Piers Morgan (8 page)

The German side didn’t issue a statement (indeed, it was unnecessary, given how almost everyone was outraged on their behalf), but the German Ambassador in London did object. ‘Sport should not be connected with a war which, for the Germans, is a very strong reminder of a past they do not care to brag about,’ he said.

Meanwhile, horrified
Mirror
executives came down on Piers like a tonne of bricks and forced him to issue an apology, but he himself showed every indication of simply not understanding the extent of the furore he had caused. ‘We just want people to have a bit of fun, a bit of humour,’ he protested. ‘Humour about the Germans has gone back in our history and is reflected in programmes like
Dad’s Army
and
’Allo ’Allo
. It was intended as a joke, but anyone who was offended by it must have taken it seriously and, to those people, I say sorry.’

But it could have been a whole lot worse: there were
rumours that Piers (or one of his lieutenants) had planned to drive a tank into Germany, that the paper had been arranging a Spitfire flypast over the London hotel in which the German team was staying and that he’d looked into reuniting the cast of
Dad’s Army.
Then again, it could have been a whole lot better. But the
Mirror
had wanted an editor capable of causing the nation to choke on its morning cuppa – sometimes at the sheer brilliance of the scoop and sometimes at the sheer scale of the misjudgement – and that’s what it got. Besides, everyone had been warned: they knew their man had been given a public carpeting by Rupert Murdoch, which is why they’d managed to lure him away in the first place. What’s more, they were keen to keep him (say what you like, everyone was certainly talking about the
Mirror
) and so the matter was dropped.

It was the first massively controversial front page that Piers had created for his new paper… and it certainly wasn’t to be the last.

P
iers had apologised, but the
ACHTUNG! SURRENDER
furore took some time to calm down. After all, this was the second time in less than a year that he had made a serious miscalculation and, while a maverick but brilliant young editor might get away with a certain amount, another mistake on this scale could be seriously damaging. More than sixty complaints had been lodged with the Press Complaints Commission, while widespread condemnation continued. Piers did what he could to calm everyone down: the next day’s paper showed the German captain Jürgen Klinsmann accepting a Harrods’ hamper as a peace offering, under the headline
PEAS IN OUR TIME.

Certainly, everyone was having a lot of fun with puns. Over at the
Sun
, there was talk of ‘appiersment’, while the Boy Wonder had also been dubbed Piers ‘Guten’ Morgan. Rather more seriously, a couple of advertisers pulled their campaigns from the
Mirror
(not the best development
for a paper with a falling circulation), at which point the Mirror Group’s share price slipped a couple of points. Far much more seriously, Germany then beat England on penalties, which led to rioting in the streets afterwards. In this unwelcome development, Piers was openly blamed for winding people up. Comedienne and columnist Jo Brand, meanwhile, let it be known that she wouldn’t be renewing her contract. Apparently, she too disapproved of the paper’s stance.

Some predicted this would be the end of Piers’ reign, but they were totally wrong. It wasn’t long before he had tuned into what the readers wanted and launched a campaign to force the royal family to give Princess Diana back her title. She had lost ‘HRH’ following her divorce from Prince Charles in 1996, although at this stage it wasn’t quite finalised and, in the wake of this, withdrew from her position as patron of over a hundred charities. Following this, the
Mirror
launched not only a legal challenge but also a petition to reverse the move.

‘The decision to remove the title Her Royal Highness from the Princess of Wales by Buckingham Palace has become a matter of enormous public interest,’ Piers declared. ‘The
Daily Mirror
believes that the removal of the title is damaging to the public interest and goes against public opinion. We feel it is now imperative that the Court should reconsider the full implications before granting a Decree Absolute.’

It proved a clever move; Princess Diana, with whom Piers had recently lunched, was still enormously popular
and the newspaper could do no wrong in issuing messages of public support for her. Nor did it hurt that it rather deflected attention from the unfortunate
ACHTUNG! SURRENDER
front page.

In the background, Piers and Marion decided to give their marriage another go and their next child, Stanley Christopher, was born in 1997. However, the reunion was not to last. One problem, according to friends, was that Marion sometimes seemed to put her husband down in public, always eager to assert that her career as a nurse was just as important as Piers’ life as a newspaper editor. But, while this might have been true, she was nothing like as high profile as her husband, which perhaps jarred. Either way, she did not appear to be offering him the support he wished for and many were not surprised when the marriage eventually fell apart.

