Piers Morgan’s mauling of Matt Hancock and Robert Jenrick will have ministers wishing the GMB boycott wasn’t over

The team at Good Morning Britain are no doubt more pleased than most that Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain have left Downing Street. By no coincidence, the ban on ministers appearing on GMB was lifted as soon as the diabolical duo slung their hooks.

First off, and after a 201-day drought, GMB viewers were treated to an interview with a happy, smiling Matt Hancock, who looked as though he’d just been let out on day release from a Tehran jail. Today, Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick showed up to be grilled by Piers Morgan and Susannah Reid, or “shouty and pouty”, as Morgan puts it.

Like Hancock, Jenrick couldn’t explain, let alone justify, the six month ban. Jenrick’s wan smile suggested he hasn’t had this much fun since the last time Richard Desmond showed him his holiday snaps at a Tory fundraising dinner. Jenrick was hopeless anyway, especially on the failure to remove cladding from high-rise blocks, post-Grenfell; he must be looking forward to the next reshuffle with some unease. Shouty and pouty did a good job on him.

It’s interesting how some of the best interviewers these days are former newspaper editors: Andrew Marr (The Independent), Andrew Neil (Sunday Times) and Piers Morgan (Daily Mirror). I think it must come from years of interrogating reporters and desk editors about their stories, probing them, bullying them a bit and generally tearing to bits the stuff that hasn’t got “legs”, as we say in the trade.

They don’t take a non-answer as an answer to their question. When Morgan welcomes back Hancock and asks him why he hasn’t been on for months, and Hancock cheerfully says, “I’m here to answer all your questions”, Morgan reminds him that, ironically enough, this isn’t an answer to the first question he’s been able to put to him since the spring.

The same with Jenrick, who attempted to charm old Piers with some smarm about GMB being his wife’s favourite thing on the telly (as if). If any politician is ever foolish enough to say to Morgan something like, “you may be interested in the prime minister strangling kittens to death but I think what your viewers want to know about is the Northern Powerhouse”, then Morgan would soon let them know who is the better judge of what GMB viewers want. (The bit about kittens isn’t true, as far as I know).

Obviously Hancock and Jenrick can’t say, “we’ve not been on because Cummings and Cain would bollock us and we’re only cabinet ministers”, but by roughing them up a bit, Morgan made the truth perfectly apparent.  

In their full pomp, after they won the last election, Cain and Cummings attempted to impose their will on the media in Trumpian style. Cummings once tried to exclude, from a briefing on Brexit, lobby journalists from titles he deemed unreliable, picking them out humiliatingly and telling them to leave the room. The other hacks, from the likes of the Mail and Telegraph, in an impressive act of solidarity, refused to go along with this and imposed their own brief boycott on Cummings.

As media management, it was a case study in how not to do it. Even if Cummings was frustrated by the “reptiles” of the press, there are smarter ways of playing them. Small wonder he’s had unsympathetic coverage, even if, in reality, he’s so much the author of his own downfall.  

As far as the broadcasters were concerned, there was a similar attempt at apartheid from Number 10. Certain shows in particular were summarily excluded from any access to government: Newsnight, Channel 4 News, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, and ITV’s Good Morning Britain. It was obvious, crude, spiteful and embarrassing. No doubt they were all regarded as Corbynite organisations or nests of the Europhiliac liberal elite, but the continuing ban on GMB probably also had something to do with Piers Morgan calling Cain “a snivelling little worm”. So the worm turned and for most of the year, GMB viewers had to do without Alok Sharma or Liz Truss launching their day.  

It’s different now: low-powered, evasive, self-satisfied, logic-chopping, smug, patronising, top Tories are back on breakfast telly, defending the indefensible, dishing out false hope and tired soundbites “at pace”. Nature is healing.