It might have been the weight of expectation that a heavy-hitter like Piers Morgan was going to tackle the cancel culture and shrieking social media narration that has enveloped society which has left me feeling more than a little disappointed.
I am not necessarily a Piers Morgan fan but I don’t find him objectionable in the way that some do, and I share his revulsion of cancel-culture bullies who seek to destroy people’s careers and lives simply for the crime of wrongthink or wrongspeak.
And, to be fair to Piers, he tends to strike back at the adolescent tantrums and refuses to succumb to the expectation of grovelling apologies that are only used as confirmation of guilt and the precursor to ultimate cancellation.
However, Wake Up falls flat of any expectations readers might have had of Morgan finding that sweet spot in tearing apart the whole cancel-culture charade, or the hope that he would take a position to really raise the heckles of his opponents.
It feels as if Wake Up falls somewhere between two stools – the original intent of building a strong and coherent repudiation of ‘woke’ political correctness and being overtaken by the covid-19 pandemic which created a temptation to capitalise on a sellable narrative – a temptation to which Morgan ultimately succumbed.
And he admits this at the start of the book – seeking in early 2020 to persuade his fellow liberals to stop behaving like illiberal idiots, he got distracted and settled on elaborating his diary, which fortunately for him, he had been keeping all along.
Unfortunately, the diary just doesn’t work. Designed perhaps to show how Piers changed and evolved over the course of the pandemic, it feels a little bit too much like a manufactured awakening of his own.
He spends too much time re-counting certain Twitter conversation – a bit of ‘He said, then I said, then he said, and then I ultimately put him in his place’, or recounting verbatim various conversations from his Good Morning Britain programme, interspersed with repeated admissions that from time to time he may go overboard in his responses on social media and add more fuel to the fire.
Ultimately, though he claims the book is aimed at the illiberal liberals, he fails to deliver a knock-out blow, often undermining his claims of liberalism by striking out arguments he disagrees with by treating them with a superficiality associated with his opponents. He takes strong positions on what he sees as being the right attitudes and cannot avoid denouncing those he disagrees with without the courtesy of exploring their arguments. He tries to walk the line of being neither right-wing nor left-wing, neither illiberal nor authoritarian, rather a traditional liberal democrat – but comes across as being a bit of all of what he seeks not to be.
Reading the book, Morgan appears to be a pragmatist of sorts – something his critics would never consider him to be. And in a world of polarisation, there is no place for pragmatists, only purists.
He claims toward the end of the book ‘I am just a reasonably liberal person who believes in democracy, freedom of speech and holding governments (of any persuasion) to account’ which could be the self-assessment of any self-professed liberal – whether their actions concur with that is a matter of subjective opinion as much as objective fact, and in the writing of the book, Morgan exposes himself to a similar accusation as that which he throws at others.
And this is the frustrating part. He says much that is agreeable but also settles for simplistic assertions when it suits. Coronavirus lockdown critics are not entertained in the slightest – it is his view that is final in this instance, whereas his slightly woke self-congratulatory ‘using my power for good’ narrative sticks a little in the throat.
If you were expecting something a little more cutting edge, a bit more ‘in your face’, more hard-hitting, Wake Up will disappoint and Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes hits that sweet spot much better.
Morgan’s self-stated evolution and internal learning spurred on by the pandemic that engulfed the world, teaching him to take a more humane and soft-spoken approach, is slightly unbelievable and makes the book harder to read. It isn’t all bad – and there are some nuggets in there – but Morgan tries to hard to appear reasonable and labours the fact more than is useful.
While trying to weave two story lines – cancel culture and the coronavirus outbreak – into a single narrative of illiberal liberalism roaring back with a vengeance after a minor interlude of solidarity, compassion and shared suffering, he undermines what could have been one incisive response to the psychological pandemic that pre-existed coronavirus. It is a decent read, but don’t expect an answer to the world’s primary epidemic – wokeism. The book is more a Panadol than an inoculation.
The sad irony is that since the release of Wake Up Morgan has inadvertently self-cancelled after falling foul of the shrieking mob that were up to their usual intolerant tricks of name-calling, shaming and finger-pointing, misrepresenting and seeing -isms when they just aren’t there. He probably should have put the pre-emptive boot in much harder while he had the opportunity.
Dualta Roughneen