June

‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’

MONDAY 1 JUNE

Huge George Floyd protests have exploded across America, with millions taking to the streets to show their fury at his sickening death. There’s been nothing like this, on such a massive scale, since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

Sadly, there has been a lot of rioting, looting and arson too as some of the protestors express their rage in a criminal manner. I was stunned to see a terrifying video clip of what resembled a war zone in Los Angeles, and suddenly realised it was adjacent to The Grove, a very genteel retail and entertainment complex that I’ve gone to dozens of times with the kids.

I don’t condone any of the looting and violence. It’s shameful, wrong and self-defeating. As MLK himself said, ‘Hate begets hate; violence begets violence. Toughness begets a greater toughness.’ But my God, I understand the rage of the protestors. And it’s just not good enough for white people like me to watch George Floyd die in the way that he died, shake our heads and say how awful it is, rant about the looters, then turn away and get on with our comparatively privileged lives. This is a wake-up moment for all of us. Things have to change. Yet the one person who could most powerfully effect that change is doing the complete opposite.

President Trump had one job to do after this terrible killing – and that was to heal the raging wounds of fellow Americans. To speak to them from the Oval Office, with love and respect and empathy. To say he understood their anger and would do everything in his power to stop more black people like George Floyd being killed by the very people charged with protecting their lives. Instead, as America burns, Trump is pouring fuel onto the fire.

‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ he tweeted on Friday. This was a direct quote from racist Miami police chief Walter Headley in 1967, who referred to civil rights protests by saying, ‘There is only one way to handle looters and arsonists during a riot and that is to shoot them on sight. I’ve let the word filter down: when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ Earlier that month, Headley had ‘declared war’ on crime and said his primary target was ‘aimed at young Negro males, from 15 to 21’.

So, here was the president of the United States effectively telling people protesting at the murder of a black man by a police officer that more black people were now going to be killed by police officers. It’s hard to imagine a more reckless, incendiary thing to say at such a tense time. When his comments sparked fury, Trump tried to pretend he didn’t know the history behind the phrase.

But he knew what he was saying.

We all knew what he was saying.

And as with his spectacular ineptitude during the coronavirus pandemic that’s led to over 100,000 deaths in the USA, Trump’s loose-tongued rhetoric has made things ten times worse.

Where he should heal, he’s divided.

Where he should calm, he’s inflamed.

Where he should lead, he’s failed.

As he always does, Trump has reacted to justified criticism by repeatedly lashing out at the ‘fake news media’, and unsurprisingly a large number of journalists have been targeted by police in the past few days – arrested, pepper sprayed and shot at with rubber bullets. The president, not content with encouraging police to shoot black protestors, wants them to see the media as the enemy too. It’s a total disgrace, aimed to show his base supporters what a big tough guy he is.

But where did the big tough guy go when his comments led to large numbers of protestors converging outside the White House over the weekend? The president was taken by Secret Service agents to a secure underground bunker for his own safety. That’s where. He even boasted he couldn’t have felt ‘more safe’, and warned there were dogs and heavy weaponry waiting for anyone who tried to get near him. What a shame there were no dogs, heavy weaponry or Secret Service agents around to stop George Floyd being murdered.

The world is in crisis from a deadly virus and crying out for strong leadership. Normally, this would be provided by the United States of America. But America is today in utter chaos, with the worst Covid-19 death toll, 40 million job losses, a devastated economy and now the worst racial equality riots since the 1960s. And the president’s response, which must be delighting rival superpowers like China, is to self-implode – hurling off his own verbal firebombs and then hiding in his bunker as they explode.

On Saturday, Trump went down to Florida to watch Elon Musk’s rocket Falcon 9 fire up into space. It was a reminder to the world of America at its pioneering, buccaneering, inspiring best and a moment for millions of Americans to feel pride in their country. But it was just a fleeting moment amid the mayhem that’s brought the country to its knees and left the rest of the world looking on aghast.

In AD 64 Rome burnt for six days in an enormous fire that destroyed nearly three-quarters of its buildings and left half its citizens homeless. Emperor Nero, so legend has it, was safely tucked away in his villa 35 miles away, playing the fiddle. His people never forgave him. America, already reeling from coronavirus, is now engulfed in anarchy. And the president is shamefully fiddling as it burns.

TUESDAY 2 JUNE

The UK has introduced quarantine for people flying into the country. Home Secretary Priti Patel explained the decision by saying, ‘We must keep the country safe from potentially infected passengers unknowingly spreading the virus […] and ensure that public health comes first.’

Yes, I couldn’t agree more. So why are we only doing this now, five months after this virus erupted and after allowing 20 million people to fly in without any checks whatsoever? Like so much this government has done during this pandemic, it makes no sense.

A social media campaign gathered momentum to declare today ‘Black Out Tuesday’ to honour George Floyd, in which everyone was encouraged to post only a black square with the hashtag #blackouttuesday. I don’t really like these kind of enforced shows of social media solidarity, as they’re usually just an excuse for people to virtue-signal.

I’d also been so busy with GMB and writing two columns that I hadn’t really picked up on how many were doing it, until I Instagrammed a photo of a bottle of rosé I was drinking this evening when I finally got time to relax – and promptly got monstered for it.

‘No respect shown from Piers Morgan today,’ said one follower. ‘Despite what he says on TV, today was a day for us all to unite and to black out social media for #blackouttuesday. Obviously way too much to ask from some of those who are not directly affected.’

I replied, ‘We did over an hour on racism on GMB today, I think that had more impact than me posting a black square.’

‘Brave,’ messaged Spencer on the boys’ WhatsApp chat.

‘Why?’ I replied.

‘The idea was no one to post as a sign of solidarity, you’re the only person on my feed all day who did one that wasn’t a black square.’

‘I prefer to do things my way.’

‘I think it’s actively provocative not to post today,’ said Stanley. ‘It was a day of not posting. Surprisingly out of touch.’ This got my back up.

‘This morning, we interviewed the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, the young guy who got lynched last month, and George Floyd’s lawyer, then a half-hour panel with four black activists, before an interview with Ashley Banjo about it all. Don’t tell me I’m out of touch.’

‘That’s great,’ said Stanley, ‘but why is there a limit to what you can do?’

‘Why do I have to do what everyone else feels they have to do? I’ve done a lot more today than most of them.’

‘Solidarity is literally about everyone doing what everyone else is doing,’ Stanley retorted. ‘Don’t post about wine.’

‘I’m not a lemming,’ I replied.

