Authors: Emily Herbert
Meanwhile, Piers appeared to have suddenly become aware of just how much trouble he was in. While continuing to deny any wrongdoing,
Mirror
insiders said that an air of embarrassment hung about him, that he was uncharacteristically glum. The story had made every other paper, from his immediate rivals to the broadsheets.
So, had Piers Morgan, Boy-Wonder-turned-
tabloid-legend
, finally taken a step too far?
T
he fact that Piers was news was nothing unusual – ever since his ‘Bizarre’ days, he had been one of the most high-profile journalists in town. But this time around was different: the Department of Trade and Industry had been called in to make an investigation and he looked to be in serious trouble. What’s more, there seemed to be no shortage of people wishing him ill. He had gained many admirers along the way but an awful lot of enemies, too, and there was nothing many of them would have liked more than to see him come completely unstuck.
The Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice was quite clear about it: Clause 14 made the following points:
Appearance was everything and it didn’t look good: for a man who made his living from running stories about the weaknesses of others, even the suggestion that something dodgy had been going on in his own life was alarming. Meanwhile, none of his rivals was keen to let go: scenting blood, the pack gave chase.
The Press Complaints Commission got involved after a complaint was made and, although questions were asked at Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons, Tony Blair declined to comment. Piers was forced to issue a lengthy statement in which he denied point-blank knowing his paper was tipping the shares before he did the deal. As uproar mounted, he sold his shares and pledged to give the £13,900 profit to charity. Further investigations were then announced: this time into Anil Bhoyrul, one of the ‘City Slickers’ himself.
And the
Sun
certainly wasn’t about to hold itself back. It ran stories about sleaze at the
Mirror
and accused Piers of being like Robert Maxwell, the paper’s former
owner and a plunderer of the company’s pension fund. James Hipwell, the other ‘City Slicker’, also came under investigation – both Slickers were accused of hyping shares they owned – and even Tina Weaver, the paper’s deputy editor, was suspected of buying shares that had been plugged. Reporters were now beginning to surround Piers’ house in South London. He himself had been only too happy to dish out this treatment to others, but it was not so much fun being on the receiving end.
As the scandal rumbled on, other firms were caught up in it, too. Bloomberg, the financial news agency, very publicly warned its staff not to deal in shares of companies they were writing about. At the same time, the
Sun
published a headline about the Slickers, which simply read:
SPIVS
. By now, they were devoting whole pages to ‘Mirrorgate’, piling on the pressure and revelling in the discomfort they could cause their adversary. Piers fought back, accusing the
Sun’
s City editor Ian King of owning shares he had tipped, and editor David Yelland threatened to sue.
Matters escalated further. Piers was threatened with even more embarrassment when it emerged that he stood to make £500,000 on another share tipped by his paper; there was no suggestion of impropriety, but he had previously bought £10,000 worth of shares in Corporate Executive Search (CES) at 5p each. Shares were subsequently suspended (this was normal practice) when the company announced that it was to buy an internet company and, when trading started up again, it was speculated the shares could rise to 250p (in the event, this didn’t happen). Piers
himself had done nothing wrong, but once again the
Mirror
had tipped the company. Trinity Mirror, owner of the
Mirror
, publicly backed its editor on the grounds that the paper had plugged the shares while they were still suspended and the move was therefore not price-sensitive.
The ‘City Slickers’ themselves were summarily dismissed, though without Piers’ knowledge. As was Anthony Laiker, Piers’ broker at Kyte Securities, who had made share deals for another fourteen of the staff on the newspaper. At this point, the Stock Exchange began to examine hours of tapes of Piers talking to Laiker, around whom there was now intense speculation as to why he was going. Meanwhile, Kyte stayed schtum, and the
Sun
ran a huge story about Piers facing a possible jail sentence. The ‘City Slickers’ declared their loyalty to their former editor. ‘Piers did not know that we were being fired,’ insisted Anil Bhoyrul. ‘He was very angry, I do not blame him.’
