Yes.

OK.

The same Megan Rapinoe who has advocated relentlessly for men to compete in women's sports, conveniently after she herself retired, I noticed.

But is quite happy to watch, for example, at the Paris Olympics, a male boxer competing and winning a gold medal in the women's boxing competition, a guy who'd been banned by the World Championships for having male chromosomes, literally made a young Italian female boxer quit after 40 seconds saying, I've never been hit this hard in my life.

These people will endorse that, but they're outraged by Sydney Sweeney, who's not an athlete, not a sportswoman.

She's just doing a fun commercial for a gambling company, which, as you say, she has a stake in.

I remember we talked about body positive.

You

Yeah, I think that's the undercurrent.

The silent majority, which is a massive number of people, the silent majority just has got sick of it.

They've got sick of everything they enjoy in life being redefined as somehow evil and corrupting and worthy of cancellation.

They find the idea of the cancel culture completely ridiculous, but they also specifically like everything in their daily life that they enjoy, from comedy shows to movies to music to statues, to heroes, whatever it is, the woke brigade's only response to all of it is it's all evil, it must all be canceled, and we must go to a form of extreme puritanism where if you even crack a joke at work, you must be expunged from human life if it hasn't passed their humor test, which is obviously the worst outside of North Korea in the world.

Being humiliated by a

woman.

Who, if it had been the other way around, all hell would have broken loose.

Hypocrisy and double standard is real.

Yeah.

Right? So I've got three sons and a daughter, and I've, I've often thought, if this happened in my family...

You see it with the Beckhams, right? The, the oldest Beckham boy, Brooklyn's just done a Harry, right? What do you do when one of your kids goes rogue? And of course, the reality is, for all that he's the king, and this is a constitutional issue and an issue about the monarchy and so on, it's also a father and a son.

And I, as a father, would not want him to not make up with Harry.

I think it would be nice on a human level that they make up, because I don't feel inhuman about them.

I don't want them to be permanently estranged, but I do think that, that Harry, you know, in the old days of the royals, probably in castles like this, you would see a sustained period of groveling, actual groveling.

He'd be on his knees begging his father for forgiveness-

No, she's lovely.

[laughs]

Well, hang on, hang on, hang on.

Give me a moment.

I upload every single one because I'm trying to remind people that if they're like me and they just wake up, which is of course the name of one of my books, available in all fine bookstores everywhere, they can also be like me.

You wish you were like me, don't you? Hmm.

I can see it in your eyes.

[laughs]

So I had an interview with Donald Trump, and that little treacherous worm tried to sabotage it, thinking that he's better friends with him than me, and that's claptrap.

Well, the

thing that worries me about the whole thing is you've got, in conjunction with their return, you have the impending book by Earl Spencer, Dinah's brother, coming out imminently.

And it looks like he's going to be explosive.

He's going to be, you know, defending his sister as he did, of course, so famously at her funeral with that incredible speech.

And it was an incredible speech.

I think he's going to settle a lot of scores.

Yep.

So

say, even though Jordan's not a massive fan of Andrew, the message in principle isn't that different.

No.

No, and the message is be proud to be a man again.

You've been ashamed of being a man for many years now since the avalanche of Me Too, of Time's Up, which absolutely had an important role in society in correcting a historic imbalance in the gender, no question, and historically bad behaviour by a lot of men towards women.

I absolutely do not denigrate either of those movements.

But what it did do, as I knew it would do, the pendulum swung so far the other way that actually it freaked the hell out of young guys.

And they were suddenly like... what am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to behave? And women listening to this might think, well, it's easy.

You think that's true?

Mm.

Nothing, I'm not gonna be doing anything bigger than this.

And then it got to the end, and there was a guy sitting to the right of Rupert, and then I was next to this guy.

They got to the end, and they went to the editor, who wasn't drinking-

Mm.

So they all went, "No, no, I'm good.

I, no, no, I'm n- no." And they're all massive drinkers.

So they all said, "No, no, no, no." And he got to me, and I said, "Well, what would you recommend?" And he said, "Uh, the peach brandy's very good."

The reality is, like, when you saw what Gillette did with their...

So Gillette always had these big masculine, uh, commercials all about being a big, you know, hunter, provider kind of man.

But then there's this huge U-turn after the Me Too campaign, and suddenly it was prove you're not Harvey Weinstein or you can't have a Gillette product.

And they absolutely tanked their sales in the same way that Budweiser did when they used Dylan Mulvaney, who suddenly decided in, in the mid-20s that, that this biological woman, uh, a m- man would be, uh, identifying as a woman, and make tens of millions of dollars, uh, by almost mocking biological females.

Um, and you see it time and again, where they so grotesquely misjudge their audience.