Diana provided more useful diversionary tactics when a fake video of her cavorting half-naked with James Hewitt came to light – in fact, the couple on screen were actors. The
Sun
got hold of the story, believed the video to be real and put it on the front page, at which point it was promptly proved to be a fake. Piers was merciless; he gave up pages one to seven of his own paper to gloat over the
Sun’
s distress:
HOAX OF THE CENTURY – HOW THE SUN WAS SUCKERED
was the main headline. It was a welcome opportunity to point the finger at another editor who had messed up – and his greatest rival at that. What’s more, Piers happily appeared on the BBC to hammer the point home. It emerged the video had, in fact, first been offered
to three other publications:
Here!
magazine in the UK, plus the
Star
and
Globe
in the States.

Indeed, Piers seemed so pleased about it that some people even began to speculate that the
Mirror
itself was behind the hoax, something he was forced to hotly deny. ‘We did not engineer the hoax,’ he insisted. ‘Hand on heart, the first we knew about this was midday yesterday when Max Clifford called me, acting on behalf of the director of the video, Nick Hedges. I was here on the night the story dropped and it was a very long night indeed when I thought we’d been regally scooped. It was quite clear when we saw the video this was exactly how the scam operated.

‘I have no idea how a copy came to be offered to the
Sun
; I do know it was offered to other media operations first. Clearly, somebody was trying to con the papers. Can you imagine any national newspaper deliberately trying to stitch up another with a fake video? I’m sure he’ll [
Sun
editor Stuart Higgins] feel pretty peeved about it, but at the end of the day he was hoaxed, and I would be as keen to find out who did that as anybody else.’

He also felt there was no need for Higgins to lose his job – and, given how often he himself had recently been skating on thin ice, it should have come as no surprise when he took that line – and, with that, it was business as normal.

No one had ever quite got to the root of the stories about Piers and Sheryl Gascoigne, as she now was, but the paper maintained a remarkably sympathetic stance
towards her. She and Paul had been married in mid-1996 and, barely three months later, she was pictured in the
Mirror
with a bruised face and her arm in a sling. The headline read:
GAZZA BEATS SHERYL BLACK AND BLUE
and was followed by the full story of how he’d flown into a drunken rage at his new wife. Allegations continued to fly that Piers and Sheryl were on closer terms than might have previously been thought, but this was untrue – after all, he was now trying to make a go of it with Marion again. But it did show that his news sense was still second to none.

That news sense – and signs of a more mature Piers – surfaced once more in the autumn of 1996, when a bundle of papers was handed in to the
Mirror
. The documents were found to contain extremely sensitive information about the forthcoming Budget, but rather than publish them, as he might have done a year or so previously, Piers handed them in to Number 10. It was a win-win situation: he had a huge story on his hands anyway with the leak of the information, while at the same time he came across as responsible and praiseworthy for handing the documents back without revealing their contents.

‘Although we wouldn’t normally hesitate to embarrass the Government with such an amazing scoop, on this occasion we had a public duty to return such sensitive economic documents,’ he said. ‘Publication of so much detail from the Budget before the Chancellor’s speech could have forced the stock market to close and cause chaos in the international money markets. These were in the main press releases, which would be issued at the end
of the speech on every individual point. I think it would be fairly obvious why they chose the
Mirror
: if you are going to embarrass the Government, then we are the perfect receptacle.’

Except this time round, they weren’t. Piers had had to put up with a lot of criticism since taking up the mantle of editor on the grounds that he was a pop-music critic, not a serious journalist, and also on the basis that he was a Tory and therefore not the obvious choice for the
left-leaning
Mirror
, but this latest episode showed that he was well aware of the political impact the leaked documents might have had, and to do anything else with them would have been irresponsible. He chose by far the best course of action and, as a result, his standing rose.

It was certainly an embarrassment for the British Government. Prime Minister John Major ordered an immediate inquiry. ‘We are grateful for them having returned the papers,’ said a spokesman. ‘It would have been against the public interest for there to be premature publication.’

From intemperate risk-taker just a couple of months earlier, Piers had now donned the mantle of responsible member of the press, and was thoroughly enjoying being on the side of good for a change. Not that he was allowed to revel in it for long, as the rest of Fleet Street rounded on him, saying they would have published the information and condemned him for loss of nerve. Indeed, it was soon doing the rounds that the real reason why Piers didn’t publish was because he thought it could be an elaborate hoax and, after his recent difficulties, to say nothing of
witnessing first hand the
Sun
’s humiliation, he simply wasn’t about to chance it.