It’s fascinating to see how strongly they feel about it. I suspect there’s a lot of peer pressure going on, too, with all their friends looking to see who isn’t doing the black square, ready to berate them for ‘not caring’. Young people feel compelled to conform to whatever woke social media decides has to be said, thought or done. I’ve always encouraged the boys to have their own opinions, and to not be afraid to express them. But it’s hard when you have a few thousand people out there ready to pounce on any ‘unacceptable’ view. Not that I think the black square is a bad idea; it’s undeniably a powerful visual to support a very important cause. Like taking the knee, though, it shouldn’t be compulsory to do it. Freedom of speech and expression should allow people to decide if they want to or not, without fear of being vilified for choosing not to follow the crowd.

WEDNESDAY 3 JUNE

The front page of today’s Daily Telegraph carries the following headline: ‘Johnson takes control in shake-up at No 10.’

I was intrigued, so read the intro. ‘Boris Johnson is to take direct control of the Government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis …’

Words rarely fail me. This, however, rendered me speechless. Who the f*ck has been in ‘direct control’ until now? At Prime Minister’s Questions, Boris said of the crisis, ‘I’m very proud of our record.’ Proud of what, exactly? He failed to protect health and care workers with PPE, he failed on testing, he sent elderly Covid patients back into care homes, sparking a secondary epidemic, he was woefully late to lockdown, he pursued a disastrous herd immunity strategy for weeks and he’s performed endless U-turns on everything from face masks to quarantine for visitors. The result of all this is the UK has the worst death rate in the world and the second-worst death toll behind the USA, which has handled the pandemic equally badly. We’re becoming just as fractured as the USA by it all, too.

Meanwhile, ratings for GMB yesterday were the highest ever. It seems that the longer the government boycotts us, the more people are tuning in. It also suggests there is massive interest in the George Floyd story, given how much of the show we devoted to it.

A huge protest took place in London’s Hyde Park this afternoon, with thousands in attendance. This is such a complex situation. Mass gatherings remain banned, for very good reason as we know they help spread the virus. But I’ve heard protestors saying on TV that they view racial injustice as just as big a crisis as Covid-19, and they want their voices heard. I totally get that, and I agree with them. The right to protest is as fundamental and important as the right to freedom of speech.

Beaches and parks are packed with people having picnics and sunbathing, so how can anyone legitimately stop protestors campaigning for racial equality in the wake of a brutal racial murder? But they should do so as safely as possible, and what was clear from the overhead TV news footage is that most of them aren’t.

‘I fully support the peaceful #GeorgeFloyd protest in Hyde Park right now,’ I tweeted. ‘But the total absence of any social distancing by the thousands of people protesting is insane.’

A few minutes later, Labour MP Barry Gardiner tweeted, ‘Been social distancing since March. Today I broke it to join the #BlackLivesMatter demo outside Parliament and take a knee with thousands of brave young people calling for Justice.’

This seems a ridiculous thing for any MP to say and do. It’s one thing for a lawmaker to support the protests, it’s quite another for one to actively boast of breaking social distancing rules.

‘Reckless & irresponsible,’ I tweeted back to him.

Three hours later, Stanley tweeted a photo from the protest. He wasn’t in the photo himself – but it was of a packed crowd of people. I called him immediately.

‘Were you there?’

‘I was,’ he replied.

‘Did you socially distance?’

‘I tried, Dad, but it was very hard because a lot of people weren’t. I wore a mask and gloves, though.’

‘OK, just be careful what you post on social media because there will be people who will use you to have a pop at me if they can and I don’t want you being caught in the crossfire.’

‘Yes, I know. But I’m 22, and I’m allowed my own opinions and to make my own decisions. This was important to me. Racism is just as much a virus as Covid-19.’

He’s right. And the lockdown is breaking apart anyway. A new YouGov poll says one in five of those surveyed have followed lockdown guidance less strictly in the last week than previously, with 32 per cent of those people citing the Dominic Cummings story as a reason for that.

Tonight, sensational news broke that police have identified a new suspect in the case of British girl Madeleine McCann, who was snatched 13 years ago from her family’s holiday resort villa in Portugal.

The story gathered huge notoriety because her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, both doctors, left their three young kids under five, including three-year-old Madeleine, alone as they dined with friends in a nearby restaurant within the complex.

Like most people I felt very uneasy about their parental negligence – I would never have done that with any of my children. But when I interviewed them years later, and saw the horrific grief still etched on their faces for myself, I felt a surge of intense sympathy. Their misery has been compounded by a relentless and vicious accusatory campaign on social media by large numbers of mindless keyboard warrior idiots that has been truly disgusting to witness. The McCanns have become a global punching bag for nasty, self-righteous trolls intent on making their lives even worse. It’s unconscionable, and they get no protection from it.

But this development tonight seems a huge breakthrough. The suspect is a convicted German paedophile who was in the area at the time, and police clearly believe they may finally have their guy.

THURSDAY 4 JUNE

The newspaper front pages are dominated by the Madeleine McCann news. Most devoted many pages to it, relegating the Hyde Park protests much further back. I understand the excitement over the bombshell revelation and would have doubtless done much the same if I had still been an editor. But would there have been anything like this level of sustained interest if Madeleine had been a little black girl? I think not.

This is just the kind of subliminal, subconscious decision-making that goes to the heart of what black people call ‘microaggressions’. Newspapers, like most of the media, are still largely run by white people who make decisions based on their own life experiences. As I said on GMB, ‘This is the kind of thing that if I was black, I would look at and go, “Why is it one rule for white girls that go missing and another rule for black girls who also go missing but don’t get this attention?”’

Obviously, I promptly got accused of being a ‘race-baiting imbecile’ on Twitter by people who can’t accept that there is any racism anywhere and resent any suggestion to the contrary. How anyone can watch the George Floyd video and not understand that racism, overt and subliminal, is a very real thing is unfathomable to me. But once again, social media is elevating the debate from helpful conversation and eagerness to educate, to vicious tribal toxicity.

Interestingly, Meghan Markle offered some genuinely insightful comments about George Floyd today, which Trump would do well to listen to. She told students in a video message about her own painful memories of witnessing the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the brutal beating of Rodney King, and quoted her old teacher Ms Pollia, who would tell her, ‘Always remember to put others’ needs above your own fears.’

Meghan told the students, ‘You’re going to have to have empathy for those who don’t see the world through the same lens that you do.’ That’s what Trump either doesn’t get – or doesn’t want to get. She added, ‘I wasn’t sure what I could say to you. I wanted to say the right thing and I was really nervous that it would get picked apart. And I realised the only wrong thing to say is to say nothing.’

She raises an important point. One of the very worst consequences of illiberal wokery is that it stops people speaking out for fear they will be torn to pieces by the intolerant lynch mob on social media. Yet, how do we ever progress if we don’t foster a healthier atmosphere of free speech and democratic debate? These should be the very cornerstones of any civilised society, yet we’re trashing them bit by Twitter pile-on bit. I don’t care what Meghan has to say about many things, especially when she is being hypocritical or whining about hardship as a princess. But she’s perfectly entitled to have her own opinions, and on the issue of racism, as she showed today, she has an interesting and valuable perspective and it’s important that critics like me acknowledge that.

