Piers Morgan (16 page)

Over at the
Daily Telegraph,
the gossip column ‘Spy’ ran this item: ‘After poor reviews of his Channel 4 debut with former Tory spin doctor Amanda Platell on Saturday, Spy hears that Piers Morgan already has another television project in the pipeline. I can reveal that the ex-
Mirror
editor is being lined up to present a prime-time debate and entertainment programme on BBC2 in the New Year.’

The editor of ‘Spy’ – and, indeed, the author of this item – was a journalist called Celia Walden. Nearly six years later, she would become Piers’ second wife.

I
n early 2005, Piers’ first book of memoirs –
The Insider
– came out. It proved that, although he might no longer be sitting in the editor’s chair, he was still capable of making the headlines; he had known everyone, been everywhere and wasn’t afraid to name drop. And name drop, he did.

As for Cherie Blair, who he said disliked him: ‘I don’t hate Cherie. She had an extremely difficult upbringing that left her pretty damaged. She’s not dissimilar to Diana in that respect. The last time I saw her was at Peter Mandelson’s leaving do, where she flirted with me. The chivalrous thing is to say that I wouldn’t be her type.’ He followed up that statement by calling her ‘breathtakingly capricious and vindictive, if not in the grip of a personality disorder’.

Blair himself, meanwhile, came across as a smidgen sycophantic in the book. They first met when Piers was editing the
News Of The World.
‘I want a good
relationship with you and the
News Of The World,
’ he had said. ‘I don’t want to get chewed up and spat out, like Neil Kinnock was by the
Sun
.’ However, the two men, probably recognising in each other equally able operators, managed to get on.

Then there was Princess Diana, who gave Piers the story of how she suffered from bulimia and then, when the news came out, claimed outrage. ‘Yep, she completely kippered me there,’ he told one interviewer. ‘I hope people read that and their jaws drop. My God, she was brilliant! I saw a lot of similarities between Cherie and Diana, who were both from damaged backgrounds. I loved Diana, she was intoxicating, but she was also difficult. She treated her domestic staff appallingly, was emotionally unstable and froze people out: Fergie, her mother, Elton John – terrible behaviour towards anyone who got too close.’

It seemed Piers was everywhere, even advising Prince William to get the powers that be to leave his late mother’s butler, Paul Burrell, alone – Burrell was prosecuted for theft in 2002 and, after the charges were dropped, opened up like a geyser on the subject of Diana and has yet to pipe down.

He also revealed how lunch with Marion and Marco Pierre White resulted in a food bill of £260 and a wine bill of £26,000.

So whose diary would Piers most like to read? ‘Mine,’ he replied shamelessly. ‘It’s an absolutely riveting read – I’ve never enjoyed a book so much as when I read my own manuscript on holiday. What I’ve discovered is that my gut instinct that I was the most interesting person out there
was right – that’s a joke. As for other people’s diaries, I’d quite like to read Boris Johnson’s real diary.’

In the aftermath, Piers claimed that he hadn’t really ruffled that many feathers and lots of the people featured in the book were still his friends. ‘I had more complaints from people who wanted to be in who weren’t than from those who were in,’ he insisted. ‘Given that there was a lot of score settling, I was surprised no one took me on, and disappointed, actually. Blair hinted in the
Evening Standard
‘Diary’ that I’d exaggerated the number of times I’d seen him, but I took the meetings out of diaries prepared by my secretary. I saw him more than fifty-six times; those were the ones where it was me and him or me, him and a couple of
Mirror
journalists – I probably saw him one hundred and fifty times in all.’

Given how cavalier he was being about everyone else’s private life, it was hardly surprising when one
Sunday Telegraph
reporter asked about his own. ‘You can ask, but I won’t tell you,’ said Piers. ‘If the
Sunday Telegraph
deems my private life to be in the public interest, they must pursue it aggressively, do an investigation. What you’re not going to get is me helping you purely because it would make me squirm to talk about it. I can never understand why anyone would want to talk about their sex lives in print but some people do in
Hello!
(or wherever), perhaps I’m old-fashioned. Put it like this, I think it is wrong when politicians use their wives as a marketing tool: they use a photo of themselves with their wives to show they are a certain kind of man. I don’t claim to be that sort of man
– well, I haven’t been with my wife for four years. That is not to say I do not believe journalists have a perfect right to scrutinise my life and come after me. Despite everything Ian Hislop says, I have never complained about it, not least because it would make me look a hypocritical twat.’

