Piers Morgan on Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer

So let me ask you, I've done a couple of interviews of some of your increasingly famous, internationally famous UK subjects. I talked to Nigel Farage this week and Tommy Robinson.

So I want to ask you about a number of people on the UK political front. So let's start with Kier Starmer. In Canada, we have a liberal government, although it's not a liberal government; it's a radical socialist government. Trudeau is farther to the left by a large margin than our leftist political party has been traditionally.

And I got to tell you, it's a bit of a disaster. You might say Canada now has, our GDP is 60% per capita of that of the US, right? We have real estate prices that are twice as expensive. And those are just the things we know about.

So I would say the leftist tilt in Canada over the last nine years has been a much worse disaster than we even know yet. And now I can understand why people here turfed out the conservatives because, well, by my estimation, they weren't conservatives at all. But God only knows what sort of pack they've brought in.

So what are your thoughts about, well, what do you think's on the table for the UK for the next four years? Well, I've interviewed Starmer a few times for my life story show, which is like a two-and-a-half hour interview.

And I think, probably like you, probably believe that if you interview someone for two and a half hours, they can't hide the entire time. Yeah, you're going to work out really what they're like. I think he's fundamentally a decent guy. Yeah, I think he's a kind of regular guy; there's nothing particularly flamboyant or special about him.

He's a self-made man. He had a very tough upbringing; his mother was very ill for a very long period of time, and he effectively was her carer a lot of the time. Bit disenfranchised from his dad, no money, and he rose to become top of the legal profession—Director of Public Prosecutions, the top lawyer in the country—and now he's risen to be the top politician in the country, to be Prime Minister. That's a pretty remarkable achievement.

Yeah, he's no silver spoon guy at all. He is somebody who drifted out to the far left in the Jeremy Corbyn era; he said he thought Corbyn would make a good Prime Minister. That's a blot on his thought process because Corbyn would have been a total mad far-left disaster.

But interestingly, and I think encouragingly, Starmer is not so intransigent in his views that he's not prepared to change. The example being the issue of trans women in women's sport. You know, he started off by saying that, you know, all trans women are women and should be treated as such—even the violent rapists.

Even, you know, it's a problem those edge cases. You and I completely agree about this; it's obviously preposterous. But it's interesting to watch him change positions, and now I think he now says 99% of women don't have penises, was his last statement on the thing. He's come a long way, right?

So, you know, I think he understands that to be successful in Britain as a politician, you've got to occupy the center ground. Really, historically, almost every leader we've had in modern times effectively has been in the center ground, from Blair to Thatcher, to you—you go back and you pick any, they're all pretty well hovering in this kind of area. And then you have the exiles who create a lot of noise but never actually get elected.

And I think that Starmer has done very, very well, notwithstanding the uselessness of his opposition, to bring his party more to the center. And he's understood he's got to have middle England feeling he's not a threat.

Now, the challenge for him is there's no money. You know, we're a pretty bankrupt country at the moment in terms of money to spend as a government. He's already ruled out three quarters of all tax revenue potential, saying he's not going to do this, not going to do that, not going to do so.

He's left really with a tax-the-rich strategy; he's going to hammer people like me. He'd hammer you if you were in this country. He's going to come after, you know, money from houses, money from schools. He wants to put VAT on private schools, independent schools, etc.

He's going to raise tax for the rich, and so I don't like the politics of envy generally, and I don't think it works. So he's got to have more tools in his box. He's banking on the economy improving; he might get lucky. But you've got to have growth to do the things he wants to do about public services.

Our health system is crumbling; our education system is crumbling; crime is soaring. You know, you go through almost any metric, the seas are full of sewage. You know, it's like everything is wrong right now. But to fix it, you've got to spend significant sums of public money.

If you're going to do that without taxing three quarters of the country, you're going to end up just taxing people who may say, you know what, I'm going to leave. Yes, money is going to leave. Then you have a brain drain of the creative bosses who might be employing thousands of people and then where are you left?

So I think he's got a lot of challenges, but I wouldn't underestimate him. I think anyone that's seen off the far left, as he's done with his party, I think he's done that fairly effectively. He was pretty courageous in the campaign when he supported Israel pretty emphatically, despite the fact that there were a lot of, what, 5 million Muslims in this country, most of whom would have been persuaded to probably vote Labor.

