© Provided by The GuardianPhotograph: Joe Kohen/Getty Images
Just before 10am today, Piers Morgan finally posted the tweet of which he has surely long dreamed: "Good Morning Britain beat BBC Breakfast in the ratings yesterday for the first time."
The ITV show's Tuesday figure was almost three times the average of when the former Daily Mirror editor and CNN host joined the programme six years ago. But his peak performance was also his last. Ratings had rocketed this week, as viewers tuned in to watch Morgan implode.
On Monday's edition, the presenter accused Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, of lying about her experiences of racism and severe mental heath issues during the CBS interview with Oprah Winfrey, which was screened by ITV later that day. On Tuesday's GMB, Morgan fractionally retracted his analysis but walked off set when colleague Alex Beresford defended Meghan. By Tuesday evening, Morgan had left the show, after failing to agree a response to ITV's concerns about his comments, and the 40,000-plus complaints received by the broadcast regulator Ofcom.
Despite the talents of Morgan's smart and sharp co-presenters, Susanna Reid and Kate Garraway, the show's chances of continuing to match its BBC rival must now be severely reduced. And, if ITV apparently felt unable to tolerate an unrepentant Morgan at breakfast, it is hard to see how the clash with corporate values could be permitted in peak time, where another network hit is Piers Morgan's Life Stories - an interview series that is, ironically, heavily influenced by the psychological biographies pioneered by Winfrey.
Related: Piers Morgan: end of the road for the man who never knew when to stop
Though shaken, the network seems unlikely to be entirely surprised. A few months ago, I met a senior ITV figure. They expressed excitement at what Morgan had brought to Good Morning Britain, and predicted that he would soon beat the BBC cereal winner. "But," they added. "Then he'll go, and he will probably go down in flames because that's what he always does. I slightly fear what the fire might be." Their words proved prescient.
Morgan concluded his tweet about the GMB ratings victory with the words "my work is done". Yet he surely couldn't have planned or wanted to go amid accusations of being offensively insensitive to the pain millions suffer.
One explanation for what happened might be called The Johnson Factor. Morgan was born within nine months of the current UK prime minister and author of The Churchill Factor. Both democratised their names - Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson - and were baptised in Roman Catholic fonts.
They were both youthful admirers of Margaret Thatcher, unsure whether to enter journalism or politics first; choosing the former, they courted Rupert Murdoch. Each was accused of newspaper racism - Morgan's Achtung! Surrender! headline before an England v Germany match, Johnson's columns featuring tropes such as "watermelon smiles" - and became involved in ethical scrapes: share tipping, phone hacking and fake photos from Iraq for Morgan; an invented quote and lying about his private life for Johnson. Their lives merged again when, as the broadcaster's popularity rose but the politician's fell, a newspaper campaign and petitions urged: PM for PM.
Part of Morgan's critique of Johnson is that the prime minister seems capable of getting away with anything, and the presenter may have come to think that this invulnerability was another similarity. It wasn't, and it seems sure that Morgan's newspaper columns will now try to rip the magic cloak from the incumbent of Number 10.
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And yet the way Morgan has gone was shaped by his tactics and personality as a broadcaster. His triumphant reboot of Good Morning Britain had two central elements - severely testing the rules of impartiality imposed by the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, and exploiting his celebrity friendships for content. Both factors proved central to his fall.
Morgan has been the clear star of British television's coverage of the political handling of the Covid-19 pandemic - targeted facts, sarcasm and persistence dramatising the problems in a way Westminster journalists, bound by codes of access and tone, could not match. Despite protests, Ofcom allowed unusual leeway over his incredulous eviscerations of cabinet ministers over infections, injections and testing. The regulator seems to have concluded that there was an important public service in robust questioning of a government that prefers to communicate through off-the-record briefings and the cramped mute-and-move-on format of Downing Street press conferences.
© Photograph: Joe Kohen/Getty Images'My work is done' . Piers Morgan
Morgan's anti-Meghan rants, though, were significantly different in that the object of derision was not present to reply, and touched on two sensitive subjects: racism and mental health.
