Wake Up

Why the world has gone nuts

Piers Morgan

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780008392628
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

’The biggest threat to our freedom in the 21st century isn’t coronavirus but hysterically woke liberals trying to kill democracy by suppressing free speech.

’This is my clarion call, as a liberal myself, for them to stop screaming, shaming and cancelling everyone they disagree with, and start being part of the solution to global disharmony and division – not the problem.’

In 2020, the world faced its biggest crisis in a generation: a global pandemic. In the UK, it exposed deep divisions within society and laid bare a toxic culture war that had been raging beneath the surface. From the outset, Piers Morgan urged the nation to come to its senses, once and for all, and held the Government to often ferocious account over its handling of the crisis.

COVID-19 shed shocking light on the problems that plague our country. Stockpilers and lockdown-cheats revealed our grotesque levels of self-interest. Millennials flocked to parks for picnics, proving the rank hypocrisy of the supposedly ‘socially conscious’. Attention-seeking celebrities tried to make the war about their struggle. And the virtue-signalling woke brigade continued their furious assault on free speech, shutting down debate on important issues like gender, racism and feminism.
 
Yet just as coronavirus exposed our flaws, it also showcased our strengths. We saw selfless bravery in the heroic efforts of our healthcare staff. A greater appreciation of migrant workers. A return of local community spirit. And inspiring, noble acts from members of the public such as Captain Sir Tom Moore.
 
Wake Up is Piers’ rallying cry for a united future in which we reconsider what really matters in life. It is a plea for the return of true liberalism, where freedom of speech is king. Most of all, it is a powerful account of how the world finally started to wake up, and why it mustn’t go back to sleep again.

March

Womxn? Bullshixt

SUNDAY 1 MARCH

The ridiculous government ban on ministers coming on GMB remains in force, so when I saw Matt Hancock appearing on Andrew Marr’s BBC One show this morning, I tweeted him some forceful words of encouragement. ‘Will you be coming on GMB tomorrow to inform our viewers of the latest situation, or will you be snubbing us as the entire cabinet has done since the election? Our viewers pay your salary, you have a duty in times of crisis to address their concerns. Snub us & you snub them.’

We were later informed he would indeed be snubbing us, and our viewers, so I told the GMB team to book his Labour shadow counterpart Jon Ashworth instead. Naturally, Ashworth agreed faster than a greyhound flies out of a trap. I announced this on Twitter: ‘We’ll have him [Ashworth] on every day he wants to appear during the coronavirus crisis, as Fridge-Hider Boris Johnson & his cowardly cabinet continue to snub our viewers.’ Ashworth was thrilled. ‘If you’re offering,’ he tweeted back, ‘I’m more than happy to come on every day, let’s book it in!’

Based on 25 years of dealing with governments since I first became editor of the News of the World in 1994, my guess is that this little exchange will finally force Hancock’s hand. It’s one thing to boycott a show, it’s quite another to see your rival taking up all the airtime you have surrendered, especially during a crisis. It’s pathetically gutless and a dereliction of ministerial duty to be accountable to the electorate. It’s also breathtakingly hypocritical.

Aside from the fact Boris Johnson used to be a journalist who banged on ad nauseam about the vital importance of democracy and freedom of speech, the man behind the ban is Number 10’s Director of Communications Lee Cain, who previously worked for the Daily Mirror, where he used to dress up as a giant yellow chicken and harangue Conservative politicians in the street for avoiding TV debates.

MONDAY 2 MARCH

In the USA, Senator Amy Klobuchar has quit the Democratic presidential candidate race – which means the remaining candidates are Elizabeth Warren, aged 70, Bernie Sanders, 78, Michael Bloomberg, 78, and Joe Biden, 77. The party of diversity will now likely choose a candidate from three old white guys to take on a 73-year-old white guy. It’s one thing to talk the talk on liberal values, it’s another to actually walk it. If wokies spent less time shrieking about Donald Trump and more time focusing on their own liberal backyard, they might have found a more inspiring, diverse and less hypocritical line-up.

