Inside Piers Morgan’s ‘Contrived Controversy’ Machine

Josiah Mortimer reports on how TalkTV’s Piers Morgan Uncensored struggled to get feminists to discuss “has Me Too gone too far?” on the day a serial rapist was sentenced

Leading women’s rights campaigners have lifted the lid on how Piers Morgan’s TalkTV show battled to get them on his show to debate whether feminism had gone too far – on the day that serial abuser ex-cop David Carrick was sentenced for 24 counts of rape on Tuesday. 

Patsy Stevenson, the writer and activist who was arrested at the vigil for Sarah Everard in Clapham in 2021, has spoken to Byline Times about her exchanges with TalkTV representatives – for a show she said was “whipping up misogynistic views”. 

On Tuesday morning, she got a message from a booking agent for TalkTV. She tells Byline Times: “I’ve always wanted to go on Piers Morgan’s show, to call him out on his show. To call him a twat and then leave, basically…Sometimes if you play up to their views, they tell you lots of things.” And that’s exactly what happened.

The TalkTV representative said the debate would be about “Has #MeToo Gone Too Far?” – on the day that David Carrick was sentenced as a serial rapist, and it emerged that police were treating the deaths of a family of three – including the headteacher of Epsom College – was a murder-suicide by the husband. George Pattison is thought to have killed Emma Pattison and their daughter Lettie at the family home near the school, before taking his own life.

The booking agent said that evening, “we’d be discussing whether they should teach misogyny in schools.” It was, she said, ridiculous. 

“I thought: either I go on and call him out, or mess him around. I said I had dinner booked – I gave him the numbers of [leading feminist activists] Mandu Reid, Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and so on. None of us was going to do it,” Patsy jokes. Piers Morgan’s team is also understood to have contacted the chair of Merseyside Alliance for Racial Equality Chañtelle Lunt, and Jamie Klingler,  founder of Reclaim These Streets. 

TalkTV offered Patsy Stevenson £120 plus a car to and from the show’s Ealing studios. Then when she was non-committal, they upped the offer to £250. 

On the phone, the agent allegedly asked if she felt that lessons in school against toxic masculinity were wrong, and that “the Me Too movement has gone too far in labelling young males as sexual predators”. 

Patsy was also told by the guest booker that he had been told to request Patsy Stevenson “has a go at Piers for his Andrew Tate interview last year’”. In other words, deliberately creating a row on air.