Authors: Emily Herbert
This was, however, a more positive spin on events than he has portrayed at other times, as some bullying was taking place. The two boys in question had been taught to box in Canada. ‘The first couple of punches when he smacked me in the face were really bad,’ Piers told
The Times,
‘but after that I became completely immune to the
pain and didn’t feel anything else. And I think that’s not bad as a template for life, really – the first couple of blows hurt, and then after that it’s fine. And you just have to keep in there, fighting.’
In fact, the young Piers had more to deal with than he later liked to let on. In another interview, some years later, he admitted that it really hurt. Nor was it just a matter of a little kicking and punching. His new schoolmates labelled him ‘Piss Puke Moron’ (in later life,
Private Eye
magazine picked up on the ‘Moron’ tag, too), and he suddenly found himself in a very different educational world to the one he had just left. ‘That was a big moment – and quite tough,’ he explained. ‘It upset my mum to have to do it, but we just ran out of money. Suddenly, to be yanked out of that gilded existence, with all your friends going to Eton and Westminster School, and you’re going to the local comp, was a tricky time to navigate so I always understood the value of money and its precarious nature. Sometimes you have quite a lot of it, and the next moment, you haven’t. Your life can be affected accordingly and moments like that do toughen you up.’
Indeed, given the fact that he was to run into trouble some years later on the back of what was seen as dubious share dealing (although there has never been any evidence of wrongdoing), it’s easy to conclude this early brush with penury made him slightly reckless in some of his financial dealings, but he would still end up a rich man.
However much he might be able to laugh it off as an adult, the change of school was his second major childhood
trauma. First, he had lost his father and now a change in his family’s financial status meant that he lost out on the education for which he had seemed destined. Again, these early life experiences testify to a far more complex character than the one Piers likes to exude; he was forced to learn to cope, to bounce back and deal with altered circumstances. Nothing in his world could be taken for granted – perhaps other than the affection of his family – and, again, that brash exterior was as much a shield as anything else. He had to grow a thicker skin – and fast – if he was to survive this new, tougher environment and, as far back as that, he rose to the challenge and found he could cope.
His brother Jeremy also remembers going through a tough time. ‘There were four of us children and my father could not educate us all privately, so Piers and I left our prep school for a comprehensive,’ he said. ‘Piers is a chameleon and he made friends with the largest boys there, who protected him. I found it harder to adjust. It was a good school, though, and we both did well.’
According to Piers, his brother was the one who protected him from even more of the toughness, albeit unwittingly. ‘We both went to the local comp, where you’d get these skinheads who’d want to rearrange your face, so it was useful to say: “I’m not available for a fight, but my brother is,”’ he told the
Sunday Times.
‘He got into scrapes and a lot of people used to wind him up. I’m not absolving myself from tormenting Jeremy, but he did have a volatile temper that manifested itself in extreme violence.
The closer the British Army came to seizing his personage, the better for everyone.’
The boys were pretty self-sufficient, too, earning pocket money from a young age. ‘We had a job share, filling bags with mushroom compost,’ Jeremy recalls. ‘We could make £6 per hour, split two ways. But Piers never liked getting his hands dirty, whereas I was always happy to get stuck in. I’m cautious, Piers thrives on risk. He managed to get us into the Members’ Enclosure at the Oval when we were kids. We’d actually got into the commentators’ box when Richie Benaud caught us and chased us out. We’re different in our tastes in girls, too: Piers always liked skinny blondes and I’ve gone for more voluptuous brunettes.’
There were many other positive aspects to his life, too; all the early signs that Piers was being drawn to the written word continued to evolve during the course of his childhood and as he grew into his teens. In hindsight, it’s easy to see it was inevitable that he should become a journalist, although at the time no one quite realised what greatness lay ahead.
‘I remember getting a prize for handwriting; I had very good Italic handwriting,’ Piers told the
Independent
. ‘Now it’s appalling, like a doctor’s. I loved English and reading; I always liked non-fiction: biographies, stories of successful people. When I went to Chailey Comprehensive, they thought I was so far ahead in French that, at fourteen, I took the O-level and got a D. I retook it at fifteen and got a B, then retook it at sixteen to get an A. I then took the A-level and was awarded an O-level pass! So, I got four
O-level passes in French. I got nine O-levels (more if you include my multiple French results).’ Even so, it wasn’t quite the same as his younger days. It wasn’t just the fact that he had to get used to being called names and involved in rough housing; to put it bluntly, standards were not exactly what he was used to either.
