The late Queen Elizabeth was the ultimate antidote to a world gone nuts. For 70 years she reigned with quiet dignity and wry wisdom. Wars raged, governments imploded, markets crashed, the web sent everybody insane. And all the while, she sat atop the frenzy as an enduring symbol of comforting consistency.
When she died, many people fretted about the future of the monarchy without its seemingly eternal figurehead. And there is no doubt the royal family has taken a battering, not least a five-year onslaught from Prince Harry and Princess Pinocchio, the Sussex separatists, who attacked the institution as a cruel and racist anachronism.
In my view they did so just to boost their own brand. But the monarchy under King Charles is doing what monarchy does – enduring, calmly above the fray. Brand Sussex, meanwhile, is now about as popular as Ebola.
When I denounced their infamous whine-a-thon interview with Oprah Winfrey, the MyTruth pioneer, in 2021 and lost my job hosting breakfast television as a result, it came at the very apex of woke insanity.
We were in the age of endlessly offended cancel culture, when everybody was assumed guilty until proven innocent, especially on socially sensitive matters like race or mental health. Self-certifying as a victim – as Harry and Meghan so publicly did – meant your truth was gospel.
Wokeness was the denial of facts, reason, science and logic whenever they were inconvenient. Debate was stifled and people scared into compliance. For a while, everything had to be racist. The only acceptable opinion was that racism is everywhere and that everything was broken.
But that era, I am glad to report, is now over, thanks to a defiant barrage of straight-talking common sense ideas that many people feared were gone for good, the door slamming shut on a decade of outrage, super-sensitivity and censorship. Wokeness has burned itself out by projecting a miserable, dystopian version of humanity that the vast majority of us do not recognise.
Nobody really wants to live in a society of curtain-twitching snitches and armchair detectives raking over ‘problematic’ social media posts from a decade ago. Nobody really enjoys walking on eggshells and waiting for a knock on the door from the fun police.
Piers Morgan says he discovered Meghan had demanded his ‘head on a spike’ in a letter to ITV chiefs after saying he didn’t believe her allegations against the Royal Family
We’ve been liberated from the tyranny of the always offended and given a fresh crack at a world without cancel culture. So relax. Kick your shoes off. Feel the weight lifting from your shoulders and breathe in the freedom to say what you please, ignore the histrionics and follow your gut instinct.
As a result I don’t think the reaction to Harry and Meghan’s damaging allegations about the royal family would be anywhere near as unquestioning and sympathetic if the same interview happened today. Riding a woke wave of self-pitying martyrdom may have been the only smart thing the Sussexes have ever done.
But waves have to break in the end – and so does the public’s patience with liars. None of Harry and Meghan’s most sensational accusations of royal racism – the charge that unnamed royals were worried about their future son’s skin colour, nor Meghan’s claim that she was denied help for suicidal thoughts – has ever been supported by a shred of verified independent evidence. After I was forced to quit Good Morning Britain for stating that I didn’t believe a word Meghan had said, I discovered she’d demanded my head on a spike in a letter to ITV chiefs, who instructed that I either publicly apologise to her or leave my job. Meghan’s failed attempt to defenestrate me has made me a small storyline in the soap opera she and Harry crafted to settle scores and sell their wares.
Not for a single fleeting moment, though, have I ever regretted defending my right – and everybody else’s right – to give an opinion. Nor have I ever thought that she may have been telling the truth.
Both Good Morning Britain and the Sussexes have watched their ratings tumble ever since. Because of their atrociously treacherous deeds, the public has come to detest them with a voracious zeal, partly because they feel shortchanged.
Shortly after Megxit (a phrase which Harry has bizarrely branded ‘misogynistic’), Netflix signed a reported $100 million deal with the renegade royals in the expectation of massive revelations. Their self-titled documentary series – two years in the making – was to be spread across six hour-long episodes and released in two tantalising parts.
Surely, this is when we’d finally learn which racist royals had disgracefully smeared their unborn child and who exactly had callously refused Meghan’s plea for help at her hour of utmost need? Not a word of it.
