Entertainment
Piers Morgan accuses Alex Beresford of ‘premeditated attack’ on Good Morning Britain in explosive Fox News interview
Piers Morgan has slammed Alex Beresford in his first TV interview since he quit Good Morning Britain.
The 56-year-old presenter spoke to US conservative news personality Tucker Carlson about his exit from the ITV daytime show, which took place in the wake of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s tell-all Oprah Winfrey chat.
Before his departure was announced, Piers stormed out of the studio during a tense clash with weatherman Alex over his comments about the Duchess of Sussex.
Piers described his former colleague Alex as ‘the stand-in weather guy who does the weather occasionally’, as he opened up to Tucker about their on-air row.
‘He’s not a journalist, but he’s somebody I’ve helped with his career a number of times when he’s asked me to,’ he continued.
‘He sent me a private message in which he expressed some concern about what he felt I wasn’t really understanding about where Meghan Markle was coming from as a biracial woman.
‘He is himself a biracial man so he wanted to explain so I said come on air, let’s have the conversation. But the moment he came on air, he came with a pretty premeditated attack on me on a pretty personal level and frankly I just wasn’t going to have it.’
Piers added: ‘I walked off … I was quite angry in the moment, he claimed that I have a personal vendetta against Meghan Markle, which I don’t.’
He then turned his attention to his co-host Susanna Reid’s statement addressing his exit, saying he ‘didn’t particularly like it’.
‘I honestly think she was in the grip of fear,’ he said. ‘I think she was fearful that if she went too far in saying nice things about me, the same thing might happen to her, that there would be a huge Twitter pile on.’
Elsewhere in the interivew, Piers claimed he ‘wasn’t allowed to have an opinion’ on Meghan.
‘I didn’t believe Meghan Markle,’ he said. ‘A huge furore erupted throughout the day. I was an outrage.
‘I wasn’t allowed to have an opinion that I didn’t believe what she was saying, even though it was clear to me in real-time, as I was watching the interview that there were a number of things which just couldn’t be true.’
Last week, Alex quit social media amid racist trolling in the wake of his fall out with Piers.
‘Three weeks ago I took part in a television debate about the decision of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to publicly reveal the racism they claimed to have suffered as members of the Royal Family, and the impact on their mental health,’ he penned in The Telegraph.
‘Since then I have been subjected to relentless racism myself on social media. I haven’t announced it (like the former Arsenal player Thierry Henry did this week when he publicly quit social media, in response to anonymous racist bullying) but I have been forced to step away from Twitter and Facebook myself, because it was getting too much. I am a strong person, but I am not made of steel.’
Alex previously said how he didn’t want Piers to quit Good Morning Britain.
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