‘Chailey is one of the better comprehensives, but still had games only once a week,’ he remembers. ‘It had very good teachers: Miss Jones and Mr Shepherd together taught me the power of English language, literature and history. Mr Shepherd also taught Latin, but I was never much use.’
He would certainly go on to flex the power of the English language, not just as a newspaper editor but as a television presenter, too. That, however, was still some decades off.
The next educational establishment that Piers attended was Lewes Priory sixth-form college, where he began to prove that he was perhaps not all that academically inclined. ‘When I went on to Lewes Priory sixth-form college, they made you take another O-level while you were doing your A-levels,’ he remembers. ‘I did Italian, hoping that my Latin would help, but they said they had never had a student who, after taking Latin, had done so badly in Italian: I got a U – ungraded!’ This information was paraded with typical panache, though: when Piers failed at something, and he was to encounter a good many setbacks in later life, he made a joke out of it. He was a natural fighter and had been from a young age.
Piers had happy memories of his later school years, however – or at least he said he did. ‘I was probably most
fond of Mr Freeman, who taught history A-level,’ he revealed. ‘He was cruel, but fair. “Your boy is a buffoon,” was his entire report to my parents one year. He probably thinks subsequent events have borne him out. It was a great school, a hotbed of rock music and gambling. I ran three-card brag games in the common room and we played bridge (weird for seventeen-year-olds). I got an A in English, a B in history and a C in French [retake]. It was wine, women and song (all my schools were co-ed), a perfect background for a journalism course.’
Even so, the course was not exactly his first choice. That C grade in French was a retake; had he passed the exam first time around, he would have gone to Warwick University, but then the world might never have heard of Susan Boyle.
Immediately after leaving school, the young Piers spent a short time with Lloyd’s of London, the insurance specialists. This was, after all, the early 1980s: the time of the yuppie, the brick-sized mobile phone and the Stock Exchange’s ‘Big Bang’, when an awful lot of young men and women worked in finance before moving on to what they really wanted to do. Piers later said he found it ‘boring’, but this seemed, briefly, to be the life for which his background had prepared him: a double-barrelled surname, an early stint at public school and the desire to make money. He was also an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and voted for her as soon as he became eligible to do so: ‘I thought she was a great leader for most of her reign, but then, like most of them, she went slightly potty,’ he later declared.
But that stint at Lloyd’s was to last less than two years. A great many yuppies were to discover that their real interest lay elsewhere and, with Piers, it didn’t take too long. Besides, journalism already had him within its grasp. Courtesy of his grandfather, there was some family background in the profession and Piers had also experienced the thrill of having his first piece published and seeing his words in print. Now it was just a question of learning how to do things properly, and so he was off to journalism school.
‘The Journalism Centre at Harlow College had a very good NCTJ one-year course, with 1,000 applicants for 50-plus places,’ he remembers. ‘There were 51 girls and two of the five blokes lived in London so weren’t around much: 17:1! My shorthand was up to 100 words a minute; I’d be a very good secretary. Studying the law of libel and slander was very useful. Everyone on that course got a job on a local newspaper. I was the last because I insisted on London – I’d been told the stories were juiciest in London and could be sold to the national papers. I had been going to Warwick University but liked the lure of the bright lights of journalism. I’d like my kids to go to university.’
And he had to pay his own way; Piers’ family might have been slightly upper-crust but they were not rich (he’d already had to change schools) and they could not afford to fund his education further without him contributing something. In the summer he would work 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,’ he later revealed.
Relations with his brother improved massively (as well as foreshadowing another famous Piers Morgan stance). ‘Once I left home at 18 to join the Army, we became closer,’ Jeremy told the
Sunday Times.
‘Piers left home before me, to work at Lloyd’s in London, then to do journalism at Harlow College. I’d been stationed in Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Bosnia before I went to Basra in 2004; Piers was editing the
Mirror
then. He was adamant we shouldn’t go to war; I was adamant we should, to rid the world of Saddam and WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction]. I used to call Piers a “cheese-eating surrender monkey”.’
Many journalists begin by plying their trade on local newspapers and that is exactly what happened next. Piers left Harlow to work at the Surrey and South London Newspaper Group, where he was a reporter on the
South London Press.