The deceit began before the series was even released with a trailer that coincided with a visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales to the US, the first major royal tour since the Queen’s death. It was a typically grubby, cynical, self-serving ploy to overshadow a crucial restorative moment for William and Kate, whom they have long resented for being more popular and – as the future King and Queen – more important.
Harry and Meghan’s documentary series on Netflix was a ‘cynical, self-serving ploy to overshadow a crucial restorative moment for William and Kate’, says Morgan
There was misleading use of carefully selected clips and photographs. One was of a braying pack of paparazzi photographers, jostling for space to hound the happy couple.
But the photographers shown were actually at the premiere of a Harry Potter movie – five years before the Sussexes even met and at which no royals were present.
An apparently sneaky paparazzo was shown lurking high above the Sussexes to steal a shot of them walking with their baby. But it quickly emerged he had been invited, by them, to document their meeting with Desmond Tutu.
Another photo showed Harry stretching out his hand to shield the couple’s privacy as flashbulbs illuminated his panic-stricken face. It was cropped to disguise the fact that Harry was hugging his ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy, way back in 2007 when Meghan Markle was starring as a briefcase girl on the US game show Deal or No Deal. A rabid press scrum shown hounding the couple in the street was really outside an entirely unrelated court appearance by British model Katie Price.
The show doubled down on the narrative that a happy couple were hounded out of the racist UK by a bullying press. But if the UK media’s harassment was so unrelenting and vile, why couldn’t they find a single legitimate clip to illustrate it?
Reviews were unkind – even the Guardian called it ‘sickening’. I watched with mounting fury as they portrayed my country to the rest of the world as a spiteful bigoted hellhole where the press simply would not tolerate a biracial royal family.
The British tabloid press has undeniably behaved badly in the past, mirroring times when society writ large was far less tolerant of minorities of all kinds.
But Harry and Meghan got none of that. Meghan was in fact lauded for bringing diversity and star power to the dated monarchy.
Morgan was forced to quit Good Morning Britain for stating that he didn’t believe a word Meghan had said
Together with William and Kate they were hailed as the fresh-faced ‘fab four’ who could rejuvenate the royal brand for the 21st century.
The Netflix series made relentless distasteful use of Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana, to stoke sympathy for Meghan. The vain attempt to put Meghan on the same lofty pedestal as the most famous and most pursued royal in history was frankly disgraceful.
Princess Diana faced more intrusion on any single day of her adult life than Meghan has in her lifetime. And the whole simpering sob story about star-crossed lovers who fled for the safety and privacy of their young family just doesn’t pass muster.
They moved to California, celebrity Mecca, where they immediately signed massive podcast and streaming deals before taking regular public potshots at their estranged family and allowing a documentary crew to film their every move. They don’t want privacy; they want propaganda.
The final episodes of their constructed reality show attempted to build a reality that was recognisable only to Harry and Meghan – torching what little was left of their relationship with the royals. Harry mauled his brother William, painting him as a ‘screaming’ hothead who ‘bullied’ them out of the family and was complicit in press smears on the Sussexes.
He accused his own dad, the King, of being a ‘liar’ who put vanity before fatherhood. Even the recently deceased Queen was appallingly presented as a dupe, manipulated by sinister courtiers in the dark plot against them. All of it was based on a breathless one-sided account of family conversations that were obviously intended to be, yes, private.
The family must have been anguished and enraged to stand by as their reputations were trashed on a global platform, but the Palace maintained its usual dignified silence of ‘never complain, never explain’.
Pretty much everybody else in the world had something to say, though – how could they not? It was a blistering attack not only on the institution of the monarchy but also on the senior royals who represent the UK to the rest of the world.
Morgan denounced the pair’s ‘whine-a-thon’ with Oprah Winfrey in 2021
Many people were furious. Long-serving BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell, normally unruffled and bent double to avoid controversy, said on live TV: ‘The idea that anyone was out to destroy her [Meghan], frankly, I think is absurd and simply does not stand up to proper and reasonable scrutiny.’