I think that's the, I think that's the undercurrent.

I, I think that what happened, the si- the, the silent majority, which is a massive number of people, the silent majority just has got sick of it.

They've got sick of everything they enjoy in life being redefined as somehow evil and corrupting, and worthy of cancellation.

And, uh, yeah, I wonder what the medium term future looks like now for America.

Well, I think one of the most important things of the broligarchy, in terms of its impact, is that so many young men gravitated to it because they've been feeling lost.

You've talked about this a lot.

I've talked to you about this a lot.

I've got three sons from twenty-three to thirty-one.

I've seen it firsthand how they've been struggling, not just my sons, but th-their, their friendship group, have been struggling to understand what it means to be a man in this weird age that we're now in.

Social media driven age, virtue signaling driven age.

You think that's true, Adam?

Yeah, it's a lovely thing to see.

Well, he used to say to me when I, when I replaced-- well, didn't replace him, he couldn't be on America's Got Talent because he was on American Idol.

So even though he created America's Got Talent, he wasn't able to be a judge.

And he said to me, "Look, here's, here's the deal." Remember, I'm-- I was, I was in dreamland.

I'd been fired from my job as a newspaper editor, thinking that's the end of my media career.

And literally a few months later, I'm on the Paramount movie lot in Los Angeles in my trailer next to David Hasselhoff's trailer and Regis Philbin's trailer, and I'm thinking, "I could get very used to this." And then Cowell rolled up in his Ferrari, whatever he had at the time, and he came and had a cup of tea with me, very-- full, very British in my trailer.

And he said, "Here's the deal.

Mm-hmm

Yeah.

And I've heard your singing.

And honestly, I think I'd prefer notes, just for the record.

No, I think, look, he's obviously going to be more personable.

He'll be more relatable.

You know, you could look at what he's done this morning and say, yeah, that's a nice gesture.

But it's kind of, you know, almost fiddling while Rome burns.

and you've been suitably candid with some of your posts or some of your advice because we talk of a man without a manifesto or a mandate say for 24 000 and change in makerfield you think you should go to the country piers

whatever that cause

may be, at some point you have to show a bit of sacrifice to that cause.

You have to commit time or money or resources or whatever it may be to support.

Reputation.

Put your head over the parapet.

It has to be an element of risk and an element of sacrifice.

Now, if all you're doing is following the hashtag trend of the day.

And

On the other hand, I wonder if that gives you any, I, I don't know, self-doubt about the seriousness or the value of what's happening.

Well, I think, look, people like Joe Rogan and others have, have, have used that, that analogy of Jerry Springer and politics.

First of all, I knew Jerry Springer very, very well.

I loved Jerry Springer.

I actually, I was on America's Got Talent with Jerry Springer.

I was a judge and he was the host.

We lived in the same hotel, The Beverly Wilshire, in LA for years, and we used to meet three times a week for dinner.

No.

Mm

... or try to.

They won't.

You'll go on to bigger things, and we'll come to why I believe that so passionately.

You're looking at an example of someone who's got a much bigger career out of what happened.

So I've been in your shoes, and I know the opportunities are gonna come your way.

Um, but corporate entities have to stand up to this.

Yeah

Mm.

I mean, you, you and I have covered the royals for, you know, longer than we care to admit, but decades, right? But the, the idea they did this as Philip was dying, as the Queen was dying, you know, and they were just trashing the royals week in, week out, trashing the monarchy as an institution, all of it.

They were doing everything they could to destroy the whole thing.

And now they want to waltz back into the country because he's got his Invictus Games, which is a perfectly valid, good event.

I'm not gonna denigrate the Invictus Games.

The people that compete in it deserve all our admiration and, and that's a, it's a good event.

But the idea it becomes this big circus of the great return-

And they're, and they're in mind the whole problem.

Right

... um, by a variety of terrorist groups, from Hezbollah, to the Houthis, to Hamas, and the tentacles of Iran spread along, uh, to all those groups.

I, I don't, I don't for any, uh, moment want to suggest that isn't happening or it's not a real thing, but how a country like Israel, which is, you know, pretty much the superpower of the region, which has an extraordinarily powerful military, um, you know, it's got itself into a really difficult place on this where it is becoming increasingly a global pariah.

And that's not your fault or my fault or Megyn Kelly's fault, um, but increasingly I think it is a situation exacerbated by the lik- likes of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin because they conflate legitimate criticism of the actions of a government with, in many cases, they spray gun people with the charge of antisemitism, or as we see now, well, you must be b- part of the Woke Reich, which of course would be ridiculously ironic if that was the case given what they think I'm about.

Um, so the whole thing to me seems, uh, completely absurd.

