Piers Morgan by Emily Herbert Read Free Book Online Page A

run it. Is that wrong? Well, 4.9 million people thoroughly enjoyed the News Of The World last week.’
    In fact, it was probably roughly three times that figure: Piers was quoting circulation figures, not readership levels.
    Interestingly, even at this early stage, the fact that he had a brother in the Army gave him some degree of moral authority and, on top of that, he also had a brother-in-law then serving in Bosnia. ‘They’d let me know if I’d done the wrong thing,’ he insisted – but where, he was asked, would he draw the line?
    It turned out that Piers had a humane side after all. He related the story of a BT operator who had chatted up a caller, found out his address and started to stalk him. However, once the News Of The World confronted her, she broke down and admitted that she’d just been released from a psychiatric hospital and if they published the story she’d commit suicide. And so they didn’t go ahead.
    â€˜Morally, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if she had killed herself,’ said Piers.
    However, he did run a story in which it emerged that the Bishop of Durham had committed an indecent act in a lavatory, twenty-six years previously. ‘I thought very long and hard about it,’ said Piers. ‘I wasn’t happy with the story until we established he had been guilty of hypocrisy. It was obvious the conviction was spent. So we had to ask: should we be pillorying a man for something that had happened so long ago? My immediate answer was that he wasn’t a young boy who committed a silly offence. At the time, he was a thirty-one-year-old man, married for five years, doing something quite extraordinary, especially for someone in the Church. What sealed it for me was the fact that he had said quite categorically there was no place in the ministry for gay clergymen.
    â€˜OK, twenty-six years is a long time but if he had admitted the offence at his appointment – though I concede it would have been laughable to do so – then I expect people would have said, OK, because it’s no longer scandalous to be gay. Instead, he spoke out against gays. Our fourth most senior clergyman was guilty of rank hypocrisy.’
    Piers was on a roll – already he had made a splash as editor of ‘Bizarre’ and now, as editor of the News Of The World, he was becoming a name and this thoroughly amused him. And his old school – Chailey – had just been in touch. ‘The headmistress has just written to me asking me to open their new science building,’ he told The Spectator. ‘Evidently I’m their most famous old boy. I’ll be delighted to do it.’
    Another aspect to the job that he hadn’t had to address before was politics. As editor of ‘Bizarre’, Piers had mainly concerned himself with pop stars, but now the country’s leaders were getting a look in, too. And so he began to contend with one of the more curious leaps in the difference between his personal beliefs and professional stance, one that would stay with him for years to come: Piers was basically a Tory, who supported Labour and, at that stage, the Conservative Party still ran Britain. Indeed, Tony Blair had only recently been elected Leader of the Labour Party. ‘There’s no company line and I have an open mind,’ said Piers. ‘I think Blair is an impressive character. I met him briefly at the Labour Conference and he was a very friendly, likeable chap. [But] yes, I do vote Tory. I’m from true-blue Sussex, I am conservatively oriented and it is my family’s way. We had Michael Howard [the then Home Secretary] in recently. We got one of our canteen girls dressed as a jailbird to serve him food – he loved it.’
    Murdoch’s gamble was paying off and, to celebrate (or at least mark the occasion), Piers gave an interview to the Independent. He was, to put it mildly, robust in defence of the stories