TUESDAY 3 MARCH

NHS England today declared coronavirus a ‘Level 4 incident’ – its highest level of emergency. Britain hasn’t yet suffered a death on her own soil from the disease, but we’ve now had 30 reported cases, and we’ve all seen what carnage it’s already caused in many other countries. Covid-19, the most dangerous threat to public health since the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago, is here and wreaking its havoc.

Matt Hancock, who as I predicted, finally agreed to be interviewed on GMB after we handed airtime to his opposite number, appeared down the line from Westminster. ‘These circumstances are very concerning,’ he said, ‘and we have a clear plan for how the country can get through this as well as possible. We’re still in the phase where we’re trying to contain this disease, working internationally, and trying to stop it from becoming widespread right across the country as it has in some other places. But we’re also setting out today the sorts of measures we might have to take if it becomes more widespread. We’re not saying these are things we will definitely do, and lots of them are things I’m reluctant to do, but we will do them if the scientists tell us they will help to keep people safe.’

‘Health Secretary,’ I replied, ‘the truth is it’s going to be when, not if, isn’t it? SARS in its entire duration infected just over 8,000 people and killed 770 or so. We’re already at 89,000 coronavirus infections and over 3,000 deaths. We know the rate of transmission is massively faster than anything we’ve seen or that I can remember. So surely it is now time for the government to accept this and to start getting ahead of this by taking dramatic action. What surprises me is there’s a lot of talk about what we might do, but what we’re not doing is what the Chinese did, which is go into effective lockdown. Why are we not doing that, and what will it take for the government to take us into similar territory?’

‘We’ll follow the scientific advice on what works,’ Hancock replied.

He then said people should carry on flying, schools should stay open and mass gatherings should continue, including big football matches, which he said ‘would not be appropriate’ to cancel. None of this makes any sense to me. Why is it OK for large groups of people to be mingling together if this is such a virulently transmissible virus?

‘Should people be shaking hands?’ I asked.

‘I’ve taken the medical advice on that and the medical advice is that the impact of shaking hands is actually very small. What matters is that you wash your hands more regularly than usual and, as the prime minister said, sing “Happy Birthday” while you’re doing it.’

Again, I was baffled. This answer was totally at odds with current WHO advice, which states that people should ‘avoid shaking hands’ to protect themselves and others from Covid-19, and warns, ‘Respiratory viruses can be passed by shaking hands and touching your eyes, nose and/or mouth.’

Shaking hands as a lethal virus spreads is obviously not a good idea. Common sense seems to have been abandoned. I ended by asking Hancock the most burning question. ‘Given the rate of expansion of coronavirus now into 80 countries, whereas SARS only got into 29 countries, and given the rate of transmission, what are the chances of this developing into a global pandemic?’

‘We do think that is a very serious possibility,’ he said. ‘But we haven’t given up on containing it yet.’ What I don’t understand is how we intend to contain it, if our only weapon appears to be handwashing.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan appeared later in the programme and declared, ‘There is no risk in using the tube or buses or other forms of public transport.’

I was incredulous.

‘How do you know that, Mr Mayor?’ I retorted. ‘No disrespect, but how on earth can you say that in a city of 12 million people there is no risk given that we now know it’s here and it’s beginning to spread here and we know that in other countries the spread has been ferocious, places like Italy and Iran. How can you say as Mayor of London there is no risk to people using public transport?’

‘Because I rely upon the advice I receive from Public Health England and the Chief Medical Officer,’ he replied, ‘and the advice is you’re not going to catch it if you wash your hands regularly and if you use public transport … on the tube on a daily basis there are five million journeys, on our buses six million journeys. The evidence we have so far is it’s possible to contain it.’ As with Hancock’s responses, this sounded extraordinarily complacent.

‘You seem remarkably relaxed about big numbers of people being in close proximity to big numbers of other people,’ I persisted, ‘when in Italy they’ve now cancelled big football matches … and when the evidence from other places is that once this thing starts in a country it moves very fast.’