Reporters had a field day filleting the show to expose a whole catalogue of fibs, ranging from Meghan’s bogus claim that she received ‘no training’ on how to be a royal and an instantly disproven boast that she always wore muted colours to avoid standing out. Hundreds of official photographs proved immediately that she wore more primary colours than the Pride flag.
Harry was also mocked for insisting he was bravely ‘speaking truth to power’. Yes, Prince Henry Charles Albert David, The Duke of Sussex, Earl of Dumbarton and Baron Kilkeel, sticking it to the big guy!
The show was a massive publicity success and remains one of the biggest series ever on Netflix. The Sussexes very savvily manipulated the clickbait culture of social media validation, which rewards victimhood without evidence and wallowing without reason. But at what cost? They had sold their royal souls to become reality stars.
They severed their link to the one thing that made them interesting – royalty. And as they are now discovering, it was a Faustian pact. You can only do that once. They now have to rely on their subatomic nano-personalities, which is proving to be exactly as fruitful as I’d expect.
There has also been a much broader cultural backlash to the trend of automatically exalting every self-proclaimed victim of anything. Suddenly personal injustice warriors are regarded with at least a bit of scepticism until they show the one thing Harry and Meghan have never provided – proof.
Harry’s memoir Spare was one last dip in the royal revelations river as it rapidly ran dry.
The 416-page self-helpless book detailed every grievance he’d ever had while trading his dignity for a reported $27 million fee. The privacy-obsessed prince laid bare every tawdry detail of his previously private life, from drug abuse to losing his virginity and getting frostbite on his ‘todger’ at the North Pole. Having wailed about his security – even suing the British state for downgrading his taxpayer-funded protections – he chose to boast about killing 25 Taliban ‘chess pieces’ as a soldier in Afghanistan.
Several paparazzi photos used in the Netflix documentary were misleading. One was actually taken, for example, at a Harry Potter movie premiere
This crass misjudgement was criticised by even those who served alongside him for endangering both them and the security teams who currently look after him.
And he again spared no mercy for his closest family, accusing brother William of knocking him down in a physical attack and branding stepmother Camilla a ‘dangerous villain’ who sacrificed him at ‘her personal PR altar’. Rest in peace, irony.
Most outrageously of all, in an interview with ITV Harry dramatically and ludicrously washed his hands of the original race charge against the royals, claiming that he’d been talking about ‘unconscious bias’ by his family rather than racism. Yet he and Meghan flew then to New York – on a private jet, obviously – to collect a human rights award for their ‘heroic’ stand against ‘structural racism’.
The impact of all those race claims was tectonic. Tens of millions of people around the world were left with the unavoidable impression that Britain is a racist country, with racists at the very heart of our royal family.
A commentator on CNN told viewers: ‘Of course they are racist! That’s what the entire monarchy is built on.’ Global media duly began scouring every royal outing for a subtle sign of simmering internal bigotry.
A Caribbean tour by the Cambridges, which would normally have fluttered by as a medley of smiley photo opportunities, was overshadowed by a contrived debate about past imperial sins, arguments about reparations, demands for apologies and self-flagellating about learning the lessons of the past.
Britain’s monarchy undoubtedly has a lot to answer for. Henry VIII had a ‘problematic’ relationship with women. His daughter Queen Mary enjoyed burning Protestants, which is almost certainly now a ‘hate crime’. Britain has had kings and queens who were dumb, mean, malevolent or useless.
But it would be quite odd for King Charles to apologise for historic misogyny because one of his predecessors hunted old ladies he suspected of being witches.
Harry and Meghan as they leave Windsor Castle after their wedding in May 2018
Ironically, the monarchy that Harry and Meghan trashed has always been a vessel for a healthy, unifying type of patriotism that is unsullied by politics. Big royal occasions like the King’s coronation bring everybody together in celebration of how we all ended up here together.
