Piers Morgan has proven himself Meghan Markle’s greatest fan

Piers Morgan is on the offensive again – in every sense of the word. You might not have noticed because he’s maintained such a dignified silence until now, but Piers Morgan has gone for Meghan (and now her husband, Prince Harry) like a hunting pack after bait – and it’s been just as gruesome and bloodthirsty to witness.

For reasons known only to the broadcaster and talkTV presenter, over the years he’s gone from fawning over Markle and labelling himself a “superfan” on Twitter to spewing an almost constant stream of vitriol in her direction. She’s a liar, he claims. She’s playing the victim, he reckons. She ghosted him, he says.

What Morgan doesn’t seem to realise is that he’s still proving to be Markle’s greatest superfan. If “fan” stems from the word “fanatic”, then that seems a good description of his behaviour – he seems preoccupied with Meghan and Harry to the point of obsession.

Morgan’s very particular about the company he keeps. He doesn’t mind sharing a game of chess, a few laughs and a strikingly anodyne interview with self-proclaimed woman hater Andrew Tate but Harry, according to Morgan’s most recent tweets, is a “half-wit” and “colossal tit”. And don’t even get him started on Meghan. Scratch that, he barely seems to pause in his pseudo-moral crusade against her. What in the name of outright misogyny is going on here?

Morgan’s anti-Meghan tirades have always struck me as the rancorous rantings of an embittered soul. He reminds me of a man I used to sit next to at work, who droned on and on about his ex-wife, growing ever nastier as the day went on until he’d worked up two blobs of white froth at each corner of his mouth. His ex-wife had moved on with someone new and he was incandescent with raging hurt.

He didn’t care, he said. She’d used him but he was better off without her. She was a liar and he was so much happier without her. At the work Christmas party, he sobbed about how much he still loved her. There was tragedy in his malice – love gone rancid – but it was malice nonetheless. The thing is that it became so normal, this rancorous soundtrack to my working day, that I started not to hear it. I didn’t hear the horror of his words or push back against the name-calling: “b***h”, “slag” – and the rest. I just rolled my eyes and tried my best to ignore him.

I feel like Piers Morgan is a celebrity version of that bloke from work. He’s gone from being a vocal supporter of Meghan, whom he says he met once for about 90 minutes but then referred to as his “friend”, to producing a constant background hum of hatred.

But there’s danger in letting his anti-Meghan campaign become white noise. There’s complicity in the collective rolling of our eyes at his spite towards this woman he barely knows. He’s been at the forefront of the hate campaign against Meghan for years – the onslaught of malice that caused her to become suicidal and eventually feel forced to leave the country. And it doesn’t look like he’s about to let up any time soon.

Last night, Morgan broke a period of blessed social media silence to rail against Prince Harry’s TV interviews. He has a pop at the journalists interviewing Harry: “Why did neither Tom Bradby nor Anderson Cooper challenge Harry about his appalling Taliban kill boast? The one that made global headlines, enraged the British Army, stirred up Muslim fury, and has endangered the Royals & current members of the armed forces?”

I mean, it’s a fair point, but Morgan’s a fine one to talk, given his record of offering easy passes to even the most controversial of guests – anyone remember his interview with Donald Trump? He takes issue with Harry’s denial that he or Meghan ever said there was racism in the royal family. “Given they’ve now said there was no racism,” Morgan wonders, “will Harry and Meghan apologise for so shamefully smearing the royal family?”

It seems to be breaking news to Morgan that neither he nor, in fact, Harry, are arbiters of what’s experienced as racist. I’ll tell you what, maybe ask a black person who’s experienced life in the palace about what they… oh, my mistake! Morgan won’t do that because he’s too busy conducting an obsessive hate campaign against the person who really can tell us what it’s like to be a black woman living as part of the royal family.

And if he’s accused Meghan of “playing the victim” then he won’t see the irony in the many ways he’s portrayed himself as a victim of the woman who dared to “ghost” the great Piers Morgan. “I seem to recall being forced out of my job at GMB for disbelieving Harry and Meghan’s unsubstantiated racism claims against the royal family”, he tweeted. “Now he’s finally admitted there was no racism, two questions: a) Do I get my old job back? b) Why should we believe a word they say?”

Oh, Piers. I do feel for him. It must be super awkward to have been shown up on live TV. After raging against snowflakes for years, Morgan stomped off set because he was challenged by a Black colleague about his attitude to Meghan Markle. I can see that must sting, but for how long? Isn’t it time to... well, let it go?