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Piers Morgan’s charge that Endgame author Omid Scobie is a “weaselly lickspittle” in thrall to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was served back to him on his own TV show on Thursday when a guest said his own relentless advocacy of the royal family made him a “gob of phlegm on the royal doormat.”
Guest Tessa Dunlop’s salvo came after Morgan had delivered a near 14-minute defense of why he had named King Charles and Kate Middleton on his show the preceding night as the alleged “royal racists” who had voiced “concerns” over then-unborn Prince Archie’s skin color.
The names were first printed in the Dutch editions of Endgame, which were quickly pulled from shelves. Scobie said a “translating error” was responsible for the inclusion of the names, though a translator has stated she had translated the manuscript she was sent—and that text included the royals’ names “in black and white.”
Buckingham Palace has yet to address the allegations directly, though is rumored to be considering legal action in the wake of Charles and Kate being named. Harry and Meghan have yet to make any comment.
“You appall me, Piers,” Dunlop, a historian and writer, said, condemning the “appalling diatribe we’ve just had to sit through.” She added, “You claiming, you lying, there suggesting that you’re putting their names out effectively to save the monarchy. You put their names out for clicks. You’re no better than Omid Scobie. In fact, you’re worse, You call him a lickspittle. You’re a great big gob of phlegm that’s just landed on the royal doormat. I don’t know you slept last night. I struggled to sleep thinking about what you’d done.”
Morgan said Dunlop was speaking “performative crap,” told her to calm down, and then asked for a “civilized conversation.”
Dunlop wasn’t done. She accused Morgan of hypocrisy, spending “day in day out” advocating for the monarchy, and then dropping “Kate and Charles right in it.”
Morgan said he hadn’t; Scobie had by naming the royals in the Dutch edition of the book.
Before the blow-up, in his monologue, Morgan repeated over and over again he did not believe that Charles and Kate had ever made any racist comments, or said what they had been alleged to say. He had named them because “speculation was raging out of control,” he said, and without the names being known the royals were suffering “guilt by collective association.”
Morgan has been among the most vociferous of Harry and Meghan’s critics, deriding their claims over what was said about Archie’s skin color ever since the bombshell Oprah Winfrey interview of 2021, where the story was first relayed by Meghan.
It made “no sense,” Morgan said on his Thursday night Talk TV show, that Dutch journalists and people who had access to the book knew the names of the pair of royals accused of saying the remarks, but the British themselves—whose own royal family was central to the story—did not. Morgan said he did not think that “any serious person” believed Kate or Charles had “even the tiniest racist bones in their bodies, or would judge anybody by the shade of their skin.”
Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex attend the 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award Gala in New York City, December 6, 2022.
Morgan went on to claim Scobie was “a proven liar” who had lied over Morgan and Queen Camilla’s friendship. They had never spoken on the phone, as Scobie alleged, Morgan said. Scobie, whose previous book was the Harry and Meghan-focused Finding Freedom, was “dragging the royal family through the mud again,” using charges of racism to “sell books and make money,” Morgan said.
Harry and Meghan’s silence after the naming of Kate and Charles was “shameful,” he said, asking if they had anything to do with the leaking of material from letters shared between Meghan and Charles, naming the two “royal racists.”
“Nobody, I repeat, really thinks King Charles or the Princess of Wales are racist—nobody,” Morgan said. “That’s part of the reason, actually, why I decided to put their names out there. It’s called lancing the boil. It’s called removing what has been a simmering threat, deployed by Megan and Harry and deployed by Omid Scobie as an unspoken threat— ‘We’ve got these names and if we if we don’t get what we want, we’re going to use them.’ Well, now they can’t.”
Morgan said he had consulted with lawyers before he named Charles and Kate Wednesday. “It was entirely lawful what I did,” he said. I did seek legal advice. I got very good sound legal advice and actually there’s no question, I didn’t take the law onto myself, I actually applied the letter of the law. This information had been published in the Netherlands. Dutch people were free to read it and I took a view it was ridiculous that British people couldn’t be aware of this information. I also said when I named them that I didn’t believe a word of the racist allegations made against them.”
Piers Morgan Accused of Being ‘Phlegm on Royal Doormat’ on His TV Show
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01.12.2023
Royalist is The Daily Beast’s newsletter for all things royal and Royal Family. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Sunday.
Piers Morgan’s charge that Endgame author Omid Scobie is a “weaselly lickspittle” in thrall to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was served back to him on his own TV show on Thursday when a guest said his own relentless advocacy of the royal family made him a “gob of phlegm on the royal doormat.”
Guest Tessa Dunlop’s salvo came after Morgan had delivered a near 14-minute defense of why he had named King Charles and Kate Middleton on his show the preceding night as the alleged “royal racists” who had voiced “concerns” over then-unborn Prince Archie’s skin color.
The names were first printed in the Dutch editions of Endgame, which were quickly pulled from shelves. Scobie said a “translating error” was responsible for the inclusion of the names, though a translator has stated she had translated the manuscript she was sent—and that text included the royals’ names “in black and white.”
Buckingham Palace has yet to address the allegations directly, though is rumored to be considering legal action in the wake of Charles and Kate........
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