 A high-profile figure unimpressed by the government's new advice is Piers Morgan. Morgan's rise to be a credible journalist holding the government to account instead of someone getting into pointless arguments with vegans every morning has been one of the more surprising developments of this coronavirus crisis. He took Tory MP Andrew Bridgen to task this morning on the ambiguities in the government's new social distancing guidelines. Okay, can I go and see my two sons? I haven't seen in 10 weeks. Can I go and see them today and maintain two meter distance? Yes or no? As far as I would be concerned, I do not speak for the government. As long as you maintain social distancing in what you do, that will not allow the... The problem Andrew Bridgen, you see, what you've just said is completely against the new rules, as stated. So there you are, a Conservative Member of Parliament who thinks you know exactly what Boris Johnson has been saying and yet you've just told me to do something I'm not allowed to do. So this is the problem, isn't it? There is no clarity. It's a load of old flannel talking about controlling the virus and you as a leading high-profile Conservative politician haven't got a clue about what these rules actually mean. And you're an MP. You're part of this. So was Andrew Bridgen a performative metropolitan elite pretending to not understand the guidelines or the guidelines genuinely confusing? Well, I'd like to read you very quickly. Two tweets which were tweeted less than two hours apart. One from Sam Coates, who works with Skyline. One from Nick Eardley works for the BBC. Sam Coates, you know, new guidelines. Dominic Rob said you could meet both your parents in the park, no doubt more from government later, right? So that's a pretty big thing. You can meet two people in the park while socially distanced. That is a pretty big statement and a change from all the things that we've been told so far. Less than two hours later, one hour, 20 minutes later, in fact, clarification from UK government. You can meet one person from an outside household in park if you follow social distancing. You cannot meet two such as both parents at the same time applies to England only. So I don't think it is a product of my North London tribalism to go, that is confusing government messaging. And clearly, even, you know, Vox Populi, man of the people, Andrew Bridgen, also finds it confusing. And he's had his head untroubled by the lived experience of, you know, harrowing gay Tottenham and field such as myself. It can happen to the best of us. The terrible thing is that he's allowed to go out onto national media. Piers Morgan's got a huge platform and mislead the public. Now, if it wasn't for Piers Morgan being on top of it and being able to highlight that confusion, but were it any other broadcaster, dare I say it, were a host on BBC Breakfast? Would the public have ended up with that pretty critical knowledge? I would say no. Did you see that BBC guy? What's his name? Dan something. Yeah, he was saying, I let them on my show and they get to speak and I don't interrupt them. It's like, yeah, that's probably a bad sign. Yeah. And he's like, oh, you don't need to shout. No, you don't need to shout. But so when let's say we get to 250,000 people have died, what are you going to do? Whisper? What are you going to do? Sort of, you know, smile and say, that shouldn't have happened. Perhaps you're talking about a quarter of a million people dying. That's kind of the ballpark figure we're looking at now. I mean, if you're not going to get, you know, a bit of a bit of a sort of more, you know, an escalated tone when a quarter of a million people die. I mean, when's it going to happen as a journalist? Serious question. That's a good point to go to our next clip, actually, which is the rest of that exchange with Piers Morgan, because he really does take Andrew Bridgen to task and it is quite something to witness. Piers, I didn't hear your diatribe against the Prime Minister earlier on. What you've got to remember? What would you say diatribe? Let me explain what my diatribe is. We have, according to the government, own graphs. And you can spin them any way you like. The second worst death toll in the world. And that's just the deaths that we're declaring a 31,000. The real figure, according to any detailed analysis of the ONS figures, is over 55,000 people. It's an absolute national disgrace when you compare it to almost any other country in the world. We've had no testing. Our Chief Deputy Chief Medical Officer said we didn't need testing. It wasn't appropriate. So we stopped doing it, which was a total scandal. We've had no PPE for the NHS frontline workers and care home workers, which is why over 200 of them have died. It's an absolute national disgrace. And when you come on and say, I heard your diatribe against Boris Johnson, the diatribe is because so many people have died and so many people are continuing to die. So none of us at Navarra Media have been particularly big fans of Piers Morgan. He's normally the kind of guy who actually takes quite right wing talking points against what he calls identity politics and is really trying to stoke a pretty unpleasant culture war. But during this coronavirus crisis, he really has been the TV journalist who is best at holding the government's account. And I suppose I want to go to you, Ash, first, because I know that you've met the guy. You've had quite a few testy exchanges with Piers Morgan. What do you make of his rise to become, I suppose, one of the most credible TV journalists in the country? What's going on? Piers Morgan is a very able man. And when he wants to, he can be incredibly good at being across detail. He's clearly an aggressive questioner. He's a hostile interviewer. You're not going to get a kind of Michael Parkinson, this is your life from him. And on a day to day, that can be really exhausting, because you have to kind of concoct micro events, which can rile him up and get that kind of clip of all TV. But I think that when you give him a matter of international importance, he is capable of really rising to the occasion. And he has done so here. So credit to him. I am not what you would call your archetypical Piers Morgan fan. I would say that I've had more than my fair share of run-ins with him. But credit where credit is due. He is one of the few broadcasters taking their public service remit seriously. Now, I entirely agree with Dan Walker. You don't have to be a kind of shouty interviewer. And we've seen with, you know, interviewers like Andrew Neil, that you can be incredibly thorough, incredibly rigorous, and not have to raise your voice even once. So the question is, why aren't more broadcasters doing it? I would say it's because they've interpreted their role as being one which has an active role to play in minimizing the chance of social unrest during a national crisis. And I think if you have a look at that email, which I think was leaked to the economists from the BBC, where they talked about, you know, broadcasting as a state endeavor, right? And not necessarily a public one. Now, this is nowhere in the BBC's charter. So that indicates quite a profound shift in what they see their role as being. It's not to hold the government to account, but to minimize and control public anger. Aaron, are you now a Piers Morgan stand? Me and Ashnash, we've had sort of behind the scenes debates about Piers Morgan before. I think he's probably in recent years been one of the most corrosive figures in the public sort of debate in this country. But why I've not defended him. That's not fair. I don't think he's party political. And I think he's, he's as big an opportunist as he is a narcissist. And Ash is absolutely right. In a context of a national emergency like this, I think that's actually quite good. And I think she's also right. It's a really keen piece of observation, I think, from her, actually, is that his personality type, the way he acts, you know, in normal times, it kind of is a bit deranged. He has to find a new story, new angle, something to get, you know, enraged about almost every day. I mean, that's clearly not what life is meant to be like most of the time. However, in a political moment, such as the present one, it's an incredibly useful mindset to have as a journalist. And he's taken risks before. You know, I'm not a fan. He started life out as the bizarre columnist at the sun. So it's really the lowest of the low when it comes to Britain's print media. Maybe, maybe the cartoonist at the Daily Sport was a bit lower. You know, that's debatable. But then he went to the news, the world, I think, briefly, he made his name really at the mirror, where is the editor? And he, of course, famously published what we now know to have been fake photos of Iraqis being tortured by coalition soldiers. In any case, that was actually happening. It was in sort of wide circulation amongst journalistic circles, and he took the risk of publishing it. So I don't think he's ever been wary of making enemies. I don't think he's ever been wary of, you know, breaking with the line that's kind of all pervasive in his industry. He's done that before. He's clearly doing it now. Ash is right. Why isn't it happening more elsewhere? I think it does boil down fundamentally to the fact that BBC has 80% of, you know, radio and TV broadcast news market share in this country. So yeah, there's a little bit of sort of soft entertainment on ITV. There's maybe Channel 4. There's maybe ITN News at 10. The Spatches. But really, there's not much of a space outside the BBC for this kind of journalism. And I do think it's an indictment that the outstanding TV journalist throughout all of this hasn't just been on ITV, but has also not even been on a hard news program. I really think that says something. And we need to take a step back as a country and say, why isn't that both are? We talk about press all the time. We talk about print media all the time. Why isn't our broadcast journalist sort of journalistic industry in this country doing better? And I think it's partly about the BBC. It's not to blame the BBC, but clearly in moments like this, having an institution of its size with its market share, with its remit, right, which is there's a national crisis. We need to ensure that people pull together. There's not, you know, public disorder and so on. I think you probably almost certainly do need to have that as an institution. Should it have 80% of news market share? No, I don't think it should. I don't think, again, I don't think that's congruent with the kind of media you would expect in a liberal democracy.