January

‘Wuhan’s as big as London …’

WEDNESDAY 1 JANUARY 2020

The world seems relatively quiet this morning, though there’s a disconcerting story coming out of China, where health authorities say they’re investigating 27 cases of a new strain of viral pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in Central China which has left many of the people infected seriously ill.

There are rumours on Twitter that it may be another outbreak of SARS but Chinese officials are playing them down. ‘The cause of the disease is not clear,’ the official People’s Daily newspaper said, citing unnamed hospital officials, continuing, ‘We cannot confirm it is what’s being spread online, that it is SARS virus. Other severe pneumonia is more likely.’

China doesn’t have a good record for transparency in this area – it lied for weeks when SARS first erupted in 2003. And suggestions of something far nastier than just ‘severe pneumonia’ this time have been fuelled by the fact that Wuhan’s massive Huanan Seafood Market – one of the country’s many infamous ‘wet markets’ full of live animals – has today been shut down as a ‘precaution’.

FRIDAY 3 JANUARY

It hasn’t taken long for 2020 to live down to 2019’s often bafflingly insane standards of ‘woke’ absurdity.

An employment tribunal judge today ruled that ‘ethical veganism’ qualifies as a philosophical belief protected under UK law. The successful claimant, a self-proclaimed ‘ethical vegan’ named Jordi Casamitjana, asserted he was fired by his own employer, animal welfare charity the League Against Cruel Sports, in April 2018 because he told colleagues their employer’s pension fund was being invested in companies that experiment on animals.

The charity rejected the allegation, but the case really centred on whether ‘ethical vegans’, who follow strict vegan diets and oppose the use of animals for any purpose including laboratory testing, are entitled to the same legal rights and protections surrounding their ‘belief’ as, say, a person has for their religion, or other protected characteristics like their race, sex, pregnancy, maternity and sexuality. The answer, apparently, is yes. Judge Robin Postle said he was ‘satisfied overwhelmingly’ that ethical veganism meets the criteria of the Equality Act as a philosophical belief and not just an opinion. ‘It is cogent, serious and important,’ he concluded, ‘and worthy of respect in democratic society.’

Of course, the news was greeted with raucous celebration by the more radical and preachy members of the vegan community, which has spent the past two days haranguing people like me into giving up meat for the dreaded ‘Veganuary’. Finally, they’ve got what they want: legal validation for their war on carnivores. Kale-munching is no longer a lifestyle choice, it’s a right. And as with all rights in the modern world, that brings with it an instant onslaught of self-righteousness and virtue-signalling. The latter, for the uninitiated, is ‘the action or practice of expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue’. In other words, doing or saying something to make oneself look virtuous. Since the advent of social media, this affliction has become a scourge of biblical proportions. Now, there’s nothing wrong with virtue, it’s just behaviour showing high moral standards. Nor is there anything wrong with signalling, that’s just conveying information or instructions by means of a gesture, action or sound. The problem comes when you combine the two and start to signal your virtue; especially if you’re signalling an entirely different virtue to the one that actually exists inside your soul.

I began to notice this curious phenomenon several years ago when a few famous friends of mine began tweeting (aka ‘signalling’) extraordinarily virtuous thoughts to their millions of followers that, let me be kind here, bore little relation to what they would spout to me over dinner. They do it to be liked – literally. They want to rack up ‘likes’ on social media, believing it to be a measure of their apparent popularity. To be most effective, the virtue-signalling needs to be expressed with extreme outrage, and preferably punctuated with profanity to show the world you REALLY F*CKING CARE!!!!

Veganism attracts the very worst kind of virtue-signallers.

I’ll be honest, I find vegans annoying. Not the quiet ones who get on with their meat-free lives without bothering the rest of us, but the noisy, angry ones who demand we all do the same as them or automatically expose ourselves as disgusting monsters. And from my experience, most vegans are very, very noisy. As the joke goes, ‘How do you know if someone’s a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll soon tell you.’ Like all the best jokes, it carries with it a truism.

I like to eat meat. In fact, I like to gorge on beef, lamb, chicken, pork and, yes, even veal. I know exactly how it’s all produced – vegans delight in constantly detailing the precise gory details lest we forget – and I still like eating meat. Just as many animals like eating other animals. I don’t think there’s anything a vegan can possibly say to me that will ever change my mind, although I am open, as with everything, to a reasonable discussion about it. The problem is that radical vegans, like all radical activists, don’t want to be reasonable let alone have a discussion.

I honestly don’t care if people want to be vegans. If they truly want to spend their life forgoing the joys of meat to dine on tasteless plants, that’s their problem not mine. Or, rather, it’s their life, not mine. But I do care when they decide to lecture me on how repulsive I am and try to push their eating habits onto me. Particularly when they try to play the holier-than-thou card, as they do so often.

As with all ‘woke’ activists, there is a woeful lack of tolerance from radical vegans. They want to shame, vilify, silence and convert meat-eaters, berating us into subservient compliance to their way of life. It’s not enough that I respect their right to eat what they like; unless I follow their path then I am the enemy.

Whenever I publicly express my love of eating meat I am immediately greeted with a barrage of abuse on social media and demands for me to be ‘cancelled’. This nasty uncompromising attitude was best typified by an incident in 2018 when a group of 20 vegans from a group called Direct Action Everywhere stormed the Brazilian-themed Touro Steakhouse in Brighton on the south coast of England (11 miles from the village of Newick where I grew up and still have a home), screaming and shouting, waving signs and placards, and playing loud sounds of cows being slaughtered. ‘It’s not meat, it’s violence!’ they hollered.

Unfortunately for the protestors, there was a large stag party of young men in the restaurant who retaliated by leaping to their feet and chanting, ‘Stand up if you love red meat!’ The activists didn’t know what to do, so they just screamed their abuse even louder, as if somehow that would persuade a bunch of boozed-up carnivores to instantly renounce meat. Of course, that was never going to happen. In fact, all their antics achieved was to encourage the meat-eaters to want to eat even more meat. We see the same thing unfolding relentlessly online – abuse and shouting, with no intent to discuss, listen or learn.

This is why I suspect Mr Casamitjana’s ‘win’ will turn out to be a loss for vegans in the long run, because people just don’t like being told what to do, or think, or say, or eat – especially by angry activists shouting in their face. ‘Woke’ campaigners like this never understand that by adopting this kind of rigid, non-compromising approach to absolutely everything, they may win a battle or two but they won’t win the war. They genuinely believe the more they harangue and hector, the more they will persuade, yet usually the complete opposite is true. And at the heart of all this enraged intransigence lies an absurd hypocrisy: it’s not liberal, or even close to it. The whole principle of liberalism is predicated on a willingness to be tolerant of other people’s views, not violently opposed to even considering them.

Yet even the most powerful companies in the world are rolling over to radical illiberal activism. Tech giant Google used to have a salad emoji on its search engine platform that contained the basics of most salads, including lettuce, tomato and a boiled egg. But this was deemed ‘offensive’ because the egg was not inclusive for vegans. So, the egg was removed. Jennifer Daniel, Google’s ‘user experience manager’, proudly announced the change with this tweet: ‘There’s big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google so if you need any evidence of Google is making this priority, may I direct your attention to the [salad] emoji – we’ve removed the egg … making this a more inclusive vegan salad.’

I was curious why Google felt the need to do this. Ms Daniel, when confronted with widespread scorn, said it was to fall in line with something called the Unicode Consortium which chooses and creates new emojis.

‘Hello carnivores, vegans and everyone in between!’ she tweeted again. ‘Just want to clarify that the goal of the salad emoji redesign was to create an image more faithful to Unicode’s description: “A bowl of healthy salad, containing lettuce, tomato and other salad items such as cucumber.” Bon appetite [sic]!’

Aside from her poor French spelling, I noticed there was also no sign of cucumber in either the old or new salad emoji which seems very exclusionary to cucumbers and offensive to those who like eating them. Twitter was merciless on Google’s vegan virtue-signalling.

‘Excuse me,’ said a Twitter user named Kuraha, ‘I don’t have legs, could you cut yours off, so I feel included? That’s how it works, right?’

Others were concerned about people with allergies to tomatoes or lettuce: why didn’t Google care about their feelings? For my part, I was bemused why my preferences were now deemed offensive. I like eating eggs. I’ve always liked eating eggs. Many scientists cite eggs as being very nutritious as part of a well-balanced diet, which is why billions of people have eaten eggs quite happily for centuries. Yet Google will no longer let me see eggs in a salad emoji because they’re now ‘offensive’? This is surely just as exclusionary as removing the eggs just to please vegans. Why are vegan rights more important than my carnivore rights? Who decided that? Do I have to go to court like Mr Casamitjana to fight for my right not to have my belief in eggs discriminated against in this way?

The British Egg Industry Council was similarly puzzled. ‘We completely understand that vegans choose not to eat eggs, but in the UK egg sales are up by almost 5 per cent,’ a spokesman said. ‘Many people love them, so it seems a shame for the majority to be missing out due to concern for offending one group. Eggs are the perfect salad accompaniment – full of protein, vitamins and minerals.’

Inevitably, crafty commercial minds have realised that there is money to be made from all this nonsense. A year ago this week, Greggs, the British high street bakery chain, announced on Twitter, ‘The wait is over … #vegansausageroll.’ I was incredulous. Who the hell had been waiting for a vegan sausage roll? And how can a sausage be vegan anyway? The very notion of a ‘vegan sausage roll’ makes no sense. Sausages are meat products. From the time they were first invented in 3100 BCE by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq – they have always been made of meat. And anyway, why would vegans want to eat something named after a meat product if they hate meat so much?