Humble as it sounds, this kind of background – learning how to dig up stories and make such mundane events such as the village fête sound interesting – can prove an invaluable training. Not that he had much to do with local events; it might have been a provincial newspaper, but it was in the nation’s capital city and so, from early on, Piers reported on major news. He was finding out about real life stories, too.
This was the time of the Brixton riots, which Piers covered for the
Streatham and Tooting News.
It was also his job to interview a prostitute. ‘Your life must be terrible,’ he told her.
What are you talking about?’ came the indignant reply.
‘How often do you get your leg over every week? I love it, and I love the nice fur coat and the nice flat. How dare you patronise me like that!’
It was a spirited reaction, and also proved that Piers had a gift for getting people to make revealing, sometimes outrageous comments. The experience proved invaluable; it was ‘a brilliant insight’, he said into not pre-judging any given situation and also taught him how to get a story.
‘The number-one thing I look for in any journalist is charm,’ he said in later years. ‘It’s not best results, it’s not a university degree, it’s not anything. If they can come into my office and charm me, they can charm anyone.’
He was on his way.
P
iers Morgan was a young man with a lot of energy that would soon stand him in good stead. Already he was doing well, learning his trade on the local
South London Press,
but he also showed a knack for making the most of his situation that would pitch him into a role on one of the most successful newspapers of the day.
‘He was a natural,’ explained Joan Mulcaster, then associate editor of the
Sutton Herald.
‘He was very, very bright, and right from the start he grasped what the job required. He had this knack of being able to get old ladies to talk to him. Once he was sent on a story, he was sure to succeed.’ The only problem, according to Mulcaster, was that Piers didn’t get on with the then editor, ‘because he was too good, and he knew it.’ He was clearly destined for greater things.
There was the hard news angle for a start, which began with the Brixton riots. ‘I saw the pressure building in communities,’ Piers told
The Times
in 1999. ‘There’s a
similar situation now. I think there’ll be real payback. In the cities you have got total lawlessness on the streets. It’s not necessarily there in the figures, but in terms of an underclass of kids abandoned by the establishment and by their fathers in some cases. The gangs are all they have. Thirty kids stabbed on the streets of London last year doesn’t tell me crime is getting any better.’
As well as interviewing colourful locals, he was sharp enough to see that celebrities who did pantomime at Wimbledon’s theatre – among them Cliff Richard, Rowan Atkinson and Frank Bruno – were of interest to a far wider audience than those served by the paper he was working on. It wasn’t long before he secured little chats with them, wrote them up into a story and then sold them on to the national press.
He started doing the odd shift for the national papers, too, after Joan Mulcaster introduced him to a former
Sutton Herald
reporter, Kevin O’Sullivan, who was now working for the
Sun.
‘You don’t want to touch the shit I’m writing,’ O’Sullivan told him, but Piers, who was made of sterner stuff, responded, ‘I’m not too proud.’ And so it was that he found himself doing the odd shift on Britain’s biggest-selling daily (and dropping the ‘Pughe’ part of his surname – he said it made his by-line too long, but in fact it was completely out of character with working for the
Sun
).
And it wasn’t long before he came to the attention of Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of the
Sun.
At the time, MacKenzie was one of the best-known and most influential
editors; his
Sun
was responsible for such headlines as
STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA, FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER
and
UP YOURS, DELORS.
MacKenzie, too, had a brash personality which made itself felt in the newspaper he ran. In short, there could be no better place for a fiercely ambitious journalist with the popular touch to begin making his name.
MacKenzie quickly hired Piers, and after a year he became editor of the ‘Bizarre’ column and displayed a gift for self-promotion that took even fellow journalists by surprise. It was a time of massive change: the late eighties was seeing considerably less interest in the established fodder of the gossip columns, the aristocracy (with the enormous exception of Diana, Princess of Wales), and far more excitement about celebrities. ‘Bizarre’, launched several years earlier by another extremely colourful and brilliant journalist, John Blake, was a gossip column focusing on celebrities and was to kick-start a spectacular career.
What Piers did was breathtakingly simple: he put himself in the photo with the stars. Instead of just photographing a pop star talking about his latest single, he would run a picture of himself talking to the star about his latest single. This manoeuvre had two outcomes: it put Piers on the same level as the pop star, making him out to be another member of the star’s celebrity world, while at the same time causing him to become massively recognisable to readers. Few journalists ever become visible to the wider world outside their immediate profession and become famous in
their own right, but Kelvin MacKenzie had achieved this and now his young protégé was having a go at it, too.
