Dear Ariana,
To be honest, I didn’t know much about you before the Manchester terror attack.
Obviously, I knew you were a hugely popular young American pop star. But I wouldn’t have been able to name a single one of your songs, nor recognise you if you came up to me in the street and slapped me in the face.
Something you’d have been perfectly entitled to do after my scathing remarks about you two weeks ago, when you flew straight home to Florida within hours of the bombing.
I was very angry then.
Angry at the wicked, senseless act of terrorism that took such a devastating toll on so many lives.
Angry, especially, at the thought of all those poor young girls who’d been deliberately targeted, murdered and maimed.
Angry at the abject failure to prevent this obscene assassin from perpetrating his evil – despite myriad red flags about his radicalisation.
Angry at the same old meaningless rhetoric being spouted by our politicians that we hear after every one of these Islamist attacks.
So yes, I was angry.
Then I saw footage on TV of Her Majesty The Queen visiting the wounded in Manchester hospitals, and in my heightened state of indignant fury, I wondered where the hell you were?
Well, I knew where you were: your high security mansion in Boca Raton.
I just didn’t understand why you’d left it to a 91-year-old pensioner to check if your wounded fans were OK.
“God bless The Queen and her kind heart,” tweeted your friend Katy Perry.
To which I replied: “Agreed. Might have been nice if Ariana Grande had stayed to do the same.”
People reacted with outrage to my criticism, believing it to be crass and insensitive, but I doubled down: “If the Queen can visit the victims in hospital, so can the star they paid to see. I expected her to stay, visit and comfort her wounded fans and relatives of those who died.”
I believed those words then and I believe them now.
I still think it was wrong of you to flee the country so fast. I still think it would have been far better if you’d hung around to see your suffering fans first.
To my hard, cynical journalist mind, you had selfishly deserted them in their hour of need and run away from your responsibilities.
You’re not a kid, you’re 23 – old enough to make your own decisions.
Yes, I know you were shocked by what happened that night but you weren’t actually bombed and many of your fans were.
So I was angry with you, Ariana.
And I think the victims’ families felt similar disappointment.
In fact, I know they did because one of them told me so.
Peter Mann, whose 10-year-old daughter Jaden suffered two fractured legs and shrapnel injuries, tweeted me after you returned this week to say:
“She just came to Manchester children’s hospital to see Jaden.”
He enclosed a wonderful photo of you and his little girl laughing together.
“Great picture,’ I replied. “Very glad Ariana is doing this.”
“Thanks,” he replied, “all the parents supported what you said last week. She came and she was lovely.”
I felt self-righteously vindicated when I read this.
But it was a short-lived sentiment.
The truth is that you have made me eat my cynical words in quite spectacular fashion.
You flew back to Manchester within two weeks of what must have been the worst day of your life.
You went to the hospitals and sat with your wounded fans like Jaden.
You joked with them, did endless selfies, sang a few songs and brought huge joy to so many shattered lives.
You had also spent the past week planning a huge fund-raising concert, persuading many of your pop superstar friends like Niall Horan, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber to join you on stage back in the very city where the attack happened.
And then, on the eve of the new show, there was another massive terror attack in Britain.
Many more people were murdered and maimed in a horrific series of attacks in London.
I’m sure you were traumatised by this news. Who wouldn’t have been?
You could have cancelled the event and gone home again. Nobody would have blamed you. Well, I might have done but so what?
Instead, you defiantly declared the show would go on.
I watched the concert last night and it was a staggeringly moving and inspiring event.
And at the centre of it all was you, Ariana Grande.
My grandmother used to speak of the “Blitz spirit” whenever we spoke about her experiences during World War 2 when she was a young teenage girl.
The official dictionary definition is “stoicism and determination in a difficult or dangerous situation, especially as displayed by a group of people.”
You displayed that exact same spirit last night.
You may appear to be just a sweet, pint-sized, baby-faced young woman.
But by coming back to Manchester so soon, shrugging off the latest attack in London, standing on that stage and performing with such raw emotion and power, you showed more guts, resilience, strength of character and “Blitz spirit” than every snivelling, pathetic ISIS coward put together.
And you certainly showed a damn sight more compassion than I ever showed you.
I wrote after the attack that the right reaction to what happened is not just the usual vigils, candles, poems and hash-tags but rage; enough rage to force real change in the way the authorities tackle this new enemy.
I still feel that. I think the time for pussy-footing around with this rapidly expanding virus of Islamic terrorism is over. As the British Prime Miniser Theresa May suggested yesterday: “Enough is enough.”
But last night, I felt something else too; surging sense of pride that within two weeks of a pop concert being bombed in my country, another, bigger and better, pop concert had taken place here; one that was attended in the same city by many of the same people who had been at the first concert, including some of the victims.
They sang, they sobbed, they laughed and they cheered.
It was a joyous celebration of life and a wonderful tribute to those who were attacked. As Justin Bieber put it so perfectly: “We honour you, we love you.”
Then I chuckled to myself at the thought of how utterly enraged those pitiful ISIS douchebags must feel to see that their efforts to destroy our way of life, and force us to cower away in hiding, have been so roundly thwarted by a young ballsy girl in pigtails.
Someone whose first reaction after that bomb exploded was to get the hell out of there.
But someone who then got home and thought to herself: “No, I need to go back.”
Ariana, we’ve never met and I very much doubt I’ll be on your dinner party schedule any time soon.
But I want you to know this: I seriously misjudged you.
I had you down as just another self-obsessed millionaire pop star prepared to put her own safety before that of her fans.
I was completely wrong.
In fact, you’re an exceptional young woman who last night put on an exceptional show and in doing so, sent a massive two fingers to the disgusting creeps who thought they could bomb you and your fans into submission.
That took huge personal courage, yes.
But more than that, it took spirit.
An indomitable spirit.
The Blitz spirit.
The kind that says: “I don’t care who you are, or how badly you want to hurt me or my way of life, or that of those I love, I’m not having it.”
My army brother says there are two types of people in life: those you’d want in the trenches next to you, and those you wouldn’t.
Ms Grande, I’d have you in the trenches next to me any time.
I’m sorry I questioned your courage.
You’re one helluva gutsy young lady.
Crowd at Sunday's Charity Concert (inset: Morgan and Grande) 