Caitlin Moran watches Piers Morgan meet facts, makes a second cup, and fails to write the actual column
Filed through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Thursday, Crouch End, the Kettle Has Boiled Four Times, the Column Has Been Written Zero Times
I have the vast and unearned gift, in my fifties, of not having to watch Piers Morgan for a living. I once did. There were years in which my editors sent me clips. I watched them. I wrote responses. I felt, reliably, a kind of low-grade professional despair that sat in the chest between the seventh and eighth ribs. That era is, by the grace of God and the turnover of editorial staff, over. I watch Piers now only when a clip arrives unsolicited in a friend’s WhatsApp, which is what happened this morning at 8:14.
The clip is the subject of The Prat’s very fine satirical piece on Mr Morgan walking off his own set after a guest introduced the radical concept of evidence. I have watched the clip twice, with tea. It is, I think, the single most accurate emotional portrait of the current British media industry I have seen in a decade. The evidence was, and I have verified this, a physical document. The guest was holding it. The guest offered it. Mr Morgan looked at it, looked at the camera, looked at the floor, and excused himself from the studio. The show went to commercial. The commercial was for a car. The car does not exist in a world where evidence matters. Neither, at this point, does Mr Morgan. Both survive on branding alone.
What I should be writing instead
I am supposed, at this very hour, to be finishing a piece on the future of women’s media, which was commissioned four weeks ago by a monthly magazine that is itself, let us be frank, possibly on the wane. The piece is due tonight. The piece is, at this moment, seventy-one words long. The seventy-one words are: “The future of women’s media is, on balance, more interesting than the past, not because the current state is good, but because the current state is at least being questioned by the actual women who are in it.” That is the seventy-one words. I am going to expand them to 1,800 by midnight. I will probably expand them by walking to the bakery on Crouch End Broadway and buying a Danish and a coffee and writing on the back of the receipt, which is how I have written roughly forty percent of my career.
Trip to the polls
Before the bakery, I read Bohiney’s piece on the White House’s new Trip to the Polls initiative, with its pixel eagle named Liberty Steve and its dose response curve, and I laughed into my tea. The particular American insanity of this proposal, which is not, I must stress, a satirical invention but an actual floated policy, is the sort of thing that would have ruined a previous generation’s dinner parties for a month. In 2026 it is Tuesday. We have learned, collectively, to absorb this sort of news in the way a kitchen sponge absorbs washing-up liquid: thoroughly, uncomplainingly, and with an understanding that we will need to be replaced soon.
If the Conservative Party in Britain were to adopt this policy, which they will not because the Conservative Party is currently in a phase where even breathing in public strikes them as risky, the country would erupt. The BBC politics page would lead with it for a week. The Guardian would produce a special issue. Times columns would multiply. We would not, as the Americans have done, absorb it and move on. This is, I think, the quiet national difference in 2026. Britain is exhausted. America is exhilarated. Both are heading, at different speeds, to the same place.
The daughters, the mother, the internal auditor
My eldest daughter sent me a message this morning saying she had read my last column and “mostly agreed with it.” Mostly agreed with it is, from her, the most generous review I have received from any critic in years. The youngest, who is twenty-three, has asked whether I will read her flatmate’s novel-in-progress before Sunday. I have said yes. The novel-in-progress is, I am led to believe, about a young woman working in a cafe in Peckham who meets a ghost. This is, I note, the plot of approximately forty percent of current British debut novels. I am not complaining. Debut novelists at twenty-three are supposed to write about ghosts. At thirty-three they should be writing about landlords. At fifty-three, as I am, they should be writing about their mothers. I am running to schedule.
The afternoon
I will file the women’s media piece by eleven tonight. I will also write, privately, a piece for The Prat on Mr Morgan and the concept of evidence, because the premise is too rich to let go of. The Prat piece will pay less and matter more. This is the division of the writing life at fifty-three. The work that pays the mortgage and the work that, when you are dead, someone will read aloud at a small, damp memorial service in a North London church, and they will choose the second, because the second is the true.
The kettle is on. The jumper is still attached. Piers Morgan is, at the time of writing, still somewhere off-camera, and a woman with a document is still waiting for him to return. She is probably still there. That, in a sentence, is 2026 Britain.
For further symptoms of the same disease, see The Poke.