‘It’s really important we take the advice we’re given,’ he replied. ‘We’ve had no fatalities in our country, and I would say to GMB viewers to have confidence in our experts.’

‘Are you shaking people’s hands?’ I asked.

‘I’m not,’ Khan replied.

What?! My incredulity returned. ‘You say there’s no risk to people using public transport in confined areas around lots of people,’ I snapped, ‘yet here’s you, the London Mayor, saying you’re no longer shaking people’s hands because you’ve taken a view that there is a risk.’

‘The advice is that it’s perfectly safe to use the tube and public transport,’ the mayoral parrot replied. Again, where does common sense come into it?

Boris Johnson later hosted the daily government coronavirus news briefing and warned we need to prepare against ‘a possible, very significant expansion of coronavirus in the UK population’. Asked if he was still shaking hands, he boasted, ‘I can tell you I’m shaking hands continuously! I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands, and it’s very important that people should make up their own minds but our judgement is that washing your hands is the crucial thing.’

It was an extraordinary spectacle. Why would anyone, let alone the leader of a country, encourage people to shake as many hands as possible given the WHO has said the coronavirus is easily transmitted in that way? Why would Boris think we’d all be pleased to know this?

Three more things happened today that made me think the shit with coronavirus just got very real. First, the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned after massive spikes in coronavirus infection in the worst-hit countries like South Korea, Italy, Iran and Japan, ‘We are in unchartered territory.’ He also revealed the death rate for it has risen to 3.4 per cent compared with less than 1 per cent for regular seasonal flu.

Second, America’s Federal Reserve took the drastic emergency move to slash the interest rate by half a percentage point to limit damage to the economy from the virus. To put this into perspective, the US central bank hasn’t done anything like this since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 to trigger the global financial crisis. And nobody’s convinced that slashing interest rates now will make much difference to combating a disease. ‘It’s like placing a Band-Aid on an arm to cure a headache,’ said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economist. Indeed, after a brief rally, the cut prompted a further crash in the stock markets, which have already been suffering their worst run since 2008.

Third, the Queen – the very epitome of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ common sense – wore long, heavy-duty white gloves to present members of the public with honours at Buckingham Palace, the first time she is believed to have ever done this for an investiture.

Oh, and if all this wasn’t disconcerting enough, the French health minister called for a ban on the nation’s favourite practice, kissing. None of this seems like an overreaction to me.

In the USA, President Trump is desperately keen to keep a lid on a health crisis that could yet pose a decisive threat to his chances of winning the 2020 election in November. ‘Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,’ he tweeted, the day after the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) said the spread of the virus was inevitable. The CDC’s prediction sent the media into overdrive, which prompted Mick Mulvaney, acting White House chief of staff, to say it was overreacting about coronavirus because ‘they think this is going to be what brings down the president’. But ironically, it will be underreaction to coronavirus by the Trump administration that could bring down the president.

If tough decisions need to be taken to contain the virus, then take them now. Nobody with half a brain will blame leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson for doing too much too soon to combat what is clearly a very serious global threat to human life. But people rarely forgive their leaders for doing too little, too late. I’m not a normal panicker but I think coronavirus is going to be much more serious than people realise. And the war against it won’t be helped by either timidity or wokery.

The WHO has issued a new advisory saying: ‘DO – talk about people “acquiring” or “contracting” #Covid-19 … DON’T – talk about people “transmitting Covid-19”, “infecting others” or “spreading the virus” as it implies intentional transmission & assigns blame.’ What an absurd load of virtue-signalling guff.

This really doesn’t seem a good time to be going all politically correct on the language used to describe how you catch the virus. Surely, the stronger the wording, the more impact it will have and the more lives it will save. And conversely, the weaker the wording, the less impact it will have, and the fewer lives it will save. This bullshit advisory will simply annoy people and make them less likely to follow the guidance. So, in an absurd attempt to appease the wokies and PC language cops, the WHO – whose whole purpose is to save lives – may now cost lives.

