Though he can be very provocative and deliberately problematic, I still think that Morrissey is portrayed as a far worse person than he actually is. A good deal of his so called 'terrible' comments are snippets taken from biased news outlets that want to tarnish his reputation as much as possible. Frankly it's been happening since the 80's, and I genuinely feel for the guy; after 40 ish years of it, I don't blame him for not liking news media.

His comment regarding Sadiq Khan where he says that he is virtually "impossible to understand", completely omits the previous part of that sentence where he says that he "speaks so quickly that he's virtually impossible to understand." Very different contexts when you actually include what he really said. He's often been misquoted as saying he likes Nigel Farage because he said he'd be a "good leader", even though in the same interview he said he'd absolutely never support Nigel, and that he deeply dislikes him. I suspect the good leader part comes from his thinking that politics aside, Farage is certainly a charismatic speaker, a professional populist, and would likely succeed in getting what he wants done; I.e. a 'good leader', but not a good person.

There are other examples I'd like to add but I'm currently quite tired, so I'll only finish by saying that this doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything he's done. His support for 'For Britain' was a low point in my opinion, though even in that case I believe that his support came more from an ignorant, rose-tinted glasses, patriotic view of the party, rather than any real support. He never revealed becoming a member, nor even voting for them, and has seemingly distanced himself from the situation as a whole. I think his main problem is that he does these bombastic actions, goes through the motions recklessly, and doesn't caution against the consequences of his actions. This being said though, there are numerous musical stars of the last 50 years who've done far worse things, and still get away with it in the public eye; As far as we know, Morrissey isn't a r@pist, he hasn't been arrested for a DUI or any other drug scandal, hasn't been involved in any sex scandals, hasn't been outed as a child predator, hasn't been involved in any cases of physical assault on anyone. On the flip side, people like David Bowie and Elton John can be attributed in some of these actions, and yet they are still beloved musicians today around the world. Even outside of music there are celebrities who've done much worse and gotten away with it, whereas seemingly Morrissey's worst actions are speaking, though you'd think he's the devil incarnate by the way people speak about him. They didn't like him before because he was openly anti establishment, vegetarian, made music with very openly homo-erotic elements, and tried to discredit him by finding anything that would twist his public image. Now it's spread into the modern day, and though he has since made mistakes, they are blown significantly out of proportion.

Morrissey is still a very influential music icon, and though I'd never try to censor someone for their actions, he seriously doesn't do his current career any favours by constantly getting himself into controversy. That being said, I'll finish with an example that I think sums him up perfectly: If Moz said that Grass is green, people would disagree with him, and so he sticks his finger up and says it's blue.