While Princess Diana's 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir (currently the subject of a quasi-independent BBC investigation into journalistic ethics) is rightly remembered as an extraordinary piece of TV, it was followed by another that it is less recalled: the Tory politician Nicholas Soames, a close friend of the Prince of Wales, appeared immediately afterwards on Newsnight where he effectively accused Diana of being unbalanced and unreliable.
Watching Oprah With Harry and Meghan on Monday night, I thought: no one's going to do that to Meghan. The reason the interview was so lethal was it was hard for Windsor supporters to object without appearing indifferent to racism and suicidal ideation. It seems astonishing to me that Morgan couldn't see this, or did, but couldn't stop himself.
The reason may lie in the other key ingredient, apart from outspokenness, in Morgan's media brand. More than any other British broadcaster, he has flourished as much through who he knows as what he knows. A weekly Mail on Sunday diary records encounters with presidents, prime ministers, movie and sports stars, all of whom immediately recognise Piers, and spurt quotes (often about Morgan rather than themselves.) A book of published journals was called The Insider.
This approach won Morgan an ITV interview with President Donald Trump (whom he had met on the American version of The Apprentice). A recent newspaper column announced a warm friendship with Joe Biden, and it seems likely that ITV was expecting that sit-down in time. But, though Morgan's connections are undoubtedly good, they can sometimes prove loose: Trump was dumped, on air and in print (as Boris Johnson also was), when public opinion swung decisively against him.
Meghan Markle, however, is the one that got away. Morgan has often complained that, after one night out in London, just before she met Harry, the actor "ghosted" him. The TV presenter Trisha Goddard has astutely observed that Morgan seemed to be in "pain" on the subject of the Duchess of Sussex.
As he surely wasn't Meghan's type, and has a wife, even the presenter can't have believed that he was going to date the movie star. So, presumably, the plan, as with Johnson and Trump and others, was a public friendship, a few insider paragraphs for his column, an exclusive interview for ITV, and then a public renunciation of their friendship, which might, indeed, have come this week, after Megan's criticism of the monarchy.
But, watching his outbursts on Monday and Tuesday, it was hard to avoid the feeling that the American actor turned duchess was, at some level, being punished for reversing the order a famous Morgan mate should follow - ending the friendship herself, becoming globally famous, giving a huge interview to someone else. Broadcasters are egotistical and insecure, and it would only have been human for Morgan, on Monday night, to think that the peak-time sensation ought to have been Piers Morgan's Life Stories, with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
But, if so, Morgan could have learned something important from watching the show that did go out. The fallout from the answers was so extraordinary that it distracted attention from the quality of the questions. Oprah Winfrey, though sometimes denigrated throughout her career as a touch-feely daytime host, is one of the great interviewers - a distinctive combination of journalist, shrink and wise relative, who listens to the answers, prompting pouncing follow-ups. And, crucially, though she is at least as famous as American presidents, you never felt she was the most important person on screen.
During his enthralling and important eviscerations of government ministers over the Covid-19 response, Morgan - whatever priapic satisfaction he may have got from snarling truth to power - was speaking on behalf of very many voters. In contrast, his contributions on Meghan felt as if he was playing out some bizarre personal psychodrama designed to console himself and protect the monarchy.
Morgan's life story is one of cyclical self-destruction and reinvention. When Sky was run by Rupert Murdoch (a rare continuous fixture in Morgan's contacts), money would have been on him soon surfacing there. Now, the network's American owners, Comcast, might fret about someone who left ITV so contentiously. Murdoch's planned TV news network, or Andrew Neil's GB News, seem the most plausible future homes, though neither should now assume an interview with Morgan's best friend, President Biden, who has made comments in support of Meghan.
As for a new Good Morning Britain host, the almost like-for-like replacement in British broadcasting is Jeremy Clarkson, though the only TV content likely to result from making that approach would be a brief, much swear-bleeped clip of the former Top Gear host's reaction when told that the job would involve getting up at 3am. The biggest winner from Morgan's departure is in fact BBC Breakfast, which will probably now revert to being the duller but default post-dawn option.