My approving remarks about her didn’t go unnoticed.

‘Yes, it’s time to play Things-You-Thought-Piers-Would-Never-Say Bingo!’ tweeted comedian David Baddiel.

This afternoon, the conservative blogger Guido Fawkes ‘exposed’ Stan for attending the Black Lives Matter demo. I could have ignored it or left it to Stan to fight his own battles, but Guido has a big following and the story soon began flying around Twitter, with everyone screaming at me that I was a ‘disgusting hypocrite’.

So eventually I replied, ‘Proud of my son for attending the #BlackLivesMatter protest which he found profoundly inspiring. He told me he maintained social distancing as best he could in the large crowd. Not easy given many others weren’t, but I’m glad he tried.’

Of course, the screams of ‘disgusting hypocrite’ intensified, and my comments about Barry Gardiner were soon used to support that theory. But there was no actual hypocrisy. I had tweeted my support for the protestors before I criticised Gardiner for recklessly boasting about breaking social distancing rules, and before I knew Stan had gone.

None of this mattered, though. I’m now a disgusting hypocrite, and no amount of truth will correct that. Though it’s amusing to see all the same people I saw furiously defending Dominic Cummings now howling abuse about the George Floyd protestors ‘risking lives’. As Financial Times writer Sathnam Sanghera tweeted, ‘Things that are OK: driving to Durham, visiting Barnard Castle to check your eyesight, forcing hundreds of MPs into a confined space when it’s clearly not necessary, the frigging Cheltenham Festival. Not OK: protesting about racial injustice.’

‘You should have just said you didn’t approve of me going to a mass gathering,’ Stan told me tonight.

‘But I do approve of you going,’ I said. ‘I admire you for standing up for what you believe in.’

‘Thanks, Dad. That’s what you always told us to do. I also think if people are flocking to parks and beaches, I should be able to protest about what happened to George Floyd. Especially after what Dominic Cummings did.’

SATURDAY 6 JUNE

Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was defaced by Black Lives Matter protestors today and daubed with the words ‘WAS A RACIST’. The Cenotaph was also attacked, with one protestor trying to set fire to a flag on it. Both these things will inflame many Britons who might otherwise be sympathetic to the BLM protests, which will be an absolute tragedy.

Once again, the things we should be focusing on – racial injustice and inequality – are being eclipsed by inflammatory, intolerant and self-defeating behaviour that will damage the debate and likelihood of real change.

Later in the afternoon, things got even worse as rioting broke out between protestors and the police, including one awful moment where a female officer was thrown off her horse and badly hurt when she hit a traffic light as the poor animal bolted from rioters.

‘Can someone out there please edit down just the guy hitting the traffic light over and over again to the opening bar of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”,’ tweeted Guardian journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson, who astonishingly is the paper’s mental health expert. It’s this kind of staggering and vile hypocrisy that illustrates the real problem I have with the woke brigade. So many of them bang on about mental health, and the need to be kind and tolerant, yet then display such appalling savagery towards someone they don’t know who was just trying to do her job.

In similar vein, the mood to ‘cancel’ everyone and everything has gathered momentum in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as fury over the way he was killed has spilled over into wider woke-fuelled outrage about the state of the world. J.K. Rowling has found herself the latest target after she mocked a newspaper op-ed about health-care inequality that used the phrase ‘people who menstruate’ to be more inclusive. ‘People who menstruate,’ Rowling tweeted. ‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’

There was an immediate backlash, but Rowling – who has been rattling the transgender activist cage for quite a while – doubled down, stating: ‘If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth. I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.’

Of course, this merely intensified the outrage. The LGBTQ rights organisation GLAAD said Rowling ‘continues to align herself with an ideology which wilfully distorts facts about gender identity and people who are trans. In 2020, there is no excuse for targeting trans people.’

As inevitable calls grew for J.K. Rowling to be ‘cancelled’ – on a technical point, how do you ‘cancel’ a billionaire author? – another high-profile woman was cancelled in America when Ivanka Trump was no-platformed after plans for her to give a virtual commencement speech to students at Wichita State University Tech in Kansas were scrapped amid criticism of her father’s response to the George Floyd protests. The university dumped Ivanka in a panic just hours after announcing she would be speaking to WSU Tech graduates.

The announcement drew immediate criticism, led by one of the university’s professors Jennifer Ray, who sent a letter asking administrators to cancel it. That letter then circulated on social media and got 488 signatures from faculty, students and alumni before the speech was cancelled.

Ivanka, a top adviser in the White House, was furious, tweeting, ‘Our nation’s campuses should be bastions of free speech. Cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination are antithetical to academia. Listening to one another is important now more than ever!’

She’s right, obviously.

All the woke crap I hoped might get cured by the pandemic seems to now be intensifying again and has never felt more disproportionate.

SUNDAY 7 JUNE

Tim Adams, the Observer journalist who had to watch every GMB show that I presented in January for an in-depth feature on me, has updated his opinion in today’s paper.

‘At the end of January, I wrote a story about the ways Piers Morgan shaped the nation’s angry divisions,’ he wrote. ‘It involved a month of watching Good Morning Britain and reporting on how the personal obsessions of the nation’s most visible anchor – with Meghan Markle and the “snowflake” generation – also became the nation’s obsessions.

‘I now feel duty bound to add a postscript to that report. One of the more outlandish side-effects of Covid-19 has been the transformation of Morgan into a formidable voice of righteous anger against the failures of “populist” government. Who knows what prompted this change? Perhaps the fortitude of Captain Tom or a midnight visit from Marley’s ghost? It began when Morgan finally admitted that the US president he had claimed as “cool, calm and collected” was clearly “batshit” crazy. Since then Morgan has been moved to acknowledge he went “too far” in his obsession with Markle, and even recognised his eternal nemesis Ian Hislop as a fellow traveller. Last week, Anna Soubry, who received her share of Morgan vitriol, noted “Piers is on a journey”. Long may it continue.’

I’m not sure I’m ‘on a journey’ so much as going back to my core journalistic principles when I campaigned against the Iraq War or guns in America. But there’s no doubt this crisis has made me sharply aware of where society’s been going wrong in recent years, and what we need to do to fix it, and of the potential that someone like me with a big platform has to help with that process rather than fuel the problem of tribalism, which is more palpable than ever.

Those who opposed the BLM protests (mostly right-wing Brexiters or pro-Trumpers) are furiously defending people’s right to pack out beaches. Those who supported the protests (mostly liberal Remainers and anti-Trumpers) say the beach-goers are reckless and irresponsible. It would be so much better if we all just agreed with the bleedingly obvious and scientifically incontrovertible point that any mass gathering where people don’t socially distance is dangerous during a pandemic. But partisan politics doesn’t allow for such common sense or agreement.