There's no doubt that would have hurt him in the Muslim communities. I think he factored in that it's better to do the right thing and we're still going to win anyway, and I think that shows a bit of moral courage. So I don't underestimate him.

What about the people around him? I think he's got quite a smart cabinet, actually.

Oh, you do?

Okay, I do. And I think they hit the ground running in quite a smooth way. His whole strategy is going to be don't scare the horses and the children, right? Let's just steady as we go. And it may be that Britain's ready for that after a very turbulent five prime ministers in five years—the chaos of Boris Johnson, the madness of Liz Truss—who really got a horrible hospital pass.

I think we're ready for a bit of just calm stability.

And you think he could offer that?

I think he can offer it. I've already seen signs since he became Prime Minister of a well-organized man with a well-organized team who seems to know what they're doing. He's got a plan. Now, whether it works or not is another issue.

Part of the conservative problem was everything they promised they didn't deliver on, from stopping the small boats coming over from France to the raging legal migration, which has gone from tens of thousands to 700,000 people last year; net legal migration, completely unsustainable.

The Tories kept promising we're going to take it back down to tens of thousands; they never did. They said they sold out the NHS; waiting lists are the worst they've ever been. You know, my mother had a heart attack eight, nine months ago and was left on a trolley in accident and emergency, out in the corridor for seven hours, having been diagnosed with a heart attack. And there were 35 other people on trolleys out with her.

This—that's the state. And this is modern-day Britain.

Now, he's not a Trudeau. You know, I watched a clip of Trudeau when he's with students, and someone says something about mankind; he went, "Oh, no, no, no, we say peoplekind."

So he would literally change the most iconic line in the history of the modern world, which is one. He would also insist that you change it too, right? Now, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, Neil Armstrong, the first lunar landing would now have to be one small step for a person, one giant leap for peoplekind. That's the world that Trudeau wants.

He is insanely woke, and the truth is, if you are like that, it doesn't work, as Canada sadly is saying. I don't think Starmer is like that. I think he is much more pragmatic.

Also, I think you don't get to be Director of Public Prosecutions in this country, the number one lawyer in the country, if you're not a smart person. And I think he is a smart person. But can he somehow navigate us to a better place? Possibly.

Is he going to be a transformative Prime Minister, where we all wake up in two or three years and think, wow, the Starmer revolution? I don't think so.

Well, you know, that's better than it might have been. Well, I'm—I spent quite a long time working with Democrats in the US, and I got very disillusioned about that, partly because they showed zero propensity to draw a line between the moderate Democrats and the radicals—like, or even to admit that the radicals existed, or even to admit that by equity they meant equality of outcome.

It was really quite stunning, and I've talked to I don't know how many reasonably high-ranking Democrats, but plenty, and it was the same thing all the time.

And then I also saw it in the liberal government in Canada that the radical leftists really took over the joint, let's say. And so I'm very well concerned that the same thing is likely to happen in the UK.

Well, that's good. Okay, that's good that I can say with some certainty. I just don't think Starmer is going to do that.

Okay, I do think he's going to operate a tax-the-rich mindset across the board, and I am concerned about the brain drain that might happen. But I think in terms of what you're talking about, I don't think he's going to fall into that trap. I think he's seen what's happened with the Democrats; he's seen what's happened with Trudeau.

I don't think he sees that as something he wants to be doing here. Now, I hope I'm right, but I don't sense that with him at his heart. I think he's a pragmatist, and he's a well-organized guy. He's intelligent, he's thoughtful; he's never going to light up a room with his presence.

Now maybe that's okay for—we're kind of done with the Boris Johnson, you know, shtick.

Yeah, you know, the guy bouncing in with scruffy hair, cracking jokes, and everyone thinks it's hilarious. It's hilarious, right?

To the point you have a pandemic, and he turned out to be completely useless and ended up having lots of illicit parties while locking everybody else up in their homes. You know, it's that kind of one rule for me, one rule for you mindset that killed the Tories in the end.

And I think that Starmer certainly won't be that, and he will want to deal with things like poverty in this country in a way that the Tories, I think, have neglected. He will want to raise people up rather than kick them down, and I think he's got the right kind of mindset for that.

I just worry there's not enough money to pay for this.

Nigel Farage? You know, I used to get on well with Nigel, but I discovered to my personal cost he's a treacherous little snake.