As a meat-eater, I take exception to the use of meat labels in this way. The whole thing is a total sham, a con on the public designed to make people feel vegan-virtuous. The companies behind it are just virtue-signalling their spurious vegan credentials to make money from a small but noisy minority of their consumer base. I tweeted back at Greggs, ‘Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage roll, you PC-ravaged clowns.’

‘Oh, hello Piers, we’ve been expecting you,’ they instantly replied, with a rapidity that suggested they had indeed been expecting me. Of course, all hell broke loose as the world’s vegans rushed to abuse and shame me, playing right into Greggs’ greedy little hands.

To sum up just how ridiculous this corporate virtue-signalling is, Wagamama has just announced its new dish: vegan tuna. ‘Welcome to the bench our new vegan suika tuna,’ the firm tweeted. ‘Yep, you read that right. Vegan tuna. Now, that’s next wave. But catch it while you can. Available exclusively for #veganuary only.’

Of course, there is no tuna in it. It’s actually grilled watermelon.

SATURDAY 4 JANUARY

President Trump has taken out the second most powerful man in Iran, its military leader General Qasem Soleimani, who was blown up by a US drone strike on a convoy taking him to a meeting with the Iraqi prime minister in Baghdad.

This stunning move follows a series of recent Iran-inspired rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq, culminating in one a few days ago that killed an American contractor and injured US and Iraqi soldiers. Trump responded by ordering US strikes on Kataeb Hezbollah, the Iran proxy militia that carried out the rocket attacks, which prompted the group’s furious supporters to break into the US embassy in Baghdad and set fire to the reception area.

For Trump and his military advisors, this situation was disturbingly reminiscent of the terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 when US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed. The president, who’d been heavily critical of his predecessor Barack Obama’s inaction over that fiasco, knew that failure to act decisively now when confronted with a similar situation was not an option.

‘Iran will be held fully responsible for lives lost, or damage incurred, at any of our facilities,’ Trump tweeted. To which Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei responded on Twitter by taunting back at the US president, ‘You can’t do anything.’

There is something very surreal and unnerving about World War III being possibly started through the prism of a tweet exchange.

At the same time, the US reportedly received credible intelligence that Soleimani was actively plotting to kill more American military and diplomatic personnel in the Middle East. This represented a direct and immediate challenge to the security of the United States, but one that Iran arrogantly presumed America would do nothing about. They were wrong.

President Trump considered various military options presented to him and chose the killing of Soleimani to send Iran a firm message that yes, actually, the United States could and would do something to defend itself. Will Iran up the ante, or back down? Either way, this is the biggest test of Donald Trump’s presidency and it will be fascinating to see how he handles a real crisis.

I’ve been friends with Trump for 13 years, since I competed in, and won, his inaugural season of Celebrity Apprentice USA. During the next few years, we exchanged frequent email correspondence, and he would call from time to time for a chat about life and the universe. I also acted as his boardroom advisor on numerous subsequent episodes of The Apprentice and interviewed him many times when I joined CNN. I’ve always liked Trump personally; the man I knew before he ran for president was funny, street-smart, flamboyant, gossipy and outrageously opinionated. He’s also ferociously loyal – if you’re loyal to him.

When I left CNN in 2014, returned to the UK and was no longer of any use to him, he rang me repeatedly to check how I was doing. During his 2016 election campaign, he gave me the only two British TV interviews he conducted as a presidential candidate, and since becoming president, he’s given me the only three British TV interviews he’s conducted as leader of the free world. He even invited me onto Air Force One to do one of them, which was an extraordinary experience. So, he treats his friends as well as he treats his enemies badly. Punch him in the face, metaphorically, and he’ll delightedly keep punching back for the rest of time. Conflict is something Trump revels in.

It’s not easy being friends with the president of the United States when he’s as divisive as Trump. I’ve been pilloried in the media for it, abused mercilessly on Twitter, and even been subjected to verbal tirades in the street. But I’ve stayed friends with him because I like him, and he’s been good to me, and because, contrary to popular myth, I’ve never let it stop me criticising him in print or on air when I feel the need to – often quite sharply, as I’ve done on issues like gun control, climate change, trophy hunting, his call for a Muslim ban, his ‘grab ’em by the p*ssy’ Access Hollywood tape, his ‘fake news’ attacks on the media and his ban on transgenders in the military. I’ve written over 100 columns about him for the Daily Mail’s US website and around half of them have been critical. I’ve also made it clear many times that I wouldn’t personally vote for Trump, even if I could, as I’m not a Republican. But I think he’s an extraordinary political character and find myself agreeing with as much of what he says and does as I disagree.

I see both good and bad in Trump, and right and wrong. In some ways, he is one of the least right-wing Republican presidents ever. For example, he was the first one to reference the LGBT community in his inauguration speech (which made his later transgender military ban all the more incomprehensible). His decision to kill Soleimani is a rarity in an otherwise militarily calm tenure in which Trump’s gone out of his way to avoid the wars that most US leaders get sucked into, withdrawing most US troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and forging peace with conventional US enemies like North Korea and Russia. He’s presided over a very successful economy, achieved record low unemployment levels and launched what many see as an entirely justified trade war with China, a country that has been economically ransacking America for several decades. And yet a minute cannot pass without the ‘woke’ community being mortally offended by Trump. He seems to turn many liberals into permanent gibbering wrecks of blazing fury.

In fact, it was Trump’s election which exposed one of the biggest problems at the core of wokedom: modern liberals, especially famous ones, are very sensitive. Not a minute of any day goes by without them being outraged by something. And that something is usually Donald Trump. The wild, foot-stomping, shrieking mania that greets the president’s every utterance and movement is beyond anything I have ever witnessed in global politics.

Now, let me say this: much of the adverse reaction to Trump’s presidency is perfectly understandable and acceptable. He’s an inflammatory, deliberately provocative character who likes nothing better than winding up what he calls the ‘sneering elites’ into a slathering lather of blind rage.

So, I have no issue with people complaining or protesting about him, or with journalists holding his factual feet to the fire. But hysteria never won an argument, and I say that as someone who has occasionally got hysterical about stuff and never won those arguments.

MONDAY 6 JANUARY

I awoke at 1 am, still jetlagged, to watch Ricky Gervais host the Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood. The acid-tongued British comedian is one of the very few celebrities in the world who finds the whole idea of some kind of superior Planet Celebrity utterly ridiculous and revels in tearing to pieces the inherent pomposity and hypocrisy that lies at its heart.

As such, he is the perfect awards show host, because he doesn’t give a rat’s arse about offending the world’s biggest stars sitting right in front of him like rabbits cowering in the middle of a motorway as a juggernaut lorry bears down on them with no intention of stopping even though the driver can see their terrified little eyes.

Gervais set out his stall a few days ago by saying: ‘It [the Globes] is a room full of the biggest virtue-signallers and hypocrites in the world, so I’ve got to go after that.’ And go after that he most definitely did. His opening monologue only lasted seven minutes and forty-two seconds. But that was long enough for him to burst the absurdly two-faced PC-crazed bubble that surrounds modern Hollywood. It was brutal, vicious … and exactly what that crowd needed, even if their shocked, frozen (and not just from all the Botox) faces suggested they’d just stumbled into hell on earth. It was also what we all needed watching back at home.

Gervais point-blank refuses to bow to the modern-day anti-free-speech ultra-woke McCarthyism, ranting against it all day every day on Twitter with a mixture of incredulity, defiance and savagery. He doesn’t care about all the flak he takes because his view is that comedy is comedy, jokes are jokes and thin-skinned little snowflakes who constantly throw their offended toys out of the pram should simply be ignored because their outrage doesn’t – and shouldn’t – trump his right to freedom of speech. And he doesn’t care how rich, powerful or famous you are – everyone cops it.

That’s why Ricky Gervais is the most successful comedian on the planet. From the moment Gervais appeared on stage and flashed that mischievous grin, it was clear he was going to be taking no prisoners. Though ironically, he started by targeting an actual recent prisoner. ‘I came here in a limo tonight,’ he quipped, ‘and the licence plate was made by Felicity Huffman.’ Huffman, a former Golden Globes-winning actress who is married to actor William H. Macy, was jailed in 2019 for her part in an infamous college exam cheating scandal after she admitted paying for a proctor to correct SAT questions answered incorrectly by her daughter.

‘No, shush,’ taunted Gervais as the audience reacted in dismay. ‘It’s her daughter I feel sorry for. That must be the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to her … and her dad was in Wild Hogs.’

Having immediately broken his solemn pre-show promise not to attack any individuals – a promise I knew he’d only made to throw everyone off their guard – Gervais sprayed a machine gun of mockery at big names in the audience, calling Joe Pesci ‘Baby Yoda’, ridiculing Martin Scorsese for his lack of height and ribbing Leonardo DiCaprio for his preference for youthful girlfriends.

‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, nearly three hours long,’ he smirked. ‘Leonardo DiCaprio attended the premiere and by the end his date was too old for him.’ As the camera panned to a clearly embarrassed DiCaprio, ruthless Gervais stuck the boot in further. ‘Even Prince Andrew was, like, “Come on, Leo, mate. You’re nearly fifty, son!”’ (The prince had been accused of sexually assaulting young girls, which he denied.) By now, I was laughing so hard I went into a volatile coughing fit. But actors are relatively easy targets. It was when Gervais directed his fire at Hollywood itself that he excelled himself.

