapers, as
an editor, I’ve been on television on nightly
news shows around the world, campaigning
for racial equality, against racial injustice...”
I’m not asking you to explain that you’re
not racist, I say – I’m asking if it bothers you
that people think you are.
“It does a bit... Do I get offended by being
called a racist? Yes, that gets to me.”
He tells me his long-running beef with
Meghan Markle is a consequence of a
combination of factors. First, her ditching a
fleeting friendship with him when she met
Harry. Second, the damage he believes she’s
causing the reputation of the royal family
(“The future of the monarchy is a group of
people that have been branded callous racists
by this actress who’s come in for just a handful
of years and then disappeared”), and, third,
with specific reference to the Oprah interview,
her claims of disrupted mental health,
something he thinks is invoked lazily,
with awful consequences for the seriously
mentally ill.
“A lot of people have serious mental illness.
I don’t know why we call it the ‘mental health
debate’. Just call it – people are either mentally
healthy or mentally ill. I think the vast
majority of people are mentally healthy. What
we’ve got to is a place in society where there’s
a blurring between ‘normal life shit’, as I call
it, and serious problems. I think that people
who are clinically depressed or seriously
mentally ill are getting lost in the wash of
millions of people self-identifying as ‘I’ve got
mental health issues.’ I see it with my own
kids. [As well as his daughter with Celia
Walden, Morgan has three adult sons,
Spencer, Stanley and Albert, with his first wife,
Marion Shalloe.] You have to try to explain
perspective, and you get that from worldly
experience. I just think we’ve got to toughen
up... That’s not to denigrate those who have
serious mental problems. It’s the opposite.”
I ask Morgan for a blow-by-blow account
of exactly what happened when he and
Meghan were “friends”.
“It started when... I love her show, Suits.
One day, I was bored at home – this was 2015 - and I followed four of the stars of Suits
on Twitter. Three of the guys and Meghan
Markle... She direct-messaged me five minutes
after I followed her saying, ‘Oh my God,
thanks for the follow. I’m such a big fan!’
which is quite ironic given the way things
have played out. She’d watched me on CNN,
liked me, blah-blah-blah, whatever. Anyway,
I started exchanging messages with her and a
guy called Rick Hoffman, who plays Louis Litt
in Suits. He’s the supercamp guy; he’s very,
very good. The three of us messaged away,
sending me early preview episodes, emailing.
He came on Good Morning Britain; we sent
the pictures to Meghan. All very light-hearted.
Then, she was coming to England in 2016,
I think, and she said, ‘Could we meet up?’
That came from her. I said, ‘Why don’t
you come and have a pint in my local, the
Scarsdale?’ She came down, we had a couple
of hours, a great laugh, thought she was really
nice. Great fun. She said she was getting a few
calls from guys, received a lot of texts, people
being quite persistent, blah-blah-blah... I put
her in a cab, she went to some dinner in
Mayfair at 5 Hertford Street, and I never
heard from her again.
“It turned out she’d met Harry that night.
I sort of thought, ‘OK, whatever.’ But thenhe did it, the other guy, Rick Hoffman. He’d
been more in touch with me than she had,
and he suddenly disappeared, right? Then
he popped up after the wedding, about a
week later. He’d been to the wedding. ‘Dear
Piers, I hope you understand, it’s all been so
difficult...’ I said, ‘What the f***’s it got to do
with you, you great halfwit?’ I just thought,
the pair of them, such poor manners. Then,
she did the same to her dad, and then you
saw the wedding! There was only one member
of her entire family. She seemed to have
cancelled everybody from her previous life,
from the ex-husband to all her family on
both sides, mother and father’s side; she
disowns her father. My God! You’re dealing
with a really ruthless person here, highly
manipulative, very determined to springboard
herself up the social ladder...
“But really, I feel as annoyed by Harry’s
behaviour, if not more so actually. I think‘DO I GET OFFENDED BY BEING CALLED A RACIST?
YES, THAT GETS TO ME’