Dangerous, I think, for Israel and its reputation.

Dangerous for Jewish people around the world, many of whom have said to me they completely agree with my criticisms of this Israeli government.

Yeah

Yeah.

And he wanted publicity for his initiative, his week.

So he said...

He didn't say anything.

He just went.

Didn't say nothing.

Next day, he's sitting there.

In the sauce, okay.

Now, why would you have done that? Because-

Because I'm a fan, and to me, I've been through 22 years of pain and hurt and misery, depression, anxiety, all the things imaginable with going 22 years without winning the league.

And there was such an outpouring of joy for me and my three sons, one of whom was three years old when we last, last won the league in 2004, had never seen us do anything but choke, who for three consecutive years has seriously been the bridesmaid, not the bride.

And suddenly we have the full church wedding, and with a bride, and everyone is going nuts.

And I had had the foresight...

I just don't understand this whole thing about the, the pitch at Selhurst Park.

I'd had the foresight two months ago to check the fixture list and realize our last game was at Crystal Palace.

Yeah

And has- has gardening been part of the rehab?

Uh, no.

No, I'm not, I'm not a big gardener myself.

I'm actually here because, as an Arsenal fan, I wanted to try and find as many Chelsea fans as possible-

I've seen you.

No, I love, I actually love it.

And I'm with my, my mum.

We're having a great look around.

long.Piers?

Silence.

Wow.

Not so fast, Reform.

Um, yeah, of course he should go.

I mean, let's be honest.

This has been an absolute shambles.

So is Nigel Farage the answer, as Robert believes?

We've got a generation, a decade of people out there that were hired under DEI that didn't meet the standards or may not have met the standards, and we're all burdened with that now.

Well, that's the point: we don't know.

And, you know, I feel actually for the people who got jobs because of their skin color or gender rather than ability, because they don't know if they're actually good enough.

If they weren't put through the same exact rigorous training as anybody else, how would they know if they're good enough for what they do? These are legitimate, important questions.

You know, I believe in absolute racial equality from grassroots up in terms of opportunity.

You know, everybody should be afforded the same opportunity for any job.

But after you get on that ladder, the only way you progress up the ladder should be on your merit, on your ability, nothing else.

Well, Piers, let's talk about people that are Black or a, a woman that is competent, really does know what they're doing, and got there based on merit, hard work, did everything that they needed to do, and now people look at them and say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess you're DEI." How terrible is that for them?

As have I.

They...

As have you.

They call Donald Trump a fascist every two minutes.

They call his supporters fascists or Nazis or whatever, and they go on and on and on, drawing absurd parallels between genuine fascism and Nazism and, say, the MAGA movement, whatever it may be.

A- and, and yet at the same time, look at the behavior of these wokies in the last few years where they scold, vilify, shame, cancel, destroy, in some cases as we saw with Charlie Kirk's murder, kill people that don't agree with them.

That is the very personification of fascism.

Sure there were

And the Gulf States

... a- and the Gulf States.

Uh, but the United States-National interest should not mean chaos in Iran because that will be a, a stick to beat the US economy with for many years to come if that's allowed to happen.

Uh, not to mention fermenting, as we saw with Iraq, you know, I opposed very aggressively the war on Iraq in 2003 because I was not convinced about the weapons of mass destruction defense for doing it, and it turned out to be nonsense.

And of course, we know what happened in Iraq.

Out of the chaos came ISIS, Al-Qaeda, all these terror groups who wreaked utter havoc for the next two decades.

And the worry about Iran is if you actually achieved one of the supposed mission statements of bringing down this regime, well, what would follow? You know, there's a very high likelihood of all the disparate groups you have rampaging around a, a, a rudderless Iran, that you would end up with something, uh, appalling like ISIS or Al-Qaeda and the equivalent in Iran.

... and suddenly, retroactively, it was, uh, well, we're there to stop the missiles.

Thank you so much for having me, Piers.

Look, uh, this is obviously, as we've just heard, a very emotive issue.

It's a complex issue.

It's a multifaceted issue.

You know, there's no doubt there is an interesting comparison to be made about sheer volumes, for example, of Muslims in the UK and US.

It's about the same number, around four to five million, but the US is six, seven times as big as the UK.

So clearly, we have a lot more Muslims in the UK.

If the answer is perhaps no, then maybe you need to put on your statistical reasoning hat.

A half million will leave the New York City area.

In a way, I see that as a kind of microcosm of what I want to do with the show.

I want to bring people together.

Look, I want to do big one-on-one interviews.

I want to do interviews with two people, one either side.

They're great as well, do a lot of those.

But when you have the four people, two on either side about a big issue, I make no apologies for it getting passionate and fiery.

Yeah.