According to Piers, it was all Kelvin’s idea, and started with a picture of him with Bros, the pop-star duo who were famous at the time. ‘I was amazed when Kelvin used the picture giant-sized on the centre spread,’ he said. ‘That was when he said to me, “Right, get alongside all the stars. I don’t care how you do it, just do it.” All I did was carry it out.
‘I became the Friend of the Stars, a rampant egomaniac, pictured all the time with famous people – Madonna, Stallone, Bowie, Paul McCartney – hundreds of them,’ he continued. ‘It was shameless as they didn’t know me from Adam. The
Sun
had had a bad time after losing an action with Elton John, but this was harmless and funny. The publicity people from the record companies were all in on the joke. I got a letter one day from someone on HMS
Campbeltown,
saying I was appalling. Everyone on board got in a rage when they saw my face – so I printed that letter in full, in the column. I had four great years, travelling the world.’
And the stars themselves were usually only too happy to play along. They knew the deal: they were getting as much publicity as anyone, which could only benefit their careers and it certainly wasn’t doing anyone any harm. On one occasion, Piers was shown presenting a platinum disc to Gloria Estefan: ‘We should be giving you this, Piers, after all the support you have given us over the last two years,’ said Gloria’s husband, Emilio.
‘Thanks for everything,’ added Gloria. ‘You and the
Sun
have been wonderful to us.’
‘As I pointed out to rock’s most charming couple,’ wrote Piers, ‘that’s what friends are for.’
And it was all down to MacKenzie. The two men formed an instant bond. Piers went on to describe him (accurately) as a ‘dangerous genius’, while Kelvin encouraged his twenty-three-year-old hot shot to come up with outrageous stories and to push himself in the frame alongside whoever he was interviewing. ‘The headline instantly became “Piers Morgan 687pt, Bizarre 4pt”,’ Kelvin said in later years, referring to the size of Piers’ by-line compared to that of the column itself, but his editor was happy with what he was doing, as was Piers himself. It was also at this stage that Piers first made the acquaintance of Max Clifford, one of the best-known publicists of the age and with whom he was to have many dealings in the years ahead.
It was this trio – Piers, Kelvin and Max – who came up with one bombshell after another. ‘What was different about that period was that the
Sun
under Kelvin MacKenzie suddenly decided to take celebrities like pop stars, footballers and all the rest of them, pull them from the back pages and the gossip columns on to the front page as news stories,’ Piers later told the
Guardian.
‘Max was the easiest guy to deal with. He’d say, “Look, mate, a nod’s as good as a wink. He only hit him once, but if you want it three times, that’s fine.” Nowadays the PCC [Press Complaints Commission] would frown on that. From Max’s point of view, it makes it slightly trickier.’
Not that it really had to be a bombshell; by now, the public was completely obsessed by celebrity, so much so that practically anything to do with anyone on TV would sell. ‘A typical Max “Bizarre” story used to involve an
EastEnders
’ star having a meal at the Red Fort curry house, then having a fight at Xenon nightclub – all of which he represented,’ recalled Piers. ‘It was much more lawless then. The idea that someone like Max could create the entire story around his people, it wouldn’t be as easy now.’
It was also at this stage of his career that Piers first became involved with the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) because inevitably his attitude towards his job could be summed up as ‘absolutely anything goes’ but it was all invaluable experience. By now, he was building up contacts, learning his trade and earning a name for himself into the bargain – and all while still in his twenties.
This period also shaped Piers’ attitude towards the editorship of a newspaper. Kelvin MacKenzie, one of the most fearless editors of his generation, took no prisoners and his style would clearly influence his protégé in the future. Given the nature of their professions, both men were adamant that they themselves were fair game and were prepared to push the boat out in a way other editors refused to do. What’s more, both paid the price one way or another – MacKenzie eventually had to leave the
Sun,
while Piers was very publicly sacked from the
Mirror
– but both raised their heads above the parapet in a way few other editors would have dared.
‘I think that, if you are a tabloid editor, then you deserve everything you get, frankly. I have no right to privacy,’ Kelvin told the
Independent
many years later, as he looked back over his career. ‘You have got to understand where you lie in the ladder of life. I have absolutely no doubts about where I am. It would be somewhere near the bottom. It may be at the bottom. I always thought when editing the
Sun
that the greatest journalistic act I could perform would be actually exposing myself so you’d end up with a headline:
SUN EDITOR IN THREE-IN-A BED SCANDAL.