But the former columnists’ loyalty was not to last for Bhoyrul subsequently launched a legal action against the
Mirror
for unfair dismissal. ‘We were doing nothing wrong. The company needed to find some scapegoats,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve tipped about 2,000 shares in the column: I’ve had shares in maybe five of those and I’m always very open about those shares.’
As the furore raged on and speculation intensified that Piers might now be forced out, Sir Victor Blank, chairman of Trinity Mirror, publicly backed his editor, insisting his position was secure. Another row then broke out when it emerged that Piers had not bought the shares in his own
name but in that of a nominee – although, again, this was standard practice. The Stock Exchange widened its investigation to include a third deal, this time into shares in Wiggins Group, which Piers had bought and were subsequently tipped by his paper, which continued to back him. And, if that was not enough, it then emerged that Tina Weaver had previously nominated Anil Bhoyrul as Financial Journalist of the Year.
Piers then took a much-needed week off to go on holiday and Tina Weaver edited the paper in his absence. Meanwhile, David Yelland announced that, had he been in Piers’ position, he would most certainly have stood down. The ‘City Slickers’, having been loyal to their erstwhile editor for about a week, let it be known that they would not be standing by him and he might have seen their
share-tipping
column hours earlier than he first said. Everything hinged on the timing of when Piers initially saw the copy: if it was after he had purchased the shares, then he was in the clear but, if it was before, this was a different story. Piers returned from holiday to be met by calls for his resignation from senior Labour MPs – it was looking extremely bad.
Somehow, he toughed it out, although whether it was wise to do so was another matter. In hindsight, it is possible to say that, although it took another four years before his enemies forced him out, Piers’ reputation remained tarnished even after the whole episode calmed down. In fact, he was completely cleared of any wrongdoing after exhaustive investigations by everyone from the
Department of Trade and Industry to those working on his own newspaper, but mud sticks and this extremely unpleasant affair proved only a precursor to what would happen when he finally had to step down.
One noteworthy aspect, however, was that Piers’ own staff really did not want him to leave. He was popular among
Mirror
employees (although less so with former hacks at the newspaper) and many were now beginning to feel that the attacks on their editor were, to a certain extent, attacks on the newspaper itself, and, although Piers’ paper profit on the CES shares now turned out to be about £80,000, his staff were beginning to want the whole story to go away. There was also the feeling that some Labour MPs were truly relishing the situation – after all, the
Mirror
might still be a Labour-biased newspaper but it certainly didn’t hesitate to criticise when criticism was due. With Piers gone, the
Mirror
may have toed the party line a little more but he wasn’t going any time soon and so his colleagues simply had to wait for the furore to die down. Even Rupert Murdoch stuck the boot into his former editor, saying that, if he had been working for him at this point, he would have been fired. Of course, Piers had walked out but, even so, this was a wounding comment.
Gradually, life began to return to normal. Not that controversy was ever far away: in March 2000, Trevor Rees-Jones retracted his claim to have heard Princess Diana’s last words, in direct contradiction to what he had told Piers. At this point, Piers promptly ran an editorial
in which he warned Rees-Jones not to try to profit from the death of Diana, although the former bodyguard went on to write a book anyway. And the shares scandal certainly simmered on the backburner for many years to come; in December 2005, ‘City Slicker’ James Hipwell admitted to dealing in the shares of forty companies he had recommended to readers of the
Mirror
. The story was to run and run.
With spectacularly bad timing, given the recent controversy, the
Mirror
was sued by Victor Kiam, the tycoon who liked Remington razors so much he bought the company. An article had appeared in the ‘City Slickers’ column in which it was claimed that Kiam was about to put Ronson – a company he had just bought – into receivership. In fact, he was doing nothing of the sort and won the libel case. With the departure of the two Slickers, the whole column had been abandoned but, given that the
Mirror
desperately wanted to forget its entire recent history, this was yet more all-round embarrassment. An increasingly irate Anil Bhoyrul gave an interview to the
Press Gazette
with his version of events, declaring, ‘I won’t be the fall guy.’