This afternoon, a large group of BLM protestors in Bristol tore down a statue of Sir Edward Colston – a former slave trader who then invested large sums of money in the city from his ill-gotten gains – and dumped it into the river. It was an undeniably ugly mob-rule scene, reminiscent of when Iraqi civilians ripped down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. But I can’t pretend I was overly dismayed to see it happen.

I’m not going to lose any sleep over an infamous slave trader, who cost the lives of 20,000 African men, women and children during boat transits, finally getting his statue comeuppance. What’s more shocking to me is that there was still a statue of him lording it over black Bristolians in the first place.

I can easily understand why black people in Britain take exception to slave owners and traders lording it over them in the form of large statues in city and town centres.

I get the argument that you can’t just delete bad people or events in history – but you can definitely delete edifices that celebrate them.

Sometimes, a ban is entirely appropriate. It is right, for example, that Nazi memorabilia, including Hitler statues and artefacts displaying the swastika, were outlawed in Germany. Just as I felt it was right when the Confederate flag was pulled down from state capitol grounds in South Carolina in 2015 after a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof used it to justify trying to re-start the Civil War by murdering black people in their church. It was quite clear that he saw this flag as some kind of stirring emblem of white supremacist power and made people ask why this hated flag was still a protected species when all it does is remind people of America’s darkest, most evil past and motivate racists like Roof.

Lindsey Graham, a 2016 presidential candidate and a man for whom I have a lot of time, had previously defended keeping the Confederate flag flying, telling CNN, ‘It represents to some people a civil war, and that was the symbol of one side. To others, it’s a racist symbol and it’s been used by people in a racist way. The problems we’re having in South Carolina and around the world aren’t because of a symbol, but because of what’s in the heart.’

But even he, a proud and staunch old-school Republican, recognised the wind was turning so fast after the dreadful massacre that to continue defying it was to make the world perceive you as a racist. So, Lindsey Graham did a dramatic U-turn.

‘After the tragic hate-fuelled shooting in Charleston,’ he said, ‘it is only appropriate that we deal once and for all with the issue of the flag. I hope that by removing it, we can take another step towards healing and recognition and a sign that South Carolina is moving forward.’

He was instantly mocked and abused on social media for his change of heart. But I applaud it. A politician who listens to debate and public opinion, realises he is wrong and switches his own position shows great strength of character, not weakness.

The same cannot be said for sports network ESPN, who, in the wake of a racist attack in Charlottesville in 2017, pulled one of its announcers – an experienced Asian-American sportscaster – from commentating on a University of Virginia football game because his name was Robert Lee, the same as Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

‘We collectively made the decision with Robert to switch games as the tragic events in Charlottesville were unfolding,’ ESPN said, ‘simply because of the coincidence of his name. In that moment it felt right to all parties. It’s a shame that this is even a topic of conversation and we regret that who calls play-by-play for a football game has become an issue.’ This is precisely the kind of virtue-signalling claptrap that makes a mockery of the very real issues surrounding what happened in Charlottesville.

And yet there are still incredibly offensive things that should be banned that remain untouchable because nobody dares suggest it for fear of offending someone. Take, for example, the most disgusting racial slur of all: ‘n****r’. It’s a six-letter noun in the English language that the dictionary defines as ‘a contemptuous term for a black or dark-skinned person’. It’s such an inflammatory and offensive word that for any high-profile white person like me to publicly use it in full, without abbreviating to ‘N-word’, is rightly tantamount to professional suicide and personal opprobrium. I don’t use it; and would never use it. But it has become astonishingly ubiquitous in modern American society. According to a survey several years ago by analytics firm Topsy.com, it is used, either as ‘n****r’ or ‘n***a’, at least 500,000 times on Twitter every single day. By comparison, the words ‘bro’ and ‘dude’ are only used 300,000 and 200,000 times per day.

These shocking statistics formed part of a powerful study in 2014 in the Washington Post. Headlined ‘THE N-WORD’ – even the Post shied away from actually saying it – it concluded, ‘The slur has become more prevalent in American life but remains as divisive and complicated as ever.’

The reason it is so ingrained in pop culture is that many black people, especially young black people reared to the soundtrack of N-word-splattered rap music, use it as a form of reappropriation. They’re aware of its history; they know from their parents and grandparents that arrogant, dumb, racist whites used it as a wicked, derogatory insult against their black slave forebears. And they enjoy the freedom of being able to say it now in the knowledge that it’s become taboo for whites to do so. I understand this, and I empathise. It’s the same ironic reason many gays call each other ‘f****ts’, why supporters of Tottenham Hotspur, which has a large Jewish following, call each other ‘Y*ds’ and why some ardent feminists like to use the word ‘c*nt’ with impunity.

I get it. But I don’t like it. And this is why: it doesn’t work. It has the complete opposite effect to the one that I imagine everyone who does this imagines it will have. Far from ‘owning’ these words, seizing back control with the use of them, I believe it merely serves to empower those who wish to deploy them abusively – and encourage them to continue doing so.

Your average dim-witted, foul-mouthed bigot – and there are plenty of them, as Twitter can attest – thinks, ‘If they use it, why can’t I?’ They hear African-Americans say the N-word to each other and claim victory. ‘See, that’s what they even call themselves!’ It’s the twisted, horrible mindset of the wretchedly ignorant.

I debated this issue many times during my tenure at CNN. Mike Tyson, who uses the N-word a lot in his excellent autobiographical stage show, insisted, ‘We have to think about how this word originated, where it came from. Just because we stop saying it won’t stop them [white racists] from saying it. They’re mad because they say it’s a double-standard if they can’t say what we say amongst each other? I don’t plan on stopping saying it anytime soon.’ I don’t think it’s a double-standard at all.

The N-word is a grotesque, odious, evil stain on the English language. It symbolises everything America has fought so hard to move on from – white, imperialist, violent, sexually malevolent barbarism. Yet far from receding in society, it’s spreading, out of the once clearly defined confines of private usage in the black community, into the public hallways of every school in America.

This is wrong, isn’t it? Better, surely, to have it expunged completely. But this will only happen when America’s black community applies the same level of tolerance to its own use of the word as that now applied in the National Football League: zero.

Teach the youth of today the N-word is so heinous that even to repeat it ironically is to perpetuate its poison. As a white man, I understand that I have no right to demand that any black person gives up using the N-word. This is a decision that can only be made by black people. But as someone who believes passionately in civil rights, I just think it’s the right thing to do.