While Piers was adamant he was just being responsible, others weren’t quite so sure, but he conceded that, given his past record, he had to be extremely careful. ‘If I had published them and they turned out to be a hoax, I would have been sacked the next morning,’ he admitted. ‘And I was very hoax-minded, given what happened to the
Sun
over the fake tape of Diana and Hewitt.’

As all this was going on, he was beginning to take steps in another direction: appearing on TV. Still only
thirty-one
, he was one of the best-known editors in the country and was clearly thinking along the lines of becoming a media personality as well, but his initial forays were unsuccessful. Towards the end of 1996, he appeared on Paul Merton’s team in the BBC comedy quiz programme
Have I Got News For You.
This backfired disastrously: totally misjudging the mood of the audience, he attempted to rally them on his side against Ian Hislop, only for the audience to roar in support of the
Private Eye
editor.

‘Does anybody actually like him?’ he demanded of the audience, to which they all cried back, ‘
Yes!
’

Piers knew it had been a disaster and initially could get very cool with anyone who brought up the subject. It looked as if his putative TV career was over before it had begun. In time, however, he learned to take it on the chin; given that television was the medium in which he would one day become a household name, this was, in fact, an invaluable experience, even if it didn’t feel
like it at the time and so Piers was eventually able to mock himself.

The following year, he proclaimed, ‘I hugely enjoyed my own embarrassment and humiliation, and was confused that people didn’t realise that.’ But it had taken a while. ‘After the fourteenth video rerun at Christmas, even I began to see that my magical wit lacked a certain brilliance on the evening, though I deluded myself at the time,’ he went on. ‘I would advise anybody in the same position to be prepared for the flak if your jokes go flat, but it is better to go on than not. Don’t go expecting people to find you hugely amusing. Even if you are that funny, I’m sure the best bits are taken out to make themselves look better.’

Back at the
Mirror
, at this stage, he was now in an unusual position: he was criticised when he ran a sensitive story, but criticised when he decided against doing so. Of course, a lot of this came down to resentment. Even his biggest fans would have to concede that Piers could come across as bumptious: a combination of arrogance and hard work had taken him to the top of the tree when he was still very young, but that meant his rivals felt little compunction in knocking him down.

In some ways, he was a victim of his own success; the rest of Fleet Street had sat back and watched him set the agenda that they had to follow when he was editor of the
News Of The World
and now it was payback time. He had been handed the story of the century on a plate, but had a sudden and uncharacteristic attack of nerves.
Many headlines surfaced about mirrors cracking. Was Fleet Street’s
wunderkind
finished at thirty-one?

The answer was to be a resounding ‘no’, but it was touch and go for a while. In the meantime, there were ongoing concerns about the
Mirror
’s falling circulation (although this was not laid at Piers’ door – it was a problem that had been going on for years), with the result that, at the beginning of 1997, a £16 million relaunch was announced. The paper was to try to make itself more female-oriented, would henceforth be known as the
Mirror
, as opposed to the
Daily Mirror,
and would take on the mighty
Sun
to boot.

Meanwhile, the
Sun
benefited enormously from a vicious price-cutting war that had seen Rupert Murdoch slash the price to gain sales and, as a consequence, the
Mirror
was falling behind. The women’s pages were to be extended, Dr Miriam Stoppard hired as an agony aunt and a new showbiz column introduced. However, Piers was put on the defensive again and this time for problems not of his making.

The veteran journalist John Pilger, himself an ex-
Mirror
hand (and, it must be said, one of the most famous campaigning voices of his generation), was making a documentary on the
Mirror
’s fortunes: decline was uppermost in everyone’s mind. Piers fought back and was given space in the
Guardian
to mount a defence. ‘There can’t be many ex-employees of the
Mirror
left alive who haven’t kindly taken the trouble to air their views on how appalling the paper is recently,’ he wrote. ‘The
Guardian
’s
own self-appointed media expert Roy Greenslade has made a career out of it. It’s certainly been a more successful one than his career as an editor when he presided over one of the most spectacular drops in the
Mirror
’s circulation.’

Piers was very stung by Pilger’s attack, however, and rightly pointed out that things had to change. Newspaper readership as a whole was in decline, on top of which, along with a fair number of other titles, the
Mirror
had a ‘dying readership’ – it was losing readers because they were literally dying off. He had to make some attempt to attract a younger audience or there would soon be no one left.