And you’d start with an intro: ‘Kelvin MacKenzie wept with shame last night as it was revealed…’ I think the idea that editors are in some way part of the Establishment is just plain wrong. I sort of drifted in and out of that. The idea that the Prime Minister would ask you what you thought about something is truly, truly absurd.’
In fact, a number of prime ministers were to ask both MacKenzie and his young protégé for their advice because the other attribute they shared was the common touch (in other words, what the man on the Clapham omnibus might think). Each had a good sense of what their readers wanted (although in both cases there were errors: on Kelvin’s part, most notoriously in the case of the
Sun’
s coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, and then there were the faked Iraqi War pictures in Piers’ case). Neither was in any way remotely deferential to any sort of authority and both were only too happy to challenge the existing status quo. Their political views were broadly similar, too, despite the fact that Piers would go on to edit the
Sun’
s rival and its opposite number
on the political spectrum: Kelvin was extremely right wing, while Piers was mildly right wing. Both made waves, both got what they wanted and, even outside the narrow world in which they lived, both were often talked about. And Piers was well aware who he had to thank for his success: ‘I owe it all to Kelvin,’ he stated, when he eventually left the
Sun.
‘He’s always been there for me.’
In the midst of making a name for himself professionally, Piers also married for the first time in July 1991, in Hampshire. The lady in question was a nurse – Marion Shalloe – and she was to bear him three sons. Being in his mid-twenties, he was perhaps a little young to settle down and, indeed, the marriage would not last but at this stage it seemed as if he was determined to do everything faster, younger and better than anyone else. He was a married man, already becoming a famous journalist and, two years later, the couple’s first son, Spencer William, was born in 1993.
But Piers’ lifestyle was not conducive to settling down. To write his column – and, indeed, for the best part of the two decades that he would spend on Fleet Street – he had to put in unfeasibly long hours, on top of which, as a celebrity gossip columnist, he had to make regular appearances at numerous show-business events. Marion is one of the few subjects that Piers is a little reticent about, although he has talked in the past about being a less than perfect husband and also owned up to feelings of guilt. He was, after all, brought up as a practising Catholic and divorce goes against his beliefs.
But back at ‘Bizarre’, he was going from strength to strength and proving that he could quite effortlessly attract publicity: for example, as far back as 1989, Ben Elton publicly criticised him for implying they were friends. (In fact, Piers pretty much implied that he was friends with
everyone
in those days.)
Almost everyone, that is; a couple of years later, Donnie Wahlberg of the pop group New Kids On The Block wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the legend ‘Piers Morgan Sucks’ on stage. ‘In case you didn’t know this dude Piers Morgan, he writes for a newspaper called the
Sun,
’ Donnie informed his audience. ‘He’s always slagging us off and putting us down – his stuff should be ignored. You shouldn’t read what he writes in that newspaper.’
Piers, ever ready to indulge in a feud even then, rose to the challenge. ‘Donnie’s sense of humour is obviously as atrocious as his singing,’ he said smoothly. ‘I can’t understand it. I thought we were great friends. Perhaps this has something to do with our recent reports that the New Kids and Mr Wahlberg in particular were washed up. I hope he doesn’t intend being a comedian when, or if, he grows up.’
But it was not the end of that particular saga. In an excellent demonstration of the way in which Piers managed over and over to make himself the centre of the story, nine months later he was pictured with Donnie again. This time, the latter was full of remorse and contrition. ‘I’ve done some stupid things in the last two years, but now I’ve grown up,’ said Donnie. ‘I did it on the spur of the
moment, because all the British fans seemed to hate you. Now I realise they all read your column, every damned one of them. It’s the same with me. A lot of people say they hate me, but they all buy my records.’
As a
mea culpa,
this was some going, but Donnie clearly realised that he was at a stage in his career when he could do with some support from the press. Two decades on, with Piers about to become one of the most powerful men on American television (where Donnie still appears), he was clearly right.
Piers was clearly in his element; there were now reports of Irish singing star Sinéad O’Connor ringing up to talk to him about her marriage breakdown. In 1992, there was one bizarre (appropriately enough) incident involving Madonna. Piers devoted most of a page to the ‘world’s best singer and columnist’, who had turned up in a limo for a chat at his office in Wapping. A couple of days later came an apology from Piers for having been duped by a lookalike and a few days after that came the claim that he himself had hired the lookalike and the apology was a joke.