In 2016, black comedian Larry Wilmore called Barack Obama a ‘n***a’ while hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. ‘All jokes aside,’ he said, ‘let me just say how much it means for me to be here tonight. When I was a kid, I lived in a country where people couldn’t accept a black quarter-back. And now, to live in your time, Mr President, when a black man can lead the free world. Words alone do me no justice. So, Mr President, if I’m going to keep it 100: Yo, Barry, you did it my n***a!’

Obama laughed, because what else could he do? As black New York Daily News columnist Leonard Greene put it, ‘Besides unfairly putting Obama on the spot about the most loaded word in the English language, Wilmore gave white people, many of whom have for nearly eight years been besides themselves over a black man in the White House, license to use the N-word against the leader of the free world.’

Reverend Al Sharpton was equally furious. ‘Many of us are against using the N-word, period,’ he said. ‘To say it in front of the President of the United States in front of the top people in the media was at best in poor taste.’

I heard about the furore when I woke in London to find a tweet from the singer John Legend saying, ‘Piers Morgan’s next troll piece just wrote itself.’ Now, I’m instinctively wary of someone who changes their surname from ‘Stephens’ to ‘Legend’. (It’s usually best if someone else gives you that title …) And I take exception to his general belief that a white man shouldn’t comment on what he sees as exclusively ‘black’ issues. As Annie Lennox said to me about feminism, that women have to bring men with them to effect change, so true racial equality will only come about if black and white people work together to achieve it. This was a point that tennis star Venus Williams reiterated when she said the solidarity she has seen in recent protests over the death of George Floyd, with so many white people marching alongside black people, ‘brought me to tears’, and that ‘just as sexism is not only a “women’s issue”, racism is not only a “black issue”.’ She explained, ‘In the past, I had the honor of fighting for equal prize money for all women’s players at the grand slams in tennis. When we fought for and won equal prize money, everyone pitched in, men and women, all colors and races.’

When I called for the N-word to be expunged from modern discourse, Legend tweeted, ‘Y’all better thank Piers Morgan for that simple straightforward solution to racism. Why didn’t we think of this?’

Obviously, I don’t think this alone would solve racism. As Obama himself said on a podcast in 2015, ‘Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n****r in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.’

Legend is right when he says that white people like me shouldn’t tell black people they can’t use the N-word. But perhaps on that subject he should listen to one of the most famous black entertainers in history. Comedian Richard Pryor made his name in the 1970s and 1980s with albums entitled ‘That N****r’s Crazy’ and ‘Bicentennial N****r’. He seized on the N-word as a powerful tool to ram racism back down the throats of white people who used it to denigrate blacks. He argued that it was about ‘owning’ the term, the same argument used by those black Americans today who deploy it.

But Pryor dramatically changed his view of the N-word after a visit to Africa. In fact, he abandoned it completely. He explained to Ebony magazine, ‘While I was there, something inside of me said, “Look around you Richard. What do you see?” I saw people. African people. I saw people from other countries, too, and they were all kinds of colours, but I didn’t see any “n****rs”. I didn’t see any there because there are no “n****rs” in Africa. Can you imagine going out into the bush and walking up to a Masai and saying, “Hey n****r! Come here!”? You couldn’t do that. There are no “n****rs” here in America either. We black people are not “n****rs”, and I will forever refuse to be one. I’m free of that, it’s out of my head. I realised that terms like “n****r” and the word “b*tch” that so many black men call our women, are tricks, like genocide on the brain.’

He was right. Why try to ‘own’ a word so destructive, so vile? Far better to destroy it, to remove it from popular parlance, to render it a wicked piece of linguistic history.

MONDAY 8 JUNE

The UK government, according to a new YouGov poll, now has the joint-lowest approval rating worldwide for how they have managed coronavirus. It would appear the public’s blinkers have finally come off.

There is real change in the air about racism too. Yorkshire Tea’s now legendary Twitter account, which was so shamefully abused when Rishi Sunak was pictured drinking their product, banned someone today from ever drinking its tea again after the follower tweeted them to say, ‘I’m dead chuffed that Yorkshire Tea hasn’t supported BLM.’

Someone else named Pamela then tweeted rival tea firm PG Tips to say, ‘So now I’ve got to buy PG Tips. Well f me. This sucks. And Yorkshire Tea is done. Good luck with this bs stance.’

To which PG Tips Twitter account responded, ‘Yeah, it does suck, Pamela. If you are boycotting teas that stand against racism, you’re going to have to find two new tea brands now.’ They added the hashtag #solidaritea.

As someone who coincidentally only ever drinks these two teas, I’m delighted to see such proactive anti-racism. And what’s most delicious about it is that the racists will be too thick to know they can obviously still drink the tea if they want to.

TUESDAY 9 JUNE

Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP and one of the main architects of Brexit, appeared on GMB today to attack the Black Lives Matter organisation, comparing it to the Taliban. There are perfectly legitimate concerns about the political aims of the BLM activist group, which include de-funding the police and abolishing capitalism – as distinct from the #blacklivesmatter hashtag movement, which most people take to mean a more general desire for racial equality and justice – but comparing them to the Taliban is outrageously inflammatory and he was howled down by two other guests, black civil rights activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and white historian Professor Kate Williams. It culminated in Dr Shola exclaiming, ‘The only thing Nigel Farage is an expert on is his backside because every word out of his mouth stinks.’

Twitter blew up with fury at Farage. It felt like a significant moment. The George Floyd murder has galvanised the world about racism in a way that I haven’t seen for a very long time.

The subject of discrimination reared its head again today, when Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe launched an extraordinary attack on J.K. Rowling. ‘While Jo is unquestionably responsible for the course my life has taken […] I feel compelled to say something at this moment,’ he said in a statement. ‘Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I. […] Seventy-eight per cent of transgender and nonbinary youth reported being the subject of discrimination due to their gender identity. […] It’s clear that we need to do more to support transgender and nonbinary people, not invalidate their identities, and not cause further harm. To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you. I really hope that you don’t entirely lose what was valuable in these stories to you.’

Wow. Talk about torching the hand that fed you. What’s fascinating about this is that Radcliffe is preaching tolerance and acceptance while refusing to be either tolerant or accepting of Rowling’s right to have a different opinion. He doesn’t think he’s right – he knows he’s right. And the woman who made him a superstar must now be destroyed for daring to deviate from his opinion. This is virtue-signalling at its most virulent. Of course, it’s also exactly how Rowling has herself behaved to others, including me, for many years. She’s revelled in the cancel culture and taken a furiously intransigent stance on anyone who deviates from the woke world view.

It will be fascinating to see how she responds to the tidal wave of fury now cascading on her saintly head from fellow wokies. Perhaps Rowling will realise just how nasty wokedom can get when you dare to stand up to it. I hope so.