By now, his affair with Marina was over (not that Piers ever admitted publicly to the relationship), but he was about to meet the woman who would become the second Mrs Morgan. Meanwhile, in his public life, he was still casting about for something to do. The book had been a huge success, but it wasn’t going to go on forever, and his television career wasn’t really taking off. In May 2005, Piers took Fleet Street by surprise when he bought the newspaper trade’s rag, the
Press Gazette,
in a deal worth between £500,000 and £1 million. His co-owner was the PR guru Matthew Freud, but this was a deal that would blow up in their faces.

Piers was now a proprietor – but of what? The
Press Gazette,
a forty-year-old weekly, had suffered badly in recent years. Once well respected, it had now run into problems as it had lost a good deal of its advertising, not least job adverts, which were now listed on internet sites. It was still doing well one night of the year, though, when it held the highly profitable British Press Awards, but that was to change, too.

Piers usually had pretty immaculate timing but, on this occasion, it well and truly let him down. The previous British Press Awards had been held a couple of months earlier, but proved such a disaster that eleven national
newspapers threatened to boycott the event in the following year. The whole affair descended into chaos when the
Sun
won an award for its Band Aid coverage; although the prizes were supposed to be secret, the paper’s representatives just happened to have Bob Geldof in their midst, who made a long and very ill-advised speech, lashing out to all and sundry and making a fool of himself. There would always be drunkenness and brawling at these events (after all, this was where Jeremy Clarkson had punched Piers), but this year things got so bad that even the journalists were disgusted by it all.

Against this background (and the dinner was almost the only thing to turn a profit for the
Press Gazette
in those days), Piers and Matthew would have been better advised to set a match to their money and watch it burn instead. What’s more, the deal only made things worse because of who they were: Piers had a lot of friends on Fleet Street, but he had made plenty of enemies too – especially on papers that he had dumped on as an editor. The success of his book and his general cockiness grated on some people, too. And so it was that a fair few newspapers decided they would not support either the dinner or the magazine, bringing it to the verge of collapse. (It now exists as a website, a shadow of its former self.)

Nor was anyone any happier about Matthew Freud’s presence at the table; he was one of the most successful PRs in London, but there is a fine line between journalism and public relations, and many journalists felt extremely uneasy that it had seemingly been crossed. To have their
house journal, as it were, in the hands of someone who worked for a profession that some viewed as the enemy was too much; the deal never stood a chance.

Not that you would have guessed any of this, listening to Piers. He was cock-a-hoop about his purchase, determined it would expand to cover all sections of the media. Initially, it was not obvious how great the backlash would be – and not just from other newspapers either. Some readers even cancelled their subscriptions as a form of protest. Ray Hoppkrofft of Todmorden, West Yorkshire wrote, ‘I wouldn’t put money into the pocket of such a vile creature as Piers Morgan via the
Mirror
and I ain’t gonna do so via the
Press Gazette’
– only for his correspondence to end up in the letters’ column of the
Press Gazette.

This was typical Piers. ‘It’s hilarious,’ he said. ‘I love that sort of stuff. I told them, “Fine, put it in.”’ And he was full of plans for his new future in the trade press. ‘I went and bought all of them last week –
C
ampaign, Media Week, Marketing Week, Broadcast, Retail Week.
I saw lots of ideas that we can nick, shamelessly. People will think less of me if I didn’t. I also saw a lot of crossover to interesting features we can do in
Press Gazette.
We are going to have more coverage of magazines, more coverage of PR, advertising, the internet.

‘I want to have every single tentacle of Fleet Street covered. Every other part of the media will read
Press Gazette
to find out what’s going on in the minds of journalists. I think, in terms of the basic emphasis of the
magazine, it’s going to be about the people that make the British media tick. I’m very interested in the people, not cold statistics or hard facts. I’m interested in the people that run the big media buying companies, that run the big PR agencies. These people are as interesting to journalists as the people who run papers, and we need to be very broad-thinking in that way.’

