Piers Morgan vs Andrew Tate was toxic and fruitless – but that was the point

How does one describe Piers Morgan’s interview with Andrew Tate? The former News of the World editor welcomed the popular right-wing influencer and alleged sex trafficker onto his Uncensored interview web series last night, amid a week of violent, racist rioting across the UK. Tate was one of the most prominent voices to share the false claim that the man who murdered three young children in Southport was an illegal migrant; as racially motivated riots and hate crimes broke out across the UK, Tate continued to share incendiary anti-migrant posts to his audience of millions. “You’ve been spewing stuff that is blatantly racist,” Morgan told Tate, in an interview that had the feel of a discourse lurching into a gutter.

Seldom has the chasm been so wide and obvious between the stated intentions of Morgan’s show and its manifest agenda. Ostensibly, the ex-Good Morning Britain presenter was staking his claim as journalistic truth-teller. It’s along this tack that Morgan has recently conducted similarly provocative interviews with figures such as Armie Hammer, Kevin Spacey (both big-name actors accused of sexual assault) and Fiona Harvey, the woman who supposedly inspired the stalker character on Netflix’s hit miniseries Baby Reindeer. His aim here, he said, was holding Tate to “proper account” for spreading misinformation. Tate, per the show’s premise, was given a full uncensored hour to do what he enjoys most – posture and prevaricate around the subjects of race, immigration and politics – while Morgan, ever the prolapsed Paxman, attempted to call out his subject’s hypocrisies, lies and incitements.

What resulted was a kind of repetitive, insistent quiz that devolved again and again into the two men simply talk-yelling over the other. “The sheer brass neck of you Andrew,” Morgan snaps at one point, “lecturing me about the truth, when you’ve spent the last week spewing complete fake news bulls***, is breathtaking.” Nothing was achieved; no ground ceded. Attempts to solicit from Tate an apology, or even an admission of the bare facts of the matter – that he had spread racist lies that led to violence – were met with slippery and self-righteous deflections. Even so, this was – so we were told – explosive television.

“Explosive” is the word Morgan used, at least, while plugging the episode online. “This was one of the most explosive interviews I’ve ever done,” he wrote. But one of Morgan’s qualities is that he’s a salesman: there was nothing in the interview that merited that word. Tate was loud and combative, but at no point capitulated to the interrogation. Morgan asked him about the online misinformation, about his own views on immigration, about his support of far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson), about being “thrown under the bus” by Nigel Farage, about the anti-Tate backlash from within the Muslim community, and about the riots themselves. On all fronts, he held the line, refused to admit fault, and stated and re-stated his troublesome beliefs. “Perhaps I was wrong that he was an illegal migrant, and he was only a migrant,” he eventually admits. “Perhaps I was wrong about that detail. However, I was right about most of the things I’ve said.” All attempts at “gotcha” journalism were stonewalled by a man who, unbound by the rigours of truth or integrity, simply refused to be “got”. Tate, whose mass following among young people has freaked out parents on both sides of the Atlantic, has always evaded accountability. And sure enough, the full video clocked up a million YouTube views within a few hours – and more in snippets on Twitter/X. If that was the mission, then consider it achieved.

It would be wrong to view Morgan’s interview as any sort of aberration; it was simply a natural continuation of a career that has always trafficked in bad-faith sensationalism. The nature of Morgan’s series – produced for YouTube, and therefore unbeholden to the sort of regulation and standards that shape traditional broadcast TV – only serves to facilitate this. (When the BBC did its own interview with Tate last year, which drew no small amount of controversy, it was notably more rigorous, scrutinising Tate on his myriad scandals in a manner that didn’t give him so much room to spout off.) But on the Wild West of the internet, the governing force is only what will get clicks. And in this regard, Morgan’s tactic clearly pays off: his most popular videos garner in excess of 20 million views, and he sometimes draws bigger audiences than BBC or Sky’s news coverage.

Amid this changing landscape, Morgan, a relic of both the British tabloid press and conventional television, finds himself in somewhat uncertain territory. The scenes of racist violence across the UK are bleak, and distressing, and made all the more complicated by the intervention of social media. Over the past week, Morgan has also exchanged words with Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk, whose dismal premonitions of “civil war” in the UK needlessly inflamed things. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the most positive action can be found offline, in the mass counterprotest, in the coming together of people in opposition to hatred. At the same time Morgan’s interview dropped, thousands of people gathered in cities across the UK to deter the racist outbreaks. They’re the ones holding hateful people to “proper account”. Morgan, as usual, is nothing more than a carnival sideshow.