WEDNESDAY 10 JUNE

Rowling came out fighting again today, posting a 3,600-word essay explaining her position. She said she wanted to address the ‘toxicity’ she’s experienced since voicing her opinion on transgender issues ‘without any desire to add to that toxicity’. The essay, naturally, massively added to the toxicity.

She played the victim card heavily from the top, recounting the ‘harassment’ she’s faced since first making her views known about transgenderism, and mentioning ‘threats of violence’, being told she ‘was literally killing trans people with my hate’, and receiving misogynist abuse like ‘c*nt’ and ‘b*tch’. She said people like her often get branded ‘TERF’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and protested that the term is used ‘to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who are cowering before the tactics of the playground. They’ll call us transphobic! They’ll say I hate trans people! What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair.’

Rowling then cited five reasons for speaking out. The first was the charitable trust she set up in Scotland that works with female prisoners and survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. ‘It’s been clear to me for a while,’ she said, ‘that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.’

The second was her ‘deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on children and education’. Third was her belief in freedom of speech, which she says she’s ‘publicly defended … even unto Donald Trump’. (This made me laugh – is this the same woman who revelled in me being told to ‘f*ck off’ on Bill Maher’s TV show for saying Trump isn’t the new Hitler?)

Fourth was her concern that many of those who transition end up regretting it.

And the fifth was that she herself was a victim and a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault. ‘I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy,’ she said, trying to garner sympathy, ‘but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.’

The essay prompted another avalanche of horrible abuse. Rowling made some perfectly reasonable points, many of which I happen to agree with. But none of that matters; she’s been convicted of being transphobic and the court of woke public opinion is in no mood to allow any appeal.

Of course, it’s heavily ironic to see such a self-righteous wokie being eaten alive by her own like this. Yet it’s also incredibly disheartening to see such an important issue reduced yet again to a slanging match where nobody will back down and no consensus will ever be reached. If you don’t accept every single thing the transgender lobby says about transgenderism, however much some of it may damage women’s rights, you must be shamed, vilified and cancelled. Even if you’re J.K. Rowling, who’s devoted her life to being the wokest human being imaginable.

It’s also so depressing to see so much bloody energy being expended on gender wars in the middle of a global pandemic.

This afternoon, Professor Neil Ferguson, the chief government modeller who had to resign from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) after breaking lockdown to bed his lover, told a Commons committee, ‘The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced. So, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have then reduced the death toll by at least a half.’

This is a stunning admission. He’s saying at least 25,000 people have died unnecessarily, possibly a lot more once all the estimated 68,000 ‘excess deaths’ during the pandemic so far are properly analysed. All because Boris Johnson failed to lock down the country when people like me were screaming at him to do so.

The prime minister appeared at the daily briefing a few hours later looking like a petrified rabbit in the headlights but still refused to admit to any mistakes, and insisted we have to wait until this is all over before we can make any accurate verdicts about the UK’s handling of the pandemic. We don’t have to wait, though. The death rate speaks for itself; we’re the worst in the world. Boris knows his dithering was a disaster and one day soon he will be held accountable for it.

THURSDAY 11 JUNE

The fallout from the Colston statue has turned utterly insane, with calls for statues of great historical figures like Queen Victoria, Lord Nelson and Robert the Bruce to go too. And after various TV personalities like Keith Lemon and Ant and Dec issued grovelling apologies in the past week for doing blackface earlier in their careers, a new puritanical purge has erupted over numerous ‘problematic’ movies and TV shows, even leading to episodes of Fawlty Towers being pulled by terrified TV execs. As I feared, far from expunging illiberal liberalism, this pandemic now seems to be fomenting it – and an inevitable backlash is building.

Yet again, the woke mob are wrecking their own cause by misdirecting their focus and anger onto absurd targets that will only put people off supporting them. Fawlty Towers, one of Britain’s greatest and most beloved comedies, is not the enemy here, wokies. But if you make it the enemy, you will lose the war.

This evening, it was revealed Nigel Farage has suddenly quit LBC after they told him they wouldn’t be renewing his contract. Sources at the station said that black staff members were enraged by his comments on GMB and demanded management do something. I’ve always got on well personally with Nigel but, like our mutual friend Donald Trump, he has proved incapable of responding to the George Floyd murder with anything but inflammatory race-baiting antics.

Cancelling him won’t resolve anything, though. If anything, it will just make him more popular.

Before I went to bed, I tweeted an urgent appeal. ‘Memo to the world: don’t let insane political correctness & absurd celebrity virtue-signalling destroy the very real & very powerful movement for an end to racial inequality & injustice since George Floyd’s murder. Or nothing will change.’

FRIDAY 12 JUNE

Sir Winston Churchill’s statue has had to be boarded up to stop people vandalising it, as have the statues near him of Gandhi and Mandela, and the Cenotaph too. This is what the world has come to: three of the greatest figures in history, and a memorial to hundreds of thousands of people who gave their lives to defend our freedom, needing to be hidden from view in case they offend people or become targets for attack. It will be an absolute tragedy if the extraordinary power and impact of the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests are tarnished by a small minority of fools intent on defacing or destroying iconic monuments of people who weren’t perfect by any means, but whose actions changed the world for the better. For the love of God, make it stop.

SATURDAY 13 JUNE

As I feared, the attacks on Churchill’s statue have given the far right the excuse they’ve been looking for to take on the Black Lives Matter movement. Thousands of drunken shaven-headed white yobs descended on London to ‘defend Winston!’ They fought with police, chanted patriotic songs and spat abuse at journalists. One idiot was even caught on camera urinating next to the memorial to hero cop PC Keith Palmer, who was murdered several years ago while protecting the public from a terrorist who attacked Westminster. He later claimed he didn’t know that it was a memorial because he’d drunk 16 pints of beer. I doubt he even knew what day it was; all he knew was that he had to ‘defend Winston!’ from black people. Britain is teetering on the brink of a race war. It’s a scary moment.

MONDAY 15 JUNE

A stunning picture, taken by Reuters photographer Dylan Martinez, has emerged of a Black Lives Matter protester carrying an injured white counter-protestor to safety yesterday as he was being badly beaten up by a furious mob.

The hero, personal trainer Patrick Hutchinson, had gone to the protest with four black security guard friends to help quell violence because they didn’t want young black people to end up in jail. When he spotted the white man being set upon, he scooped him up over his shoulder and marched him away to safety as his friends formed a protective shield around them. Their collective actions almost certainly saved the man’s life.

Hutchinson explained, ‘I was thinking to myself – if the other three police officers, who were standing around when George Floyd was murdered, had thought about intervening and stopping their colleague from doing what he was doing, like what we did, George Floyd would be alive today still.’ He added, ‘I just want equality for all of us. At the moment the scales are unfairly balanced and I just want things to be fair, for my children and my grandchildren.’