He accused the movie executives in the room of being ‘terrified of Ronan Farrow’ (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose investigative #MeToo journalism brought down Harvey Weinstein and a number of other powerful people) and branded them ‘perverts’, sneering, ‘He’s coming for ya!’ Then he suggested Andrew’s multi-millionaire paedophile and star-befriender pal Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, and as the audience booed (again), he scoffed, ‘Shut up, I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care … you had to make your own way here in your own plane, didn’t you?’

He brilliantly mocked the town’s dubiously self-interested reactive diversity initiatives. ‘We were going to do an In Memoriam this year but when I saw the list of people who had died, it wasn’t diverse enough. No, it was mostly white people and I thought, nah, not on my watch.’ Gervais even hammered his own employers for the night, the Hollywood Foreign Press, as ‘very, very racist’ in reference to the lack of people of colour in many award categories, said ‘most films are awful’ – at an event supposedly celebrating film! – and railed against the new brand of corporate giants dominating Tinseltown.

‘Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show,’ he said, ‘a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing … made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.’ Ironically, Apple boss Tim Cook – who has denied the company uses sweatshops – looked rather sweaty himself when the cameras were on him in the audience.

Then Gervais rounded on the hypocritical stars again.

‘You all say you’re woke but the companies you work for – I mean, unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?’

More gasps, but Gervais wasn’t finished with them yet.

‘So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God, and f*ck off, OK?!’

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This was a Hollywood awards night, where stars are sycophantically praised not unceremoniously buried. This was intended as another chance to virtue-signal and remind the world how awful Trump is, not themselves! But Gervais knows that celebrities and comedians whacking Trump are two-a-penny. Far rarer is the star who shines a light on the stinking hypocrisy of Hollywood itself, the place that loves to take the high moral ground yet itself lurks in a sewer of immorality. It takes courage to do this in a town that can make or break entertainers’ careers, real balls of glistening steel.

‘Our next presenter starred in Netflix’s Bird Box,’ Gervais said towards the end, introducing Sandra Bullock. ‘A movie where people survive by acting like they don’t see a thing. Sort of like working for Harvey Weinstein.’

As the audience gasped and groaned again in more fake ‘what, me?’ horror – beautifully proving his point – before booing him, Gervais jeered back, ‘You did it, I didn’t, you did it …’

TUESDAY 7 JANUARY

The new year has begun for Good Morning Britain the way the old one ended, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet ministers refusing to come on the show. They’re still sulking after our fearless correspondent Jonathan Swain chased Boris into a large fridge at a dairy farm on the eve of the election as we tried to get him to honour his repeated public promises to give us an interview.

They should heed the words of former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, who writes in his new book, Downsizing, ‘I knew for a fact that many Westminster politicians disliked appearing on GMB, fearing the programme’s notoriously tough interviews. The combative Piers Morgan and the forensic Susanna Reid were indeed a formidable duo – I’d seen many a guest shrink as they received a breakfast-time grilling. But I’d always enjoyed the experience. I liked sparring with Piers, and I admired Susanna’s incisive line of questioning.’

When I thanked him on Twitter for his comments, he replied, ‘I honestly think Labour members should judge our leadership and deputy leadership candidates on their ability to handle tough interviews.’ I couldn’t agree more. What’s baffling about the ban is that many politicians have told me in the past they get more feedback from constituents after they do GMB than any of the political shows, and particular praise if they give as good as they get.

I don’t view these encounters with a cynical Jeremy Paxman ‘why are these bastards lying to me?’ mindset, but more a ‘let’s rough them up a bit and see what they’re made of’ attitude. The good ones will rise to the challenge and see their reputations enhanced, the bad ones will wilt under pressure and reveal themselves as not fit for ministerial purpose. But frankly, if they don’t have the stomach for an argument on breakfast television, how on earth would they cope with handling a serious crisis?

WEDNESDAY 8 JANUARY

Iran has responded to the killing of Soleimani by launching missile strikes at US bases in Iraq. It’s being seen as a ‘proportionate response’ and not a dramatic escalation. In other words, Iran has heeded President Trump’s words of dire warning if they try anything foolish, and blinked.

I think Trump was absolutely right to take him out. Soleimani was the world’s most dangerous terrorist. As such, he was no different ideologically from other terror leaders like Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden who Obama took out with SEAL Team 6 special forces in Pakistan, or ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who blew himself up with a suicide vest two months ago when US special forces, on Trump’s orders, tracked him down in Syria’s Idlib province. Like Bin Laden and Al-Baghdadi, Soleimani’s life was devoted to killing people via terrorism, including many Americans. And like them, he was killed to stop him directing more terror acts.

Yet unlike Bin Laden, Soleimani’s death has been met with howls of protests from the world’s liberals. Within minutes of it being confirmed, out sprang the usual suspect, mouth-foaming, Trump-loathing celebrities who erupt in breathless rage every time he speaks, tweets or does anything, often with little knowledge of what has actually happened.

Actress and #MeToo activist Rose McGowan actually apologised to Iran. ‘Dear Iran,’ she tweeted, ‘the USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. Fifty-two per cent of us humbly apologise. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us.’

When this bizarre mea culpa prompted understandable outrage, she retorted, ‘Of course Soleimani was an evil man who did evil things. But that at the moment is not the f*cking point.’

It’s not? McGowan later backtracked, explaining, ‘OK, so I freaked out because we may have impending war … I do not want any more American soldiers killed, that’s it.’

Of course, that is precisely why Trump had Soleimani killed. Ms McGowan wasn’t the only one who sounded confused. Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback famed for his kneeling protests against racial injustice during the US national anthem, accused Trump of having a racist motivation.

‘There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks on Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism,’ he tweeted.

What?! Kaepernick either doesn’t know, or chose to deliberately ignore, that for many years Iran has been committing terror attacks on black and brown people for the expansion of its own imperialist agenda in the Middle East. This action had nothing to do with racism. Nor do I believe, as some are suggesting, that it was designed to create a distraction from Trump’s imminent impeachment trial in the US Senate, due to start next week, which seems to be helping not hindering him in the polls anyway.

No, I share the view of retired General David Petraeus, one of America’s finest military minds, who said Soleimani’s death was ‘bigger than Bin Laden, bigger than Al-Baghdadi’ and a ‘very significant effort to re-establish deterrence’. Petraeus explained, ‘Soleimani was the architect and operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify the so-called Shia crescent stretching from Iran to Iraq, through Syria into southern Lebanon. He is responsible for providing explosives and arms and other munitions that killed well over 600 American soldiers and many more of our coalition partners, so his death is of enormous significance. Many people had rightly questioned whether America’s deterrence had eroded somewhat because of the relatively insignificant responses to the earlier actions.’

I agree. President Trump called Iran’s menacing, threatening, cocky, murderous bluff – to put them back in their box. He gave them the ‘slap in the face’ they deserved and warrants praise, not hypocritical liberal outrage, for taking such bold action. Far from making the world a more dangerous place, the world just got a lot safer without the presence of a loathsome terror leader like Qasem Soleimani.

It should be a moment to unite Americans, but it’s not. And once again, woke outrage spews across social media, furthering division and threatening to inhibit any discussion on what is an incredibly important moment in US politics. Other Trump-bashing stars, from singer John Legend to actors John Cusack and Alyssa Milano, also felt compelled to tell the world how disgusting it was that Soleimani had been killed. Oh, they all agreed Soleimani was a very bad man who killed lots of people, but they also think he should have been kept alive – to do what exactly? Continue killing lots more people?

Epitomising this seemingly absurd contradictory attitude was Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, whose initial response to the news was this: ‘Soleimani was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.’ One day later, Warren had a re-think and said that, in fact, the bad guy was President Trump, who had ‘assassinated a senior foreign military official’. It’s no coincidence that Warren’s dramatic change in tone came after 24 hours of rage from fellow liberals horrified that she had told the truth about Soleimani’s murderous record. But when repeatedly pressed yesterday by Meghan McCain on The View as to whether Soleimani was a terrorist, Warren finally said, ‘Of course he was.’

So, let me get this straight: Soleimani was a mass-murdering terrorist responsible for killing thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans, but should be left alone because it might ‘escalate the situation with Iran’? I don’t remember the risk of escalating conflict being an issue with the killing of Bin Laden, who was also responsible for murdering thousands of people, including many Americans. No, when Obama ordered the execution of Bin Laden, liberals cheered him around the world. But Trump Derangement Syndrome, as the president’s supporters call this kind of behaviour, dictates there must be a very different response when the current occupant of the White House kills a terror leader.

Trump can’t win. Or, rather, he can win but his opponents will never give him any credit for winning. It’s been like this ever since he was elected president, prompting many liberals to collapse into a form of spontaneous anaphylactic shock from which they still haven’t recovered. These included a lot of entertainers, people from the worlds of film, television and music whose political opinions have never seemed so important – to themselves.

