Today’s blog-post-topic is controversial, as is the author of the quoted book. Naturally, all I write is my personal view only, as usual.
Piers Morgan as a journalist is certainly controversial, and has been never shy of telling his opinion about other people in a direct and often very rude way.
Still, he has fought battles, came out sometimes as winner and sometimes as looser, and in general is somebody to be taken seriously from my point of view.
If one word in this post gets overused, it is ‘controversial’. This probably shows Piers Morgan’s style best.
In the 1990s he was a British tabloid journalist, soon a very high ranking one, editing some of the most known and notorious newspapers. He came to my knowledge because I bought his first book “The INSIDER” at a whim during a stop-over at Dubai airport (as the still attached price tag shows). The front cover gathered all those famous British people I had grown up with on TV or read about in the 1990s and early 2000s; Princess Diana, Tony Blair, the Beckhams etc. In the book, Piers Morgan came through as a not very empathic person, but one with a strong opinion and mostly common sense.
In the years that followed, when his name was mentioned in the news or elsewhere “Piers Morgan goes to the USA”, “Piers Morgan is now an important TV Host” and so on, I always thought “ah him, what is he doing now, let’s check”.
One of the bigger controversies, something you couldn’t help but notice, was his antipathy towards (and the mutual dislike with) Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, which made him quit his British show.
When his book “WOKE IS DEAD, How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness” popped up on amazon, I bought it.
The whole woke-culture over the last years had just grazed me; there were things I thought weird like that some singer was cancelled from a leftist music festival because she wore dreadlocks (so called a case of cultural appropriation) or when parents told me their 8-year-old child got asked in school by teachers if they really felt like a boy or a girl and they should think about their sexual identity. Gender-neutral language was a topic to wonder, and even more so activists’ ideas to change books that had been written 150 years ago and were classics by now.
I have many queer friends, as well as people with different skin colours, and think that everyone should live as he or she wants to. Frederik the Great, a German king in the 18th century had said: “Jeder soll nach seiner Facon glücklich werden” (Let everyone seek happiness in his/her own fashion). On the other end of the political spectrum, left wing Rosa Luxemburg’s quote from the 20th century “Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden” (Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently) has always been a lightning star.
We know well that instead of allowing their people this personal freedom, governments around the world have interfered heavily in the private lives of their citizens, deciding queerness a crime and so on. In Germany real equality between sexes and identities of humans started to become reality only during the last quarter of the 20th century. In many countries this has not happened at all.
Still, I must admit I never really understood all the legal implications of the woke movement of the last years. As usual, an American movement had first reached the UK and then continental Europe. The USA are on a full retreat to the changes in laws that had been made before (DEI politics). President Trump’s administration cut down hard on far reaching inclusion programs.
Piers Morgan sums it up on page 87 of his book in a case about firefighters “The point about DEI is not that woman, black people, or gay people are unfit to be firefighters. It’s about a systematic misjudgement of priorities in which identity is of equal or greater importance than ability”.
In the UK, the Supreme Court decided in mid-2025 that biological women (adult females) are only those born as women. One’s sex cannot be decided by a non-controlled certificate of a registry office, as it had been possible the years before.
Germany lags behind. The “Gleichstellungsgesetz” (Equality Act) was made law only in November 2024. People can now go to a registry office once a year and say they feel (to simplify it) as a man or a woman if they are not a man or a woman in the biological way. And afterwards the law gives them the right to be treated as the sex they feel they belong to.
Whilst Piers Morgan writes of rapists becoming inmates of women prisons and doing exactly what one would expect, in Germany a right-wing extremist was one of the first to change his sex to female. You can google Sven-Marla Liebich and see an interesting picture. The change of sex was accepted by the registry office and as a woman Sven-Marla Liebich had the right to a place in a woman’s prison when she was convicted of crimes. Instead, she fled to Russia. Her old self had given rude comments about queer-, gender, and transpeople, amongst other offences. This is an extreme case; there are certainly many people who are happy and relieved that they can now live as they always wanted. It is difficult to keep the line.
There are many examples in Piers Morgan’s book that make you think, like male athletes who are allowed to compete against females because they decided to be a female, and so on.
Most of the woke movement had good intentions, but good intentions do not necessarily mean a job well done.
Let us hope there is a middle way, that gives people the right to make changes to their identity, if they feel they must, without breaking common sense.
Piers Morgan writes in his typical controversial style about a worthy topic.
Nothing is worse than ‘cancel culture’, and nothing demonstrates more clearly that something is wrong than when a state takes too great an interest in the private lives of its citizens. Rosa Luxemburg and Frederik the Great are people to remember; they were far ahead of their time.
All rights to the books belong to:
Morgan, Piers: WOKE IS DEAD, How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness, 2025, published by HarperCollings Publishers, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE 1 9GF, printed and bound in the UK, HB ISBN: 978-0-00-855549-8, PB ISBN: 978-0-00-855550-4
Morgan, Piers: THE INSIDER, The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade, 2005, first published by Ebury Press in Great Britain in 2005, printed and bound in Great Britain, ISBN: 009190849-3