WEDNESDAY 4 MARCH

Amid the growing global alarm over coronavirus, actress Busy Philipps announced on Twitter, ‘I will never stop talking about my abortion or my periods or my experiences in childbirth, my episiotomies, my yeast infections, or my ovulation that lines up w/ the moon!’

Dear God, if there’s only one good thing that comes out of this crisis, can it be that celebrities stop telling us about their yeast infections?

THURSDAY 5 MARCH

There’s been the first Covid-19 death on UK soil and the WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned: ‘We’re concerned that in some countries the level of political commitment & the actions that demonstrate that commitment don’t match the level of the threat we all face. This is NOT a drill, NOT the time to give up, NOT a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops.’

It’s staggering to me that people, let alone world leaders, need to be told this given what’s happening in Italy, which today reported 769 new cases and 41 new deaths (bringing its death total to 148). It’s turning into total carnage there, yet Italy has one of the world’s best health-care systems.

Matt Hancock appeared on Question Time tonight and got a ridiculously easy time, so much so that he tweeted afterwards what ‘a pleasure’ it had been. He should have had much tougher interrogation, particularly given his continued insistence that mass gatherings are fine and don’t need to be cancelled.

‘Public gatherings aren’t a problem?’ I tweeted, incredulously. ‘Really? Then why is half the world moving to stop them?’

It would be nice to think we could enjoy a cessation of nauseating wokery until this is all over, but sadly not. Across the pond, Elizabeth Warren has pulled out of the race to be Democratic nominee, and of course blamed sexism. ‘One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years,’ she moaned. ‘That’s going to be hard.’

What self-pitying tripe, straight out of the Hillary ‘I won the popular vote!’ Clinton playbook. The truth is neither Clinton nor Warren ran good enough campaigns to beat the men they ran against. Playing the sexism card is pathetic and completely unjustified, and why should ‘little girls’ only want to vote for women anyway? Warren’s statement suggests women can’t win a US election at the moment, when there is no evidence to support that theory. They just need to be better candidates. Cynics said the same about a black person becoming president, then Obama came along to prove them all wrong by running a brilliant campaign.

This ‘pinky promises’ nonsense does women such a disservice.

FRIDAY 6 MARCH

Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd has been no-platformed by students half an hour before she was due to speak at Oxford University’s UN Women Oxford UK Society today about her experiences of being a minister for women and equalities.

Rudd, who stepped down as an MP in December, had her invitation pulled because of her previous involvement in the Windrush scandal. She was forced to resign as home secretary in April 2018, after it emerged that a large number of black legal immigrants had been illegally detained, denied legal rights, and in 83 cases deported from Britain, many of them people who had arrived before 1973 from Caribbean countries as members of the ‘Windrush generation’ – named after the Empire Windrush boat that brought one of the first groups of West Indian migrants to the UK in 1948.

It was a disgraceful episode, and Rudd was right to take responsibility and fall on her ministerial sword. But it should not disbar her from ever speaking to students about women’s rights. Rudd condemned her treatment by the students as ‘badly judged and rude’ and urged them to ‘stop hiding and start engaging’.

I’d have gone a lot further than that if they tried to pull this stunt on me. Surely, the whole point of university is to have your own opinions challenged, and to challenge other people’s opinions – not ban anyone whose opinions you don’t like? Why have our students become such a bunch of spineless snowflakes?

Universities used to be a place where contrary opinions were not just encouraged but considered essential to a student’s education. Somewhere that liberalism – discourse – was embraced and championed, and where freedom of speech was celebrated. Life on campus was once full of rigorous lively debate and speakers of all types were invited to come and give their opinions, the more controversial the better. Now, the only permitted opinions in universities around the world are those that the woke brigade have deemed permissible....

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: The World’s Gone Nuts
• JANUARY: ‘Wuhan’s as big as London’
• FEBRUARY: Pantomime Villain
• MARCH: Womxn? Bullshixt
• APRIL: PM in ICU. No PPE for NHS
• MAY: ‘What about you, Fatso?’
• JUNE: ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’
• JULY: It’s Not Black or White
• CONCLUSION: Time to Wake Up
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher