Towards the end of their fractious exchange, Russell Brand asked Piers Morgan, “What do you think your duty is here?” By “here” he meant the moral universe.

Essentially, “what is the cosmic point of Piers Morgan?”, a question everyone but Piers Morgan has asked at one time or another.

Squinting into the narrower lens of his media career, Morgan replied: “I think I have a platform that is pretty big (Freud momentarily stirs in his grave), pretty global and I think my job is to take complex issues, get people with strong opinions, hopefully some brain power, and debate these things…”

The answer of a man with so little hinterland his ends are indistinguishable from his means. If only the man were as modest as his ambition.

By this point in proceedings, Brand appeared exasperated with constantly talking past his host. “Sometimes I think you’re not listening,” he half-joked, in reaction to one of many non-sequiturs with which Morgan punctuated his impassioned soliloquies. Having grown accustomed to the loose play of sympathetic podcasts, the staccato rhythm of an adversarial interview was clearly grating on him. Mistaking his irritation for discomfort, Morgan mused that Brand was out of practice at dealing with hardball questions.

The pattern had been set much earlier. 

In the opening minutes, Brand confessed that “I have a different view on the culture now. I regard it as evil.”

To which Morgan replied, “Fame can be one of the most insidious drugs of all.”

Skipping past the triteness of the cliché, Brand asked, “Yes, but what IS it?”, pinching his thumb and forefinger together as if trying to pluck the tangible from the ethereal. 

Hmm, I thought. An invitation for another man with direct experience of celebrity to explore the metaphysics of this strange phenomenon. This could be interesting.

Alas, this wasn’t the forum or the interlocutor for that. 

“It’s like any drug. People crave it. They need more and more of it…”, droned Morgan, who must have thought he was being asked to define fame or addiction or the hackneyed analogy linking them.

With every exuberant leap for higher knowledge, poor Russell smashed his head against the proverbial brick wall of Morgan’s shallowness.

For all his animal cunning, the tabloid editor turned click hustler often misses the broader point.

He claimed moral victory in what most saw as a rhetorical defeat by Nick Fuentes. 

He is openly sceptical that Brand is influential enough to be the victim of an establishment stitch-up, even though it is public knowledge that far less prominent critics of entrenched power have been treated like enemies of the state in recent years. Whether he is actually being persecuted by an amorphous coalition of vested interests is a different question.

His apology to Novak Djokovic, accepted with a classy magnanimity it didn’t deserve, focused on his journalistic failure to gather the full background before shooting his mouth off. If he had known about the tennis player’s prior infection, tests, etc. he wouldn’t have been so critical. But his real offence was to presume that what a sovereign individual (a vastly superior physical specimen at that) chose to put in his body was any of his business in the first place.

He accepts that he was misled about the vaccine’s ability to stop transmission, but regurgitates the regime propaganda that it has saved millions of lives. In other words, although he knows that the empirically verifiable claims about the vaccines were proven to be deliberate lies, he still chooses to believe quasi-mystical claims about the very same products from the very same liars.

It could be said that he functions as a kind of volunteer Praetorian Guard of the Overton Window. When he returns from an extended fag break – during which yesterday’s sacrilege has become today’s shibboleth – he simply resumes his post and polices the new borders of acceptable discourse with the same righteous fervour. Then he congratulates himself for being flexible enough to change his mind, as if switching from black to white without even a brief stopover in grey is a sign of integrity.

The central theme of the interview, thrashed out through accusation and counter-accusation, was “cynical or sincere?”. How could either of them explain their 180s on topics ranging from religion, Covid, the geopolitics of the Middle East to climate change, capitalism and veganism?

When Morgan flatly refuted Brand’s allegation that he was “sniffing around for headlines”, it might have been a form of honesty. To someone so intellectually obtuse, only conscious calculation would qualify as cynicism. Did I, at the exact moment I asked the question, intend to drum up controversy that would maximise engagement with this content? No, I didn’t, so my heart was pure.

But, as his antagonist pointed out, he is so habituated to the grammar of cheap ambush and conflict generation, he might not even realise he is doing it. Has he ever speculated on his unconscious motives? Moral absolution, perhaps – given his abhorrent stance on the Covid vaccines, acquiescing in the fantasy that they have saved millions of people offers a measure of vindication; attention, status – the balm of swollen egos like his; sexual allure – women going weak at the knees over his big, big platform. Regardless, it’s no coincidence that everything he does seems to be guided by a fiduciary duty to the sole shareholder of Piers Morgan Inc.

At least Brand, whatever one thinks of his authenticity, recognises that the truth of the grifting accusation (like most matters of conscience) is probably too complex for a conclusive result on a polygraph. Two decades of self-examination in recovery have given him a more nuanced insight into the grubby deceptions of the human psyche. “In the end, only I know and only you know,” opined Morgan, oblivious to any of this. “Maybe not, even,” corrected Brand.

Over and over again, the host painted an arbitrary line and demanded that his guest stand on one side of it – a series of gotchas disingenuously framed as good faith enquiries.

Do you accept that millions of people died of Covid? Do you think Hamas is a terrorist organisation? What denomination are you?

A more interesting question about denomination would be why Piers Morgan is a Catholic. No doubt he would shrug and say that he was raised that way. OK, one could persist, that was your introduction to Christianity, but what is the doctrine that binds you to it? Why not a Methodist or an Anglican? Of course, he would have no answer, because his faith, like most of his beliefs, is superficial and selective. So here is something to ponder, Piers. Would the Vatican be more approving of Nick Fuentes’ pre-marital virginity or your mocking of it?

On it went. 

“Are you against all vaccines?” You know, one of those anti-vaxxers. Even Robert Kennedy Jr. doesn’t object to all vaccines, he pointed out, with an air of surprise that only betrayed his own ignorance. Brand, like any other vaguely informed Covid dissident, will have known this for years.

“You don’t have to answer this question if you think it’s too personal…” Here we go, I thought. He is going to ask him if his kids have been vaccinated.

“You’ve got three children…” And there it was. Couldn’t help himself.

The truth, as Brand must have realised, is that he was defeated the moment these questions were asked and, by implication, the moment he agreed to go on a show with this interrogative modus.

If you give a direct answer, you are immediately trapped in a dialectic of false binaries. If you don’t, you’re accused of obfuscation and presumed untrustworthy. The choice is between being corralled into the taxonomy of the outrage industry or regarded as a shape-shifting charlatan. Rock, hard place.

“I think you think the best Piers Morgan can do for himself is host hideous spectacles of conflict about real, serious, awful, dreadful stuff,” he wailed.

“Why are you here then?” came the terse and apt response.

By that juncture, the guest must have asked himself that question multiple times, not least during the excruciating 90 seconds in which he failed to locate the biblical passage he had referred to in court.

Thanks to his running meta-analysis, we know that he had been hesitant about coming on in the first place, that he knew the Bible mishap was going to cast him in a bad light and that he wondered if the whole thing was worth it just to flog some books.

As the clip went viral and a smug Morgan enjoyed his victory lap, the answer was clear. It wasn’t. He had made the mistake of thinking he could play this tawdry game by his own rules. Nearly two hours of sparring had been reduced to a meme – delicious schadenfreude for his detractors, mortifying shame for his acolytes and very little in between.

You don’t have to like, respect or believe Russell Brand to lament this outcome. These Punch and Judy shows are demeaning us all.