They say actions speak louder than words, but Patrick Hutchinson’s actions are matched by the power of his words. By saving a man completely opposed to everything he represents, and explaining so eloquently why he did it, he has sent an extraordinary message of unity to the world at a time when we most need it. For the first time in many weeks, I feel a surge of hope.

TUESDAY 16 JUNE

Another day, another hero. Marcus Rashford, the young black England and Manchester United football star, has forced the government into a U-turn over providing free £15-a-week meal vouchers for impoverished kids over the summer, given they won’t be at school to be properly fed. Rashford, 22, posted a lengthy letter yesterday in which he politely but firmly articulated why this was so essential. He spoke from personal experience, having regularly gone hungry as a kid growing up in a large poor family in Manchester.

Initially, the government rebuffed his request. But we spent all morning hammering them about it on GMB, and social media also rose up to support Rashford – another example of where it can be a very powerful force for good when used appropriately – and the government eventually climbed down from its indefensible ‘we won’t feed hungry children’ stance and agreed to fund the meals for 1.3 million young people.

‘I don’t even know what to say,’ Rashford tweeted. ‘Just look at what we can do when we come together, THIS is England in 2020.’

What was so impressive about his achievement is that he did it by staying calm, respectful and laser-focused on the issue, thus avoiding any of the angry, noisy and partisan political point-scoring currently deafening most debate. Footballers have been useful kicking-balls for the government during this pandemic. Matt Hancock lambasted them for not ‘doing their bit’ and demanded they take pay cuts – though he refused to take one himself. But ironically, Rashford has ‘done his bit’ by exposing the government for being heartless, and he’s also shown us what can be done when we come together to right a wrong that should never be subject to partisan tribalism.

WEDNESDAY 17 JUNE

Marcus Rashford called in to GMB to thank us for our support – he’d been watching the show yesterday morning and felt our passionate demands for the government to listen to him had made a real difference. He revealed Boris Johnson had rung to congratulate him.

‘It was a nice conversation,’ he said. ‘I wanted to have the opportunity to just thank him for understanding and changing his decision. He didn’t have to, so it’s definitely good. We’ve shown when we do work together we can change things.’

This is where we need to get back to as a society. Rashford’s incredibly impressive civility and quiet determination, much like Captain Tom’s, are in such marked contrast to all the shrieking culture-war noise, which is why his campaign resonated so strongly, and meant he got what he wanted in just 24 hours, surely the fastest government policy U-turn in history. There’s a lesson for everyone who wants to effect real change: less noise and abuse, more thoughtfulness and respect. And, yes, I can learn from it too. I believe that getting angry towards obfuscating government ministers at the height of a pandemic is justified when their chronic ineptitude leads to people dying in droves, but Marcus Rashford has shown that agreement and compromise can be best achieved through civil discourse.

We also need less woke absurdity. A new report at Harvard University has discovered that ‘trigger’ warnings which alert over-sensitive snowflakes to potentially harmful content at the start of books and films may cause greater problems than no trigger warnings.

‘We found that trigger warnings did not help trauma survivors brace themselves to face potentially upsetting content,’ said Harvard University’s Payton Jones, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology and lead researcher in the study. ‘In some cases, they made things worse.’

The obvious solution to this is to have trigger warnings for all trigger warnings.

FRIDAY 19 JUNE

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said in a radio interview today that taking the knee is a form of ‘subjugation’ that came from Game of Thrones. This was a spectacularly ignorant comment. Taking the knee has nothing to do with either subjugation or Game of Thrones. It was started by NFL star Colin Kaepernick, who protested against police brutality in America during the 2016 season by sitting while the national anthem was being played. After a conversation with former Green Beret Nate Boyer, Kaepernick took the knee instead, which Boyer explained was done as a mark of respect for fallen heroes in the military.

The fact Raab doesn’t know this, four years later, and after weeks of people talking about it since George Floyd’s death led to people all over the world taking the knee, is unbelievable and shameful. But sadly, it confirms what I have suspected throughout this pandemic: we are currently being governed by the worst collection of shockingly inept ministers I can ever remember. Yes, they were hit with an unprecedented situation. But the reason they’ve failed so woefully to rise to the challenge is because they’re basically, with one or two exceptions like Rishi Sunak, utterly useless.

SATURDAY 20 JUNE

A Facebook post purporting to be from tennis star Serena Williams has gone viral. In fact, it was posted by another, unknown, Serena Williams in America and she herself was re-posting the words of a friend named Gina Torres, who wrote, ‘I’m sick of Covid-19, I’m sick of black vs. white, I’m sick of Democrats vs. Republican, I’m sick of gay vs. straight. I’m sick of Christian vs atheist. I’m REALLY sick of the media. I’m sick of no one being allowed to think what they want & feel what they feel without offending someone. I am sick of the nosey ass people who call the cops when anyone does anything they don’t approve of. We’re one race – the human race. You want to support President Trump. You do you [sic]? Your choice! You want to support Biden, fine, also your choice! You want to believe in God. Okay, believe in God. You want to believe in magical creatures that fly around and sprinkle fairy dust to make life better? Awesome, you do you. BUT stop thrusting your beliefs on others & not being able to deal with the fact that they don’t have the same exact mind-set as you. […] If you can’t handle the fact that you may have a friend that has opposing views as you, then you are not any better than the bigots and the racists. I don’t have to agree with everything you believe in to be a decent human being & your friend.’

I think this resonated with people so much because it’s exactly what the vast majority of people actually feel. They’re sick of the toxic tribalism and partisan hatred. Aren’t we all, outside of the shrieking radical left and right extremists?

MONDAY 22 JUNE

A man named Alan Hawkes, from Saffron Walden in Essex, had a letter published in The Times today that read: ‘Sir, there were several articles in Saturday’s comment section with which I profoundly disagreed. Keep up the good work.’ Halle-bloody-lujah.

Newspapers MUST be a fulcrum for disparate views, particularly during very controversial times with emotions running high.

When I was editor of the Daily Mirror during the Iraq War crisis, I regularly published pro-war pieces by Christopher Hitchens to counterbalance the paper’s aggressive anti-war stance – because I knew many readers would agree with him, even if his words often enraged me.

TUESDAY 23 JUNE

Donald Trump should be preparing to pack his bags at the White House. It’s hard to imagine a worse scenario for any incumbent president trying to secure re-election than his terrible handling of a global pandemic resulting in America suffering the world’s worst coronavirus death toll and the US economy crashing to its worst levels since the Great Depression with 40 million job losses. Trump made things even worse when the country was engulfed by the worst race riots for 50 years, and he shamefully fuelled the fires with his shockingly tone-deaf and incendiary response to the country’s rage at George Floyd’s murder at the knee of a callous cop.

