Piers Morgan likes to recall that as a small boy he was instructed by nuns,
whose purity and idealism entranced him. So gobsmacking is this image of the
roguish tabloid editor turned celebrity that his interviewees must struggle
to trump it. Which is perhaps how Nick Clegg ended up blurting out last week
that he had slept with as many as 30 women.
The hilarity that greeted the Liberal Democrat leader’s candid interview in GQ
magazine is the second recent coup by Morgan. A fortnight ago the
43-year-old won the American television show Celebrity Apprentice only to be
pronounced “evil” by Donald Trump, the judge, and “hateful”, “rude” and “a
coward” by viewers. It must have been music to his ears.
For a man whose glory days seemed behind him after he was sacked as editor of
the Daily Mirror and frogmarched from the building in 2004, Morgan is riding
a rocket of fame. With two bestselling memoirs and a brace of columns, he is
known to millions across the pond as a judge on the NBC show America’s Got
Talent - a role he also performs in the UK version alongside Amanda Holden
and Simon Cowell.
Morgan’s talent for eliciting confidences remains a puzzle to his girlfriend
Celia Walden, a journalist on The Daily Telegraph: “At parties, people come
up to him and volunteer the most outlandish things about themselves, even
though he’s the last person they should be telling.”
Walden, the Amazonian daughter of the former Tory MP George Walden, transfixed
Morgan during an interview in 2006 after she had posed for a series of
provocative photographs. She was “ridiculously beautiful”, he wrote,
rhapsodising that like Brigitte Bardot “she has brought a lot of basic
pleasure to a lot of basic, lusty men”.
He had just broken up with the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde, for whom he had
earlier left Marion Shalloe, the mother of his three sons. Now the besotted
egotist set about wooing Walden with cacti resembling Venus flytraps that
spewed bile over her office desk. He repeated ardently: “In the end you will
give in.” Out of exhaustion she did, although he continued to live as a
bachelor at his £550,000 flat beside the Thames near Chelsea Harbour. Then
fame whisked him off to America, where he now spends five or six months of
the year, during which Walden manages one or two visits. He is due back at
the end of this month.
“He’s loving the whole LA thing,” said a friend. “He says there’s something
about fame coming to you late in life that makes you really appreciate it.”
Which is strange, for when Morgan took the helm of the News of the World at
the age of 28 he became the youngest national newspaper editor since 1937.
But then it was a rollercoaster ride that stalled prematurely in the water
splash.
Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, recalls hiring Morgan “on a whim” after the latter
was fired from the Daily Mirror: “The features team thought I’d gone mad.
They said no one will want to have anything to do with him.” It was the
opposite, with celebrities seeking “redemption” from Morgan, Jones reckons:
“Piers is one of those journalists who can tap you on the arm and ask, ’You
did, didn’t you? Come on, you can tell me’. And he gets away with it.”
One of the few people to have turned him down is Jeremy Clarkson, the Top Gear
presenter and Sunday Times columnist, who famously biffed Morgan at a press
awards dinner a few years ago. Jones remembers Clarkson’s exact words: “You
must be f****** joking.”
Of course Morgan is to diplomacy what napalm is to trees. “By his own
admission, he’s utterly shameless,” said Gary Farrow, head of the
Corporation entertainment PR company, who has known Morgan for 25 years and
hosted “off the record” celebrity dinners for him with the likes of Elton
John, George Michael and Sharon Osbourne. “He doesn’t care who he upsets.
He’s tougher than a rhino in riot gear.” But more boorish.
Morgan’s manners may be beyond help - his rudeness to celebrities mesmerises
Americans - but he has been giving thought to his looks. Being “a fully
fledged global TV star”, he admits, has made him vain and ashamed when
Americans marvel at his “crooked yellow British teeth”.
The lighthouse flash of Cowell’s smile drove Morgan to book a £300 laser
teeth-whitening session in Beverly Hills, although he is holding out against
Cowell’s £100 bet that he will succumb to cosmetic surgery. The two judges’
competing egos are held in check by a friendship that dates from Morgan’s
stint as show business editor at The Sun.
Last year he put himself through “gruelling” gym sessions under a giant
Austrian personal trainer, but just as he was ready to expose his honed
torso he fell off a Segway self-balancing scooter and broke three ribs. This
prompted hoots of laughter: in 2003 he had mocked President George W Bush
when he suffered the same calamity.
Morgan was born on March 30, 1965, at Newick in East Sussex. His father
Vincent O’Meara died when Piers was one year old and his brother Jeremy was
three. His mother Gabrielle was an artist who raised Piers in the Catholic
faith. She later married Glynne Pughe-Morgan, who still runs a meat, poultry
and game distribution business in the village.
“He’s been absolutely incredible,” Morgan said recently of his stepfather. “He
took on two young boys when he was in his twenties and did a great job for
us. We didn’t have much money, but we had a great time.”
He reckons he got his boisterous ways in the Sussex pub that his parents ran:
“I was always very cocky and noisy in the pub. I loved holding forth,
hearing the sound of my own voice, and a lot of people found it amusing. So
I just carried on.”
His education was a mixture of private and state: he went to a prep school
until he was 13 and then to Chailey comprehensive, near Lewes. At 15 he
wrote his first article, a 1,500-word piece for the Mid Sussex Times about
his village cricket team’s trip to Malta: “I was so excited that I framed
the [£15] cheque.”
Three years later, to pay his rent at Harlow journalism college, he spent a
summer logging trees for £35 a day: “I developed very large forearms and
nearly died when a giant conifer fell the wrong way and missed my head by
three inches.”
After cutting his teeth as a reporter on the South London Press, at the age of
23 he was recruited by Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun, to head the
paper’s showbiz column. During his five-year stint on Bizarre he was often
photographed hanging out with the stars. His love affair with celebrity had
begun.
He caught the eye of Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News
Corporation, who in 1994 appointed him to run the News of the World, the
country’s biggest-selling newspaper. Morgan left the post the following year
after publishing photographs of Victoria Lockwood, Earl Spencer’s wife,
leaving a detoxification clinic.
By Morgan’s account in his entertaining autobiography The Insider, he left of
his own volition when he was offered the editorship of the Daily Mirror. An
early admirer of Margaret Thatcher - “I thought she was a great leader for
most of her reign but then, like most of them, went potty” - he was thought
to be an odd fit for the Mirror, with its tradition of Labour politics.
His stunts, which might have worked on The Sun, were seen as clangers, notably
his “Achtung! Surrender!” headline as England prepared to face Germany in
the Euro 96 football championships. In a bid to revive what he later
described as the paper’s “rotting, dismembered carcass”, he pursued what he
admitted was an agenda consisting of “buckets of trashy, racy, celeb-driven
scandal and sleaze”.
He seemed mired in sleaze himself when it was revealed in 2000 that he had
bought £67,000 of shares in the computer company Viglen shortly before the
paper’s City Slickers column tipped the firm as a good buy. Although he
breached the code of conduct, he mysteriously kept his job.
His newspaper produced some genuine scoops, including the revelations of Paul
Burrell, the royal butler, and an exposé of Buckingham Palace security.
Then, in a Damascene conversion, he took the paper middle-market and rehired
John Pilger to campaign against the Iraq war. Amid falling sales this cause
finally did for Morgan: he was fired for publishing fake photographs of
Iraqi prisoners being abused by British troops.
“If you’re going to go, go with a huge bang,” he said. The reverberations, it
seems just keep getting louder.