The royals may bitterly disappoint us (cc: Prince Andrew) but we still love the institution, just as families stick with football teams for generations even when the current players are garbage.
There’s no doubt the royals felt personally wounded by the attacks, not least with regard to racism.
Prince William felt compelled to break protocol to tell reporters: ‘We are very much not a racist family.’ I gladly played a small role in burying the obscene race claims for good when Harry and Meghan’s self-appointed publicist, Omid Scobie, published a gossipy, pro-Sussex book called Endgame in 2023.
He boasted that he knew the names of Meghan’s ‘royal racists’ and simply couldn’t use them for legal reasons. But the names appeared in the Dutch edition of Endgame, and I named them live on air in my TV show as King Charles and Catherine, Princess of Wales.
I did that because speculation was raging out of control, dragging the whole royal family across the coals again. But also because, once you know the names, it becomes blindingly obvious just how absurd the accusations are.
Whatever your view of the monarchy, I don’t think any serious person really believes that King Charles or the Princess of Wales have a racist bone in their bodies. Judging by the public reaction, this was only the endgame for the royal race-baiters.
When both the King and Princess of Wales revealed they were battling cancer, the bombshell announcements were met with an outpouring of public sympathy. They won plaudits worldwide for sharing the grim news and emboldening others to do the same.
Then, a few months before Kate got the all-clear, she and the Prince of Wales released a stunningly powerful three-minute film about her battle with cancer to reveal she’d now completed chemotherapy. In decades of royal coverage, I had never seen anything like it.
Soul-stirring footage showed the family and their children embracing and holding hands; clearly besotted with one another. Kate’s commentary about her personal health struggle and the impact on her family was word-perfect in its honesty, humility and hope.
Little more than an hour later, Netflix released a promo for a new series on polo made by Harry and Meghan.
One video was an extraordinarily powerful, moving and profoundly inspiring insight into what it’s like to have a life-threatening illness when you have a loving young family, irrespective of wealth or status.
The other, featuring two brats who ditched royal duty and service for self-enriching Hollywood glamour, was a self-promotional plug for a series on a sport so elite that only millionaires play it.
Regardless of whether Meghan and Harry deliberately rushed out this promo to spoil Kate’s announcement or just to capitalise on the megaton-sized global attention it instantly received, it landed like a plop of pigeon poop on a bare head.
The same can be said of everything they’ve done since. Polo was scorched by critics and watched by almost nobody. Spotify cancelled its $20 million deal with the Sussexes, which yielded just 12 episodes in two years of a show called Archetypes but which a senior Spotify executive felt should have been called ‘The F***ing Grifters’.
Meghan’s Netflix lifestyle show – With Love, Meghan – was derided as ‘toe-curlingly unlovable’ and quickly followed Polo into the ratings abyss.
The brutal truth is that nobody cares about their post-royal life.
I’ve long called for King Charles to remove their titles and cut off their only remaining monetisable feature, especially given that the title of Sussex, which happens to be my home county, was awarded to them by the monarchy they abandoned. Meghan has reportedly spent less than six hours there in her entire life.
I’m often accused of being ‘obsessed’ with Harry and Meghan, but the truth is I find them increasingly tedious. I comment on them, as everybody else does, because they keep doing outrageous things.
But I truly relish the day they are so irrelevant I don’t have to talk about them any more, and it appears to be almost upon us.
At first glance, the British monarchy should be finished. How can a definitionally elitist system of illogical birthrights survive in a society that loathes ‘privilege’ and rages against ‘elites’?
It prevails precisely because it stands for nothing but continuity in a world roiled by people who want to change everything. It has survived woke, and survived the Sussexes, the way it survives every crisis.
Harry and Meghan threw the kitchen sink at mobilising culture warriors for their crusade. There was victimhood, trauma, mental health, social justice, racial justice, personalised truth.
But most people are sick of all that – and of them.
- Adapted from Woke Is Dead by Piers Morgan (HarperCollins, £22), to be published October 23. © Piers Morgan 2025. To order a copy for £18.70 (offer valid to October 18; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.