I’ll never forget a video that went viral the week after Trump’s stunning election victory featuring Yoko Ono’s calm, measured response to the news. It lasted about 15 seconds and consisted of Yoko emitting a long, strangled, mournful, high-pitched scream like a malfunctioning kettle exploding. Her agonised reaction perfectly epitomised the ludicrously over-the-top global meltdown by the planet’s celebrities to the result of a fair, open and democratic election. And it was only rivalled for insanity by an event organised a year on from Trump’s win entitled ‘Scream helplessly at the sky on the anniversary of the election’ in which thousands of Trump-hating liberals in cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia went outside, stared upwards and shouted their little heads off in rage. What could better illustrate the woke mindset than literally screaming because you don’t get what you want?

This raging intolerance has manifested itself in a very dangerous manner, with direct inferences that Trump should be assassinated. Four sitting presidents – one in 12 of the 45 men who have held the office – have actually been murdered. I remain very concerned that Trump may become the fifth, such is the viciously violent vitriol aimed his way by those who should know better.

It was Madonna who started this disturbing trend by screaming at the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 that she thought of ‘blowing up the White House’, although she quickly backtracked, claiming her remark had been taken out of context and that she had spoken in ‘metaphor’. Following her outrageous outburst, which attracted global headlines, death threats were aimed at the new president on an unprecedented scale. Global artificial intelligence firm Dataminr reported that, in the next two weeks alone, more than 12,000 posts with the words ‘assassinate Trump’ were made on Twitter. The threats have carried on coming, many of them far more serious than a Twitter post, with the Secret Service working 24/7 to stop myriad plots to attack POTUS. Yet this hasn’t stopped supposedly intelligent people from fanning the flames.

Comedian Kathy Griffin posted a photograph of herself clutching an image of Trump’s severed, blood-splattered head. It was a just a joke, she wailed, when all hell broke loose. Really, Ms Griffin? It’s ‘funny’ to hold a US president’s severed head up to a camera at a time when ISIS barbarians were doing exactly that to fellow Americans?

‘This is vile and wrong,’ tweeted Chelsea Clinton in a very rare show of solidarity with Trump after Griffin’s stunt. ‘It is never funny to joke about killing a president.’ There speaks someone who had to live for eight years as a young girl in the White House with the constant terrifying fear that someone might try to kill her father.

As outrage grew, and Trump and his family expressed horror over what she’d done, Griffin resorted to the natural preferred woke defence playbook of victimhood; she claimed she was being bullied by old, sexist and misogynist white men. Oh, and irony of ironies, she was now receiving death threats! She briefly apologised but later took back the apology.

In the short term, Griffin’s career took a hit, but once she revved up the victim card, and went on the attack against Trump, she became a liberal heroine and is now even more famous and successful than she was before the severed head fiasco. Her behaviour exemplifies the horrible self-righteousness that pervades ‘wokies’. They don’t just think they’re right – they know they’re right. And they don’t just think those who disagree are wrong, they know they’re wrong. They also believe those who disagree with them are all dumb, bigoted morons who must be shamed, abused and preferably cancelled.

Trump brings out the worst in them all, just as he also brings out the worst in the US media, who exposed themselves during his presidential run, with a few notable exceptions, as a bunch of ratings- and circulation-hungry Dr Frankensteins that created and ravenously fuelled the monster of Trump the presidential candidate – before equally ravenously trying to kill him off when they suddenly realised to their horror he might actually win, and in a massive collective guilt trip ever since have spent his entire presidency trying to bring him down. In doing so, they have fallen into his trap. ‘Good publicity is preferable to bad,’ said Trump in his bestselling book The Art of the Deal, ‘but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.’

Trump’s toxic relationship with the mainstream media in America now resembles a mutually abusive marriage. They can’t live with each other with a constant undercurrent of visceral hostility, but nor can they live without each other. As a journalist for 35 years, I don’t like Trump branding the media ‘fake news’, even if it’s justified when a story turns out to be plain wrong. And I hate him calling the media ‘the enemy of the people’. That’s just downright dangerous. But the media, dominated by liberals, doesn’t help itself with its obsessional 24/7 coverage of Trump over things like his supposed collusion with Russia to fix the 2016 election, which turned out to be a massive nothing-burger.

As with woke celebrities calling for the White House to be blown up, the constant self-serving hysteria helps him more than it hurts him. It also, more importantly, diminishes the significance of times when Trump does stuff that really does deserve massive critical attention.

Despite all the hysteria, or perhaps partly because of it, Trump now has the perfect platform for an incumbent US president to start re-election year. The US economy is purring along nicely, two of the world’s worst terrorists have been taken out in the space of four months and the US is striving to end its involvement in cripplingly expensive wars. Unfortunately, the rigid nature of modern illiberal liberalism doesn’t allow for him to get any credit for any of this. And if he wins again in November, they will only have themselves to blame. Jeremy, my army colonel brother and no fan of Trump, explained succinctly, ‘It seems to me that there is a direct correlation between noisy liberal angst and silent popular voting.’ The stats are on Trump’s side: historically, 70 per cent of presidents who run again get re-elected. If they run on a soaring economy, that probability rises to over 90 per cent.

The way for liberals to beat Donald Trump is not by wishing him dead or screaming about him 24/7. It is by using everything in the American democratic system to defeat him by fair means not foul. That means at the ballot box. Though the president should be mindful of the warning from former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who when asked what was the greatest challenge for a leader, was supposed to have replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

There are still ten months until the election and anything could happen.

THURSDAY 9 JANUARY

Bombshell news: Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have announced they are quitting the royal family.

In a statement released tonight on their glitzy new website, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex revealed they’re relinquishing life as ‘senior royals’ with all the tedious duty that entails, and instead now want to be a ‘progressive’ force within ‘this institution’. In other words, they want to be super-woke royals (with all the ‘do as we say not as we do’ hectoring hypocrisy they’ve already brought to that status) who get to keep all the trappings of royal life without any of the hard, boring bits.

In their lengthy list of pronouncements, Harry and Meghan say they will now be spending much of their time in North America, where they’ve just recently been lounging for six weeks’ ‘much-needed holiday’ – a holiday from what, exactly? – at a multi-millionaire’s waterside mansion in Canada. Oh, and they’re going to seek to be ‘financially independent’. It’s only when you read the details of this ‘independence’ that you realise what it actually means is they want to live off Harry’s dad’s money, off Prince Charles and his Duchy of Cornwall.

They have also informed us they intend to continue living for free, when they grace the UK with their esteemed presence, at Frogmore Cottage, their palatial home in Windsor that was gifted to them by the Queen and which has been refurbished to their specifications at a cost to the taxpayer of millions of pounds. Oh, and they expect to continue having royal protection too – at further vast expense to the taxpayer – and all the other stuff that goes with that like VIP royal travel. We all know there’s nothing these two fearless eco-warriors like more than stomping down their giant hypocritical carbon footprint one private jet at a time.

They also, hilariously, laid down their new rulebook for the media, saying they’re getting rid of the traditional royal rota system and will instead be inviting special favoured journalists to attend their events and write nice positive things about them. I chuckled with disbelief as I read this. Even Putin wouldn’t pull a stunt to control the press like that and it doesn’t seem to fit very well with their woke world view. There is zero chance of the media following any ‘rules’ for covering these two, now they’ve swapped royal duty for money-grabbing celebrity stardom. If Meghan and Harry want to be the new Kardashians, that’s fine, but they’ll get treated like the new Kardashians. But, honestly, who the hell do they think they are?

I’ve seen some disgraceful royal antics in my time, but for pure arrogance, entitlement, greed, and wilful disrespect, nothing has ever quite matched this nonsense from the ‘Duke and Duchess of Sussex’. I put inverted commas around those titles because I sincerely hope they won’t exist much longer. Indeed, if I were Her Majesty the Queen, I would unceremoniously strip these deluded clowns of all their titles with immediate effect and despatch them back into civilian life.

Nobody tells the Queen what to do. She’s the most powerful, respected person in Britain. And right now, she’s facing a direct threat to everything she has worked so hard to maintain. Harry and Meghan’s astonishingly brazen and selfish antics have left her no choice but to cut them loose and fire them both from the royal family. The Queen should get rid of these whining, ego-crazed leeches – before it’s too late.

FRIDAY 10 JANUARY

I posted a new Daily Mail column attacking Harry and Meghan’s statement, and it was met with people either furiously agreeing with me, or furiously disagreeing and accusing me of being ‘obsessed’ with Meghan because she’d ghosted me (for a brief period several years ago, I’d considered us to be friends), ‘persecuting’ her, ‘damaging her mental health’ and claiming, most absurdly, that I was only attacking her because she’s black.

The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr even branded me ‘a bully in a country which has institutionalised bullying via popular press’. I found much of this reaction absurdly over-the-top. My criticism of Meghan has nothing to with her gender or skin colour. Nor is it ‘bullying’ to hold people to account if they’re on the public purse.

As for the ‘obsessed’ charge, it’s true that I’ve written and said a lot of stuff about Meghan and Harry, but that’s because they’re huge global celebrities who keep doing things that dominate the news cycle, and every time I write about them, the columns get massive traction, suggesting enormous public interest. I can’t pretend the way she personally treated me – I was dropped like a stone the moment she met Harry, after 18 months of friendly communication originated by her, and a very cordial meeting, at her request, in my local pub when she pumped me for advice on how to handle the media – hasn’t informed my view of her now, especially as I’ve seen her do the same to many others. It would surely influence anyone’s thinking if someone they considered a friend suddenly ghosted them without explanation? As Maya Angelou once said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’

MONDAY 13 JANUARY

The fallout from Harry and Meghan’s royal resignation has grown unbelievably toxic. Like everything else these days, you must either love them or hate them, there can be no middle ground. And social media has turned into a vicious battlefield with me at the centre of much of it.

The narrative has firmly positioned Meghan and Harry as victims, and people like me as the heartless tormentors. The first problem I have with this tactic from these lazy ‘woke’ activists is that it represents a deliberate attempt to shut down freedom of the press, and discussion on important cultural and societal issues. But there’s a wider concern: casually chucking around serious accusations of sexism or racism to stifle criticism is also designed to encourage the general public to take a binary, one-sided stance which risks creating further division in our increasingly divided society.

I’ve been watching this unedifying saga unfurl over the past few days with mounting fury. Predominantly, at the disgracefully disrespectful way the Sussexes are treating the Queen. But I’m also enraged by the specific growing narrative that the only reason Meghan’s been so harshly criticised by the media is because we’re all a bunch of racists living in a racist country. I just won’t accept that.

From the moment Meghan came on the royal scene, and it was revealed she was from a mixed-race background, she was welcomed with warm, open, tolerant arms by a wonderfully multi-cultural and diverse modern Britain that was thrilled to finally see a non-white member of the royal family. She was showered with almost universal praise, especially when the engagement was announced. The media, in particular, was unanimous in its verdict that this was a great thing for the country. In fact, I haven’t seen a press so united in joy for anything royal since Diana first became Charles’s girlfriend.

This extraordinary tidal wave of goodwill continued through to the big wedding in May 2018 which, by common consent, was a triumph. As I wrote myself in the Mail on Sunday the following day, ‘it mixed the best of traditional British pomp and majesty with large dollops of Markle Sparkle and the result was a bi-racial, Hollywood-fused union of very different cultures that worked magnificently well’. I added, ‘It’s hard to overstate the significance of this ceremony, beamed live around the world, to black people everywhere. To borrow the words of Dr King, this was a day when little black girls could watch TV and genuinely share little white girls’ long-held dreams of one day marrying a Prince.’

These words, I would politely suggest, do not indicate the thoughts of a racist. Yet that is what I, and others working in the British media, have now been shamefully branded for daring to criticise Meghan for her – and Harry’s – erratic and spectacularly ill-advised behaviour since the wedding.

I’ve been harsh in my criticism of the way they have treated and disowned Meghan’s father Thomas after he foolishly but naively colluded with the paparazzi. But that’s got nothing to do with her skin colour and everything to do with her tendency, as I discovered personally, to get rid of people in her life when they cease to be of use to her or become ‘problematic’. My other criticisms have been centred around their hypocrisy: Meghan having a $500,000 celebrity-fuelled baby-shower party in New York, including a lift on George’s Clooney jet, on the same day she and Harry tweeted a plea for people to think of the poor; the ridiculous lengths they went to hide basic details of their baby Archie’s birth from the public that pays for much of their lavish lives; and the way they used Sir Elton John’s private jet like a taxi service after repeatedly lecturing us all about the importance to watch our carbon footprint. None of this was racist, either overtly or subliminally. People might not agree with all or any of my criticisms, and perhaps the rhetoric I’ve occasionally used to reflect them has been a bit over the top, but they are all perfectly justified ones to make, which is why so many others have made them too.

Yet this hasn’t stopped a Twitter-driven bandwagon developing that says all criticism of Ms Markle is racially motivated. In a disgraceful column for the New York Times headlined ‘Black Britons Know Why Meghan Markle Wants Out – It’s the Racism’, author Afua Hirsch attacked the ‘racist treatment of Meghan’ and said, ‘The British press has succeeded in its apparent project of hounding Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, out of Britain.’ She cites, as examples of the supposed press racism, two things that appeared in the Daily Mail.

The first was a headline saying she was ‘(almost) straight outta Compton’, one of the most gang-ravaged parts of America in south central Los Angeles, immortalised by rap group N.W.A. Now, I’ll accept that headline was a bit misleading; Meghan actually comes from Crenshaw, a few miles from Compton, but also a place with a lot of gang-related crime. I don’t believe this piece was used as a stick to racially insult her, but as simply an interesting observation about her undeniably very different upbringing to normal royal brides. Hirsch also lambasted a journalist, Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel, for saying Meghan had ‘exotic DNA’. I can understand that to some this carries connotation of ‘othering’, suggesting Meghan is somehow a lesser royal due to her background. And Rachel could certainly have used a less inflammatory phrase to make the point that Meghan is very different to any previous royal bride.

But, again, I would argue there was no intent to be offensive. I know Rachel well and she would never have intended it to be a racist jibe. Yet, according to Ms Hirsch, this is all hard damning evidence that the British press is inherently racist and has deliberately driven out Meghan because we can’t stand the fact she’s only half-white. What a load of inflammatory bilge. Hirsch should be ashamed of herself for spewing such hateful, race-baiting nonsense in one of American’s most prominent newspapers. But she’s not been alone.

Other mainstream news outlets like CNN and the Washington Post have published similar pieces intimating it’s all about racism. Harry started all this when he attacked the media soon after their romance was made public, claiming non-existent ‘racial undertones’ in the tabloid newspapers. I saw none then and I have seen none since – because there have been none. This disingenuous nonsense is now being extended from a charge against the media to even bigger targets, with sinister threats of a ‘tell-all’ TV interview in which Meghan and Harry might apparently level sensational charges of racism at the door of other senior royals and their households.

More importantly, by crying ‘RACISTS!’ in the face of perfectly legitimate criticism, this petulant duo have made a mockery of true victims of racism. The reality is that Meghan and Harry have brought this ugly situation entirely on themselves and should somehow find the strength in their faux-victim-ravaged, virtue-signalling, self-obsessed souls to admit it has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with their fragile egos and a simmering feud with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who will always be more important in the royal family as they will one day be King and Queen.

TUESDAY 14 JANUARY

There are so many strange double standards these days. Take ‘sexism’.

Today, GMB’s excellent meteorologist Laura Tobin wore a very striking pair of skin-tight red trousers, so I jokingly complimented her for ‘parading around in hot-pants’. We get on well and often exchange such light-hearted ‘banter’. But I was immediately accused of being ‘sexist’ by several viewers on Twitter, so I read out their criticism and said, ‘When a female presenter parades herself in skin-tight leather trousers to do the weather, you are going to get people going “wow”.’

Laura, 38, clarified her outfit wasn’t made of leather. They were, apparently, ‘sustainable trousers’. ‘They’re certainly sustaining me,’ I laughed. Of course, this prompted more furious tweets, which I also read out, including one that read, ‘Well out of order, the sexist comment on Laura Tobin’s trousers. A woman should be able to wear what she likes without it being sexualised.’

Susanna Reid, my long-time co-presenter, immediately sprang to her defence, branding me ‘slightly creepy’ and saying ‘people don’t want to be objectified at work’. When I pointed out that the women on our show often compliment their appearances on air and off, Susanna retorted, ‘Complimenting each other is not the same as sexualising each other. You’re saying “hot” as an alternative to “sexy”.’ I laughed, ‘What’s wrong with being sexy?’ Laura was the least offended person. ‘Thank you for noticing and giving me some airtime!’ she declared.

But some viewers were having none of it. ‘Piers Morgan showing that making women feel uncomfortable in the workplace for how they dress is still with us in 2020!’ Another seethed, ‘Piers just went into creepy perv mode over Laura’s trousers. Very disturbing viewing.’

Various online newspaper stories erupted about me ‘humiliating’ Laura, until she eventually addressed them on Twitter, saying, ‘Lots of reaction to my trousers today, I’m not humiliated by @piersmorgan. They’re just a pair of trousers! I thought I was being stylish!’

This prompted a wave of people supporting me. ‘It’s called banter,’ one viewer tweeted, ‘having a laugh, like we used to be able to do years ago.’ Another observed, ‘I’m sure if Laura Tobin was humiliated, she’s a strong enough person to have put Piers in his place and told him so.’

All of this just left me exhausted. One of the problems with the feminism debate these days is that some women want to have their hypocritical, sexist objectification cake and eat it too. When each new series of Poldark comes out, for example, the amount of drool spewed by Britain’s women over lead actor Aidan Turner could fill an ocean, and his half-naked body fills the front pages. No man I know gives a damn about the way he’s objectified, and I bet he doesn't either, but if we did the same to a female TV star now, radical feminists would rip us to shreds.

The double standards are laughable. Take, for example, US talk-show star Ellen DeGeneres, the darling of the woke community and a woman who drips unctuous sycophancy and virtue-signalling from every pore. Nobody has been more censorious about the behaviour of ghastly lecherous men than Ms DeGeneres, who identifies as a lesbian. Yet when she appeared at the People’s Choice Awards in Los Angeles – accepting, of course, the award for ‘Favourite Humanitarian’ – she said the following: ‘You know, here’s the thing, awards are great. But what really makes me happy is making other people happy. And tonight, I want to make you happy, so – I’ve brought a shirtless photo of Chris Hemsworth to share!’ Gigantic images of the Australian actor stripped to the waist instantly beamed onto the big screens in the theatre, and to millions of viewers at home. Women in the audience screamed and howled with laughter as Mr Hemsworth smiled sheepishly and blushed. ‘You’re welcome!’ cackled Ellen, as she left the stage delighted that her gag had gone down so well.

Sexism is a bad thing – let’s all agree on that. But so is hypocrisy. Ms DeGeneres is a serial offender. In 2017, she wished Katy Perry happy birthday by posting a photo of herself leering at Perry’s cleavage with the caption, ‘Katy – it’s time to bring out the big balloons!’ Think I’d have got away with that? No, of course not.

It’s time for women to either view male humour, and obvious harmless compliments such as mine about Laura Tobin’s trousers, in the same way they view their own, or to be as indignant with themselves as they are with men when they feel the line gets crossed.

THURSDAY 16 JANUARY

James Bond will remain a man.

This shouldn’t be a sentence I ever have to write, but sadly I do. The news was revealed by Barbara Broccoli, who has run the 007 movie franchise since the death of father Cubby, in an interview with Variety.

‘James Bond can be of any colour,’ she said, ‘but he is male. I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it. I think women are far more interesting than that.’

Thank God for that. I’ve waged a lengthy campaign to save Bond from the clutches of radical feminists, who take the very laudable cause of feminism and apply a totally uncompromising intolerance to anyone who strays from their rigid belief of what is acceptable. And these radical feminists have proven far more dangerous to Bond’s existence than Jaws, Blofeld or Oddjob. After all, as a white heterosexual man who kills people, seduces random women, brazenly chats up female co-workers, drinks, gambles, smokes cigars and cracks inappropriate jokes, Bond represents the very antithesis of everything the PC-crazed snowflake world stands for, so must of course be eliminated from public life.

Broccoli spoke out after rumours began to run riot that Bond would be turned into a woman. The warning signs came with alarming regularity via leaks from the set of the latest Bond movie, No Time to Die. First, it was reported that the script began with James now retired and temporarily replaced as 007 by a black woman, played by Lashana Lynch. Then it emerged that producers had determined James must now ‘navigate the #MeToo movement’, which apparently involves him becoming a hyper-sensitive, emotionally aware wokie who cries in front of women rather than beds them. Yet is that really the kind of Bond that women want?

The campaign to neuter the most masculine icon in movie history reached an entirely predictable nadir with a call for him to become female. Astonishingly, it was actively encouraged by former Bond stars. ‘Get out of the way, guys!’ demanded feminist-by-proxy Pierce Brosnan, who played 007 four times, ‘and put a woman up there! I think it would be exhilarating, it would be exciting!’ Curiously, I don’t remember Mr Brosnan suggesting this when he was 007.

This is not about equality. I don’t object to women playing Bond because they somehow lack the requisite skills to do so. I’m sure there are many female spies operating right now who are just as adept at killing people, seducing members of the opposite sex, chatting up co-workers, drinking, gambling, smoking and cracking inappropriate jokes.

No, I object to it because James Bond is a man, was always intended to be a man by Bond writer Ian Fleming – and should therefore remain a man. As Broccoli said, you can make Bond a black man – I’d love to see Idris Elba take over from Daniel Craig – or a man of any other ethnicity for that matter, but you can’t make him a woman. If Pierce Brosnan needs someone other than me to explain why this is a dumb idea, then he should ask Rosamund Pike, who co-starred with him in Die Another Day.

‘James Bond is a character that Ian Fleming created,’ she said, ‘and the character is a man. It’s a very masculine creation. Why should a woman get sort of sloppy seconds? Why should she have been a man and now it has to be played by a woman? Why not be a kick-ass female agent in her own right?’

Exactly. By all means create your own super-spies, ladies, but for Christ’s sake, leave our guy alone. Bond, like him or loathe him, is a male, straight, womanising loner who likes killing bad guys and prefers wearing tuxedos to dresses. That’s just who he is. And that’s why he’s been so beloved for so many decades and retained such a powerful place in British culture. As Sean Connery once put it, ‘Bond is important: this invincible superman that every man would like to copy, that every woman would like to conquer, this dream we all have of survival.’

As with all these stupid ‘woke’ campaigns, very few people outside the radical liberal bubble actually want it to happen. On GMB, we ran a poll asking if Bond should be a woman and 86 per cent of viewers (in a very large response) said no. So, this is yet another example of the troubling modern phenomenon of politically correct subservience to the outraged whim of a small minority against the wishes of the vast majority. I suspect there were even more women than men voting against it, because for many women, and I hate to break this to you my darling feministas, James Bond represents gloriously macho fantasy escapism.

Unfortunately, the war on Bond is part of a wider war on masculinity. I say this as a man who’s actually proud of being a man, and who also likes being masculine. I realise this is a horrendous thing to say, and I can only offer my insincere apologies to all the radical feminists now exploding with rage. If there’s one thing they loathe even more than the M-word, it’s the longer M-word. But why? Masculinity simply means ‘having qualities or appearances traditionally associated with men’. That’s it, nothing more sinister.

It dates back to the Latin word masculus meaning ‘male, worthy of a man’ and has been widely used in the English language since the middle of the fourteenth century. By the 1620s, it was further taken to mean ‘manly, virile, powerful’.

So, for nearly 400 years, it was assumed to be a positive word, one that represented the very best of men. Not anymore.

Thanks to women of radical feminist persuasion who’ve gleefully hijacked the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns to serve their own man-hating purposes, masculinity has become the most controversial, detestable word in the English lexicon. And it’s now impossible to be ‘masculine’ without also being accused of ‘toxic masculinity’. The best conversation I’ve had about all this was with the singer Annie Lennox, who said it was ‘important to bring men with you’ on the feminist journey. ‘But,’ she cautioned, ‘the debate has to be less hostile to men for that to happen.’ Sadly, the opposite has happened and there is now constant outright hostility towards men and masculinity.

One of the more disturbing reports came from the American Psychological Association, which released a set of guidelines ‘to help psychologists work with men and boys’ in which aspects of traditional masculinity were condemned as ‘harmful’. Specifically, it stated that male traits like ‘stoicism’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘achievement’, ‘eschewal of the appearance of weakness’, ‘adventure’ and ‘risk’ should be discarded in favour of finding potentially positive aspects in traits like ‘courage’ and ‘leadership’. It basically implied that a lot of the common ideologies surrounding masculinity can lead to problems elsewhere in the social sphere.

As David French, a writer for the National Review, put it in a withering response to the report, ‘The assault on traditional masculinity – while liberating to men who don’t fit traditional norms – is itself harmful to the millions of young men who seek to be physically and mentally tough, to rise to challenges, and demonstrate leadership under pressure. The assault on traditional masculinity is an assault on their very natures. Are boys disproportionately adventurous? Are they risk-takers? Do they feel a need to be strong? Do they often by default reject stereotypically “feminine” characteristics? Yes, yes, yes and yes.’

One of the very worst things about radical feminism is the scourge of pathetic male virtue-signallers that urge them on. As an obvious (or so I thought) tongue-in-cheek joke on International Men’s Day two years ago, I tweeted, ‘Happy #InternationalMensDay! Stay strong lads, we’re not illegal – yet.’

Most people reacted in the way I would react if someone else had tweeted that – by laughing. Others weren’t so amused, bombarding me with hateful abuse about my supposed ‘toxic masculinity’. A man named Box Brown, who has a verified Twitter account and claims to be a New York Times-bestselling cartoonist, replied simply, ‘Die.’ How laughably hypocritical; this angry little clown races to attack what he presumably perceives to be my aggressive maleness – yet does so by saying he wants me dead.

While I may have joked about International Men’s Day, of course I understand and appreciate there is a very serious side to it too. The stats tell the grim story: 76 per cent of suicides are by men, 85 per cent of homeless people are men, 70 per cent of homicide victims are men, men serve 64 per cent longer in prison and are 3.4 times more likely to be imprisoned than women when both committed the same crime. And wars are still fought by male-dominated armed forces. So, it’s not all a patriarchal bed of roses being a man.

There is also no doubt women have historically been treated unfairly in terms of equality, and that many women continue to be treated unfairly. I also fully accept that women have been subjected to far more harassment, sexual abuse and domestic violence than men. That is where the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have performed a valuable public service in highlighting and exposing genuinely bad, unacceptable and in some cases criminal behaviour. In fact, I don’t know any of my male friends who wouldn’t agree with that.

However, what I refuse to accept is that all masculinity is therefore now automatically a bad thing, or that being a man is suddenly something to be ashamed about. Nor do I believe that most women actually want the kind of emasculated, papoose-clad, weeping, permanently apologising doormats that radical feminists are trying to make us become. And once again, a very important and legitimate movement – feminism – has been hijacked and its momentum redirected towards something as trivial and misguided as a war on masculinity, or on a beloved pop culture figure like Bond.

Let me therefore offer some friendly advice from a man who loves women. We don’t want to be told we can’t appreciate a female star’s beauty because it’s offensive to feminists, then see feminists like Ellen DeGeneres openly objectifying famous men’s bodies at awards shows – to no complaint. We don’t want to be informed that James Bond has to stop hitting on women because it’s now deemed politically incorrect, especially as none of the women he ever hits on seem to be anything but ecstatically thrilled about it. We don’t want to be disapprovingly frowned at for opening doors for women, or standing up for them on trains or when they walk into a room, or paying the bill for dinner if we want to.

Chivalry remains a good, not oppressive thing. We want to pride ourselves on being a protective modern-day hunter and provider, in whatever capacity that manifests itself to the benefit of a woman or family – without promptly being labelled a ‘dinosaur’ or ‘caveman’. Some of us – in fact, most of us, I suspect – like to preserve the right not to be seen blubbing in public every five minutes just to prove we’re in touch with our emotional side. In short, we’d just like to still enjoy being men, if that’s OK? Just as we’d like women to enjoy being women.

Those seeking to ignore this advice do so at their peril. For 30 years, Gillette’s commercials had unashamedly celebrated men and masculinity. They used the tagline ‘The best a man can get’ to persuade people like me to part with large sums of money for their expensive shaving blades and foam. We watched them and felt good about being male. Not just because they made us aspire to be a winner and successful achiever, but because they also encouraged us to be a good father, son, husband and friend. As a result of this consistently upbeat and positive marketing style, Gillette grew into the most successful razor firm in history, generating annual sales of $6 billion a year. I was one of its most loyal customers, buying Gillette products for over three decades. I didn’t do so because their stuff is significantly better than their main competitors. (I’ve tried them all, and they’re not especially.) I did so because I liked Gillette’s brand and what I thought it stood for. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, in another depressing act of corporate virtue-signalling, Gillette decided to turn on men, and specifically ‘toxic masculinity’.

In January 2019, the company released a new commercial, a short film entitled ‘Believe’, with the new tagline, ‘The best men can be’. Gone was the celebration of masculinity. In its place came an ugly, vindictive two-minute homage to everything that’s bad about masculinity. The film asked, ‘Is this the best a man can get?’ before flashing up images alluding to sexual harassment, sexist behaviour, the #MeToo movement and bullying – interspersed with a patronising series of educational visual entreaties about what men should do in various unpleasant situations. The subliminal message was clear: men, all men, are bad, shameful people who need to be directed in how to be better people. It was truly one of the most pathetic, virtue-signalling things I’ve ever endured watching.

Gillette said the purpose of the new campaign was to urge men to hold each other ‘accountable’ for bad behaviour. Right, because the one thing that’s not happening right now in the world is men being held accountable for bad behaviour! I don’t seek to diminish the importance of the #MeToo campaign, which has shone an important and long-overdue light on completely unacceptable sexual harassment, bullying and abuse. But why should all men be tarred with the same monstrous brush in the way this Gillette campaign sets out to do? It is the assumption that we are automatically culpable – that we have done something wrong by just existing as men – which I find so offensive. Particularly as, if a commercial was made with the same inference about women being collectively awful until they proved otherwise, outrage would soon ensue.

There was only one thing Gillette really wanted to achieve with this new campaign, and that was to emasculate the very men it had spent 30 years persuading to be masculine. As one male customer’s Twitter response, which quickly went viral, said, ‘Just used a Gillette razor blade to cut off my testicles. No more toxic masculinity for me. Thanks Gillette!’

He was not alone in his fury. The YouTube version of the ad was watched many millions of times but attracted ten times as many ‘dislikes’ as ‘likes’, fast turning ‘Believe’ into one of the least popular commercials in US history. Gillette – which believes so much in women’s rights that at the time of this commercial it had just two women on its board of nine directors – thought it was being clever by tapping into the radical feminist assault on men and masculinity. In fact, it was being unutterably dumb.

In a massive global two-fingered response, Gillette’s male product sales collapsed in the space of just a few months, causing a staggering $8 BILLION write-down in the company’s value and a humiliating U-turn back to macho commercials starring burly firemen who risk their lives. Gillette learned the hard way that most men don’t actually want to be snivelling, apologetic little snowflakes.

Somewhere in this whole masculinity debate, common sense got lost. I don’t know any woman who really wants her man to be anything but masculine, as the word was intended. Yet now they’re being encouraged by companies like Gillette to find the whole concept of masculinity repellent and to think that being ‘masculine’ means to damagingly suppress emotions, maintain a fake impression of macho hardness, and to use violence as a means to illustrate physical power and gender superiority. What a load of bollocks.

FRIDAY 17 JANUARY

The actor Laurence Fox is at the centre of a firestorm after appearing on the Question Time panel last night and getting into a fierce debate with a mixed-race audience member who called press coverage of Meghan Markle ‘racist’.

‘Let’s be really clear about what this is, and call it by its name,’ said Rachel Boyle. ‘It’s racism and she’s been torn to pieces.’

‘It’s not racism,’ replied Fox.

‘It absolutely is,’ Boyle insisted.

‘We’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe,’ Fox said. ‘It’s so easy to throw the charge of racism at everybody … and it’s really starting to get boring now.’

‘What worries me about your comment is you are a white privileged male,’ said Boyle, a comment that prompted widespread groans and boos from other audience members.

‘Oh God,’ sighed Fox, ‘I can’t help what I am, I was born like this, it’s an immutable characteristic. So, to call me a white privileged male is to be racist. You’re being racist.’

Fox then said racism should be called out when it is ‘seen, when it’s obvious and when it’s there’ and that ‘throwing racism around’ was dangerous.

There’s been a furious reaction to the clash, led by Femi Oluwole, a prominent pro-European activist, who tweeted, ‘So when Laurence Fox calls it racist to point out that he’s a white privileged male, when he’s trying to downplay racism, even though, as a white privileged male, he has even less of an experience of the adversity racism causes than I do as a black privileged male. Apparently, we should only call out racism when it’s seen and obvious … So subtle racism behind closed doors … Absolutely fine. Cheers Laurence Fox!’

This struck me as an absurd overreaction and a direct threat to his freedom of speech. Fox was right to say the Meghan media coverage hasn’t been driven by racism. He was also right to say that he has no control over his skin colour, and for someone to use that as a stick to suppress his view of racism is in itself racist and denies him the right to express a freely held opinion.

That’s not to say there aren’t racists in Britain – of course there are. Sadly, we saw all too many of them rear their ugly heads in a horrible manner during the Brexit campaign. But that doesn’t make Britain a racist country – recent polls do suggest we’re one of the least racist and most tolerant countries in Europe – nor does it mean media criticism of a high-profile black person is necessarily driven by racism. And if the woke brigade use Twitter to cancel and silence anyone and anything they deem to be racist, even when it’s patently not the case, they are furthering divisions and making things worse, not better.

Laurence Fox has been hounded mercilessly since Question Time aired, in the most disgusting and vicious way. All because he refused to accept the media coverage of Meghan Markle has been racist. He may not have personally experienced the kind of racism a black person endures, but that surely doesn’t disqualify him from discussing it. Just as Annie Lennox said about feminism, for true racial equality to succeed it will need white people to come on the journey too, and for that to happen open discussion and debate are absolutely critical. That’s what a proper liberal would call for, isn’t it?

Even more worryingly, there have now been calls to ‘cancel’ Fox’s acting career. And incredibly, they’ve come loudest from minority representatives of the actors’ union Equity, which fired off a series of accusations on Twitter against Fox, saying he wanted to ‘berate and bully women of colour attempting to discuss issues of race and gender discrimination’, was ‘playing to the gallery, a populist tirade, with women of colour being used as cannon fodder’ and ‘occupied a highly advantaged position’ while trying to ‘damn any recognition of that privilege as the very racism he claims is exaggerated when people of colour try to discuss it’. This is such a sinister attack on free speech. And where does the logic of it leave us? Can nobody now have an opinion on anything we haven’t personally experienced?

‘Cancel culture’, as it’s become known, is one of the very worst things about modern society, and it’s driven by the same woke liberals who profess to stand for tolerance. They would do well to listen to Barack Obama, who is celebrated by liberals worldwide but finds cancel culture ridiculous and harmful. Speaking in Chicago at his own Obama Foundation Summit in 2019, he warned, ‘This idea of purity and that you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke – you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting might love their kids. One danger I see with young people, particularly on college campuses … there is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough. Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.’

SATURDAY 18 JANUARY

The Queen has sensationally ordered Harry and Meghan to drop their HRH titles and repay the £2.4 million of public cash spent on Frogmore Cottage, as part of their ‘severance deal’ with the royal family. Harry will even have to give up all his military titles. It’s being billed as an ‘amicable settlement’ but it’s very clear there’s nothing remotely amicable about it. This is a bitter divorce, and like King Edward VIII, Harry’s giving everything up for his wife – a woman who seems to specialise in dropping people.

‘Only surprised it took her so long to get Harry to ditch his family, the monarchy, the military and his country,’ I tweeted. ‘What a piece of work.’ Feminists reacted with fury. TV presenter Beverley Turner said the phrase ‘piece of work’ is ‘almost uniquely aimed at women … its [sic] dehumanising and belittling.’

‘Oh Beverley, cool your “SEXISM!” jets. A “piece of work” is non-gender-specific,’ I replied. ‘People say it about me … often for very good reason.’

One of the many irritations of radical activists is their fervent desire to banish perfectly anodyne words because they’ve been weaponised. These PC language cops don’t just want to control how we think but also how we speak. By playing the victim to common-usage words, women are surely being the opposite of empowered. It just makes them look weak, and slightly pathetic. I’ve been called far worse than any of this, for a very long time, and often found it hugely empowering. It also, again, takes the focus away from very real feminist issues like the ongoing gender pay gap, which was 17.3 per cent in the UK in 2019. By ranting away about trivial nonsense like banning words, at the expense of meaningful structural change in the way women get paid, feminists shoot themselves in their stilettos.

TUESDAY 21 JANUARY

A fascinating debate erupted today over the word ‘woke’. It began when Guardian journalist Steve Rose claimed it had been weaponised by the right, like the phrase ‘politically correct’ before it, so it’s now come to be interpreted as the opposite of what it was originally intended to mean.

‘Technically,’ he wrote, ‘going by the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition, woke means “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)” but today we are more likely to see it being used as a stick with which to beat people who aspire to such values, often wielded by those who don’t recognise how un-woke they are, or are proud of the fact.’ He added, ‘Criticising “woke culture” has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle. The language has been successfully co-opted – but as long as the underlying injustices remain, new words will emerge to describe them.’

Rose is right about what’s happened to the word ‘woke’ but not about the culprits. It’s the wokies who have wrecked their own word by being so absurdly illiberal to the point where even many liberals like me find them laughable.

Freddie Gray in the Spectator responded to Rose by saying the word ‘woke’ has degenerated into ‘a meaningless term of abuse’. He argued, ‘The whole idea of being woke – suddenly alert – to racial or social injustice is not real, and never was,’ and went on to say, ‘and therefore the movement against it is similarly fake. Right-wingers have the same concept and call it “redpilling”; in both cases, it means a sort of lobotomised enlightenment for people who only enjoy feeling aggrieved. Scratch the surface – go beneath the endless viral spats between trolls on social media – and you realise that nobody means what they are saying. Nobody is actually redpilled. And nobody, come to that, is woke.’

Gray was right that these labels on both sides of the political divide have become tribal partisan badges more than a reflection of genuinely held beliefs. He was also spot on about what drives wokery, which in many instances is just blind allegiance to issues regardless of any real intellectual rigour, and a desire to be liked.

‘Many of my friends spend hours virtue-signalling (another word that is fast approaching redundancy) on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram,’ he said. ‘But if I ever ask them about it, they’ll explain that they only shared the sanctimonious meme because everyone in their office did, or they just thought that is what you have to do. […] At some point the mask becomes the man, as in the story of the Happy Hypocrite. We are what we emote. If we spend our lives hectoring and censoring each other online, that will eventually bleed into everyday life. But it’s useful sometimes to remember, as we all gorge on offence culture every day, that most people don’t mean it, and nobody is really woke.’

I don’t think that last point is true. There are many people fighting for racial and social justice who are principled, decent human beings that are knowledgeable about the issues and prepared to engage people in democratic debate about how best to fix the problems.

THURSDAY 23 JANUARY

China has now identified the mystery pneumonia-like disease in Wuhan as a new SARS-like coronavirus. It has already killed 17 people and is causing so much concern that the entire city of 11 million people has been shut down to try to contain it.

The World Health Organization, having tweeted on 14 January that there was no evidence of ‘human-to-human transmission’ with the virus, now says that is happening and has recommended avoidance of large gatherings, isolating infected people and extensive hand washing as the best way to combat its spread. It all sounds rather worrying, but in a statement to the House of Commons, Health Secretary Matt Hancock reassured MPs that it presents little danger to the UK. He said Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty has advised that the risk to the UK population is ‘low’ and that ‘while there is an increased likelihood that cases may arise in this country, we are well prepared and well equipped to deal with them’.

Hancock added that the UK ‘is one of the first countries in the world to have developed an accurate test for this coronavirus and Public Health England has confirmed to me that it can scale up this test so we are in a position to deal with cases in this country if necessary’. And he declared, ‘The public can be assured that the whole of the UK is always well-prepared for these types of outbreaks.’

In response, on behalf of the Opposition, Shadow Minister for Public Health Sharon Hodgson said, ‘There is a chance that a global pandemic can be avoided if governments across the world take the right measures in a timely fashion.’

SUNDAY 26 JANUARY

The government has continued refusing to put up any ministers for interview on GMB. It’s all been very petty, but I assumed the ban would be lifted now there appears to be a rather serious global health crisis developing with the coronavirus from China.

‘Tell the government we expect them to put up the Health or Home Secretary tomorrow,’ I emailed the GMB production team this afternoon. ‘It is their duty to appear and talk about this.’

‘We don’t have anybody to put to you for tomorrow,’ came the response from Number 10, with the patronising additional aside, ‘Thanks for checking in.’

I was so angry I tweeted, ‘As #coronavirus threatens to hit Britain, we asked the British government to put up a cabinet minister to speak about it & reassure GMB viewers. They said “nobody is available”. Shameful dereliction of duty.’ I copied in Boris Johnson for good measure.

MONDAY 27 JANUARY

Most of the show was dominated by the awful news of US basketball legend Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash, and a new interview with Thomas Markle in which he emphatically denied the press had been racist to his daughter. We also interviewed a British ex-pat, Ian Thompson, who is locked down in Wuhan and painted a disturbing, almost apocalyptic picture.

‘It’s extremely strange,’ he said, ‘and very scary too. The streets are completely empty, there’s no one walking around, and everyone’s been told to stay in their houses. There’s no transportation anywhere, and all the restaurants, bars and most shops are closed down. Local stores are open at the moment which are being supplied by special trucks coming in. The amount you can get is quite limited because everyone’s rushing and panic buying.’

Susanna and I were both shocked by what he told us. ‘Wuhan’s as big as London,’ she said during the next commercial break. ‘Can you imagine that happening here?’

THURSDAY 30 JANUARY

The WHO today declared the coronavirus – now named Covid-19 (short for Corona Virus Disease 2019) – a ‘global public health emergency’. An hour later, my youngest son Bertie posted a photo to our father and sons WhatsApp group of a man in a full white hazmat suit walking outside his halls at Bristol University.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, assuming it was some kind of student joke meme playing off the news.

‘One of the students has gone down with flu-like symptoms and been taken to hospital,’ he replied. ‘It’s scary, there were people in these suits all over the place. There was an ambulance too. If it’s coronavirus, we’re being sent home.’

‘This thing is no joke,’ my eldest son Spencer replied. ‘Look how fast it’s spreading and watch the movie Contagion.’

I looked at the photo again. It does resemble something out of Contagion – a film about a deadly virus pandemic that ravages the world. But this is obviously very real, and increasingly unsettling.

FRIDAY 31 JANUARY

Awoke this morning to breaking news that two people in England have tested positive for the disease. I wonder if one of them was that Bristol student? Is Bertie now at risk?

The troubling development rounds off a remarkably busy month for news, with horrendous bushfires in Australia, General Soleimani’s killing, Trump’s impeachment trial in the US Senate, Harry and Meghan quitting the royal family, and Kobe Bryant’s shocking death.

All of these events generated massive media attention, and furious debate – especially on social media – about hot-button issues like climate change, race, privilege, gender and nationalism. Today heralded the denouement of perhaps the most seismic and contentious story of all, with Britain’s formal withdrawal from the European Union – or Brexit as it has become known.

As someone who voted Remain but believed passionately that once my side lost the vote we had to accept the result, I’ve been dismayed to watch fellow Remainers spend the past three and a half years shrieking in fury and refusing to admit defeat. It’s been an unedifying, ugly, visceral spectacle and what’s made it particularly distasteful is that so many of these ‘Remoaners’, as they’ve been dubbed, identify themselves as liberals.

Yet their pathetic response to losing a free, democratic referendum has been the complete opposite of everything liberalism once stood for, including fairness, reason and adherence to basic principles of democracy. I became so infuriated with the sore-loser squealing that I even voted for Boris ‘Let’s Get Brexit Done!’ Johnson’s Conservative Party at the general election last month because he was the only leader promising to honour the vote of the people. Of course, this made me an even bigger target for the howling liberal woke brigade.

Today, as Brexit becomes a legal reality, the cacophony of incessant liberal whining fills the air like a toxic stench. It’s been an issue that’s ripped Britain in two, dividing families and friends, turning mainstream and social media into seething cesspits, and leaving everyone drained, fractious and indignant. Even a specially minted commemorative 50 pence Brexit coin inscribed with the seemingly non-contentious words ‘Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations’ ignited a poisonous row between deranged Remoaners and rabid Brexiters. It’s so depressing to see such utterly uncompromising attitudes, on both sides, over even something as trivial as a coin. Democracy is going to wither away unless something changes.

As with those other extraordinarily polarising subjects, Donald Trump and Meghan/Harry, Brexit is not something you’re allowed to be neutral about. It’s imperative to take a firm, unyielding position and stick to it, even if facts emerge that contradict things you believed.

Yet on Brexit and Trump, I’ve found myself in a curiously middle-of-the-road place – voting against the former but wanting it delivered to safeguard democracy, and being a good personal friend of the latter who wouldn’t vote for him but wants to cover his presidency in a fair, non-partisan, critical-where-he-deserves-it manner. None of this has gone down well with the Brexit or Trump tribes. Nuance or impartiality just doesn’t cut it anymore in political debate.

As for Meghan and Harry, I admit to viewing the pair of them as disingenuous, virtue-signalling, hypocritical, selfish, narcissistic brats. Has some of my criticism of them been too aggressive? Probably. Has it been unfair? On occasion, perhaps. So, am I part of the tribal problem?

Yes, I guess I am. I have a dog-with-a-bone personality that can be a force for good, or perhaps not so good, depending on what bone I am gnawing on – from campaigning against the Iraq War when I was Editor of the Daily Mirror and waging a lengthy battle for better gun control in America when I worked at CNN, to trying to oust former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, or just feeling very irritated by vegan sausage rolls. The only common denominator is that once the bone’s in my mouth, I find it very hard to stop gnawing, sometimes to my own detriment.

At 11 pm tonight, as Brexit became official, I felt nothing but a weary sense of relief and hope, perhaps forlornly, that we could all finally stop shouting at each other and find some common purpose.