Amid all this pressure, Piers had somehow managed to stay relatively calm but, at the British Press Awards in March 2000, he found himself no longer able to keep his feelings under control, berating various people present for their comments about his travails. Completely tired of all the stick he had been receiving, he even cancelled a speech to the Confederation of British Industry. Certainly, he’d had his fair share of controversy in the past, but nothing
like this; the
ACHTUNG! SURRENDER
headline might have been a mistake but not along these lines. Altogether, this was a foretaste of what it was to really fall foul of the pack – although, on the whole, odd rant aside, he managed to keep his head down.
Still, at least he had the Pride of Britain Awards, which ran for the second time in 2000 and was just as successful as the first time around. Blair was there again (sitting between Michael Caine and Diana Ross), along with a real A-list – it was a welcome respite from all the jibes Piers had recently been receiving.
In the event, the Press Complaints Commission issued a strong rebuke, advising him that he had ‘fallen short of the high professional standards demanded by the Code’. If that were not enough, it added, ‘In view of the unsatisfactory state of affairs revealed by this episode, the Commission has decided to refer the terms of this adjudication to the chief executive of Trinity Mirror’ – in other words, they were reporting Piers to his boss. But Sir Victor Blank had already made it quite clear that he would be standing behind his editor, and so it was that Piers lived to fight another day.
In June 2000, matters took a turn for the better when it was announced that Piers and Marion were expecting their third child in six months’ time. He also proved himself to have a considerably more forgiving nature – to say nothing of a sense of irony – when he hired a new City columnist, Suzy Jagger. It was Ms Jagger who had printed the original story about Piers’ share-dealing activities
in the
Daily Telegraph,
thus setting the whole story in motion, but it showed that Piers had not lost his instinct for good publicity because his latest signing certainly got him noticed. It even made him look like a good sport, all the more so when Piers himself nominated Suzy for an award for ‘Scoop of the Year’.
And he certainly couldn’t keep away from the limelight. In 1998, Piers had taken possession of some love letters written by Princess Diana to Major James Hewitt after the former Cavalry officer’s then girlfriend, Anna Ferretti, attempted to sell them. While Piers did not publish the letters, nor did he return them on the grounds that they really belonged to Diana’s family and, over two years later, he was now being questioned about the matter by Scotland Yard, although he was never actually charged with theft. Naturally, he responded in his usual robust way.
‘I understand that James Hewitt accuses me of conspiring with others to steal from him letters written to him by the late Diana, Princess of Wales,’ he said. ‘I do not believe there is any evidence to support this allegation. The
Mirror
was approached by a woman called Anna Ferretti, who offered to sell to the
Mirror
for some £150,000 personal letters written to James Hewitt by Diana. Ferretti [said] she was not acting on behalf of Hewitt, but I believed she was, as she was an intimate friend and I knew he had previously exploited the letters for his personal gain. It was decided to pretend to Ferretti that the
Mirror
would buy the letters but give them to Diana’s representatives and refuse payment of the £150,000. The broad facts have
been well known since shortly after they occurred, not least because they were published in the
Mirror
in April 1998, and I am astonished that I should be accused of criminal activity, especially after all this time and consider it an abuse of process.’
In the event, the matter was laid to rest but that was just one of many controversies with which Piers was dealing at the time. Another, though perhaps more of an innovation, was the establishment of a new style of gossip column – the lifeblood of any tabloid newspaper – on the
Mirror
. As already noted, this had been the means whereby Piers himself had risen to fame and he now took a similar approach to his own staff: make the journalists themselves the stars of the gossip column, while at the same time making it appear as if they are an integral part of the world they are reporting on. And so he created a new column called ‘3am’ and picked three attractive women – Polly Graham, Eva Simpson and Jessica Callan – to front it. Their mission was to attend every showbiz event going and be photographed with the stars; all three were so successful that they built careers on the back of ‘3am’. The writers attracted a great deal of attention (all of which, of course, reflected well on Piers and the
Mirror
), while Piers himself talked of them as his ‘James Bonds’.