Any one of these fiascos would normally signal ballot box slaughter in election year. Yet somehow, unbelievably, Trump’s opponents are once again doing everything in their power to wrestle another defeat from the jaws of seemingly inevitable victory. If you were scripting an escape route for Trump, it would involve exactly what is now happening: liberal protestors tearing down statues of America’s greatest icons, liberal leaders allowing virtual anarchy on the streets to go unpunished and a dramatic intensifying of the absurdly self-defeating culture war nonsense that makes many Americans fear the very soul of their nation is being dismantled.

From a position of unprecedented weakness, Trump is now fighting back with his clunky but undeniably effective triple whammy ‘America first’ fist of patriotism, toughness and common sense. Or rather, he’s being hauled off the ropes by his opponents losing their minds. This insanity has reached its peak over the past few days as protestors set about destroying monuments to some of America’s most beloved historical figures.

In Portland, Oregon, they draped an American flag around a 100-year-old statue of the first US president, George Washington, set it on fire, pulled the statue down and then urinated on it. They said they did it because Washington owned slaves. That’s true, he did. But he was also one of the Founding Fathers who established the United States of America with a determination to eradicate slavery, which then happened.

In San Francisco, protestors vandalised a statue of another former president, Ulysses S. Grant, the man who led the Union Army in defeating the Confederates in the Civil War. Again, they argued he was a slave owner. And again, that’s true. But Grant was gifted one slave, despised the whole concept of having one and let him free within a year. He then wiped out the Ku Klux Klan by pushing legislation through Congress to prosecute them. And he appointed African-Americans to prominent government roles.

In another part of the same Golden Gate Park, hundreds more protestors tore down statues of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, because he too owned slaves. This, again, is true. But he also represented a young black man suing Georgetown College for his freedom in the 1830s. And he wrote America’s national anthem!

In Philadelphia, the statue of abolitionist Matthias Baldwin was attacked and sprayed with words like ‘colonizer’ and ‘murderer’. Yet Baldwin was a very outspoken critic of slavery, fought for African-Americans to have the right to vote and founded a school in the city for black children.

The craziness has got so demented that author and activist Shaun King has even called for statues of Jesus Christ to be removed. ‘I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,’ he tweeted. ‘They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.’

All of this, set against the backdrop of widespread looting and rioting during otherwise predominantly peaceful George Floyd protests, will have the opposite effect to the one the protestors claim to want. It won’t persuade people to join their movement; it will turn them against it.

That’s not to say all their arguments are wrong. I have no problem with statues of Confederacy leaders being removed. As Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen wrote yesterday, ‘The Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, said in his “cornerstone speech”, the Confederacy rested on “the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition”. Monuments to this revolting sentiment have no place in a United States that is dedicated to the opposite principle – that all men are created equal.’

I think most Americans would support that. But to destroy monuments of great presidents, as with the defacing of Sir Winston Churchill’s statue in London recently, actively alienates people from supporting the Black Lives Matter cause.

So, it will hinder, not help, the battle for racial equality and justice. The way for Democrats to win in November is simple: keep reminding the American people how badly Trump has handled the pandemic, how horrifically the economy has tanked and how atrociously he responded to George Floyd’s murder. It’s not difficult to paint a pretty accurate picture of a president who completely lost control of his country during its darkest hour, through his ineptitude, complacency, narcissism and chronic lack of empathy.

But nobody’s talking about any of that right now. Instead, the news agenda is dominated by images of statues of beloved American icons being destroyed, and by lawless rioting and looting in cities all over the country. Trump said this week, ‘The choice in 2020 is very simple. Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?’ Whatever you think of him, this is a very effective campaign message.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, I regularly warned liberals that their strategy to beat Trump, based around constant self-righteous and often rankly hypocritical rage, wouldn’t work. They ignored me, carried on screaming and lost. My message to liberals today remains the same: stop shrieking, stop indiscriminate self-harming statue toppling, stop virtue-signalling, stop pandering to ridiculous political correctness and provide America with a vision for the future that resonates better than Trump’s increasingly dystopian ideal. It shouldn’t be difficult to do this given the state of the country. But all I’m seeing is liberals committing political suicide.

As Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former short-lived communications chief who’s now become his biggest critic, told me on Good Morning Britain today, ‘If they continue to tear down statues in the United States and continue to riot, that will play into the president’s hands. As he searches for a campaign narrative right now, that narrative will be that people are trying to take away your cultural heritage. And he’ll pit people against each other in a big culture war.’

Yes, he will. And it might work.

Wake up, liberals, before it’s too late.

WEDNESDAY 24 JUNE

Is chess racist? Even as I write these words, my heart sinks. But an Australian radio show has become a global target for mockery after airing a segment asking that very question because a father tweeted that his child had asked him why the white pieces always move first in the game. The father apparently paused, ‘aware of current cultural context’, and wondered exactly how to answer. He didn’t know if there was any racial background to the rule.

Of course there isn’t. It was an entirely arbitrary decision made in the 1880s to standardise competition and had absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s skin colour. But this is where wokery inevitably takes us – to ridiculous extremes where people feel compelled to see racism, or any other -ism, in absolutely everything. And all that does is annoy everyone, and prevent change happening. We have to stop this nonsense because all it does is fire up the racists.

Last night, a plane flew over the Manchester City v Burnley Premier League game, where the players wore the same #blacklivesmatter names on their shirts, with a banner saying, ‘WHITE LIVES MATTER BURNLEY!’. As I tweeted, ‘Let me try & help all the idiots foaming at the mouth today. 1) Black lives matter … too. 2) Black lives matter … as much. 3) Black lives matter … so why are black people still treated as 2nd class citizens in many areas of society? Educate yourselves & demand equality.’

It got a huge response, mostly from people agreeing but also from a large number of people hurling abuse at me for being racist and ‘anti-whites’. This debate is getting nastier.

MONDAY 29 JUNE

Shocking video footage has emerged of groups of elderly residents of Florida’s retirement complex The Villages all screaming abuse at each other over Trump and Black Lives Matter. One of the pro-Trumpers, a white man in a golf cart, eventually shouts out, ‘WHITE POWER! WHITE POWER!’ Trump then retweeted this clip, saying: ‘Thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing. Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!’

Three hours later, his retweet was deleted but in that three hours, the world saw the president of the United States endorse a racist shrieking ‘WHITE POWER!’ I’ve no idea if Trump heard that part of the clip, but I don’t care. He’s the most powerful man in the world, and his retweets carry huge influence. As America continues to be split apart by racial tension since the George Floyd murder, the president continues to make things ten times worse.

The country desperately needs proper leadership, of the type that heals not divides. Like Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who said, ‘Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!”, when nobody will shout “Black Power!”, but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.’