In an imaginative move, at this point, he hired the PR relations specialist Max Clifford as a columnist but it never really paid off.

Piers then announced that he would be going into the office at least once a week (as owner, his presence was not required quite so much). In truth, it looked more of a hobby than anything else. For all of the
Press Gazette’
s undoubted qualities, it was not a publication in the league he was used to dominating, and it was later estimated that in the course of his ownership – which lasted until the end of 2006, when the magazine went into administrative receivership and was sold off to a trade buyer – he actually only went into the office about six times. Here was a major media player casting about for his next big project and the
Press Gazette
was never going to be it.

Although it had yet to take a firm shape, his television work continued. Piers started to make documentaries on subjects ranging from social issues, such as hoodies, to the haunts of the wealthy albeit tacky, such as Marbella. He began a series of interviews for
GQ
magazine and landed a diary on the
Mail
; he also pursued his passions of cricket, football (Arsenal) and generally having a good
time. Indeed, he now presented his exit from the
Mirror
as one of the best things that ever happened to him.

‘We went to the Barbados test match last year and Ian Botham had been lent this 80ft racing yacht,’ he told one interviewer. ‘So, I’m lying on this fabulous yacht with Ian Botham, telling stories and thinking, life does not get better than this. So then I came back and got fired. I thought, great – I can do it more often!’

Nor, he said at the time, did it really knock him sideways (although later he was to admit this was an extremely difficult period). ‘I waited a long time – I think my mother did, too – for the crash, but it never came,’ he insisted. ‘I found the whole thing very entertaining. Had a bit of a party the night it happened, went down to my village the next day and had another party – everyone seemed to find it terribly funny – and for a whole number of reasons it felt like the right time. I thought, if you’re going to go, go with a huge bang. Much better than going out like a damp squib for poor sales.’

At this stage, it seemed as if he was champing at the bit to get back into newspapers. After all, he was still only forty – younger than when most people become editors – and talked slightly longingly about making a comeback as an editor when he was forty-five, but it was hard to know where that might be. The Mirror Group was out of the question and so too was News International, home of the
Sun
and the
News Of The World.
Nowhere else had any vacancies. Piers now found himself in the odd position of still being best known as a newspaper editor, but with
nothing to edit. His proprietorship of the
Press Gazette
was not going well either, not least because the magazine was a dying force.

And then, another newspaper did come up, though admittedly nothing like any publication that he had edited before – indeed, nothing like it existed elsewhere.
First News,
a newspaper written by adults for children, was the brainchild of Nicky Cox (who had set up the children’s magazines division at BBC Worldwide) and her cousin Sarah Jane Thomson (part of the media monitoring company Thomson Intermedia). The paper was to appear once a week on Fridays and would tackle serious news, as well as celebrity gossip, competitions and sport.

While it might not have been editorship of the
Mirror
, it was all good fun and a new challenge. Piers would be editorial director and he clearly looked forward to his new role. ‘They needed somebody they thought would send a message that it was a serious operation as a newspaper,’ he explained. ‘I was very excited when I saw the dummies. I thought it was a great idea because there’s a complete gap in the market for this, always has been. Clearly, it’s uncharted waters but I wouldn’t be wasting my time on something I didn’t think would work. Nor would the Thomsons – everything they’ve touched in the world of media has gone platinum very quickly. They are putting millions into this and they have a long-term commitment to it.’

First News
was to be aimed at nine- to twelve-
year-olds
, the age range of Piers’ three sons. ‘It will be sold
alongside newspapers, not next to the
Beano
,’ he proudly told one interviewer. ‘There will be a round up of world events. We want it to be campaigning as well, particularly on kids’ issues. A website (www.firstnews.co.uk) will run with it. The idea is for
First News
to become a forum for debate for that age group. We don’t think anything is off limits. But it’s not aimed at teenagers – there won’t be “Position of the Week”. We would definitely have splashed on Jamie Oliver’s food campaign. It was a good political battle, relevant to children’s lives, but we wouldn’t have covered Tessa Jowell and David Mills because it’s too complicated. I’m forty and I’ve edited newspapers, and
I
don’t understand it. There has to be a limit on what you foist on young kids.’