The BBC’s Question Time became a huge inquest into the breaking news, and panel member Hugh Grant stamped on the News of the World’s grave with predictable gusto.
He’s never forgiven the paper for paying Divine Brown for her story. The hooker with whom he cavorted and was caught by police in Hollywood in 1994. Nor has he forgiven me, as I was the editor at the time.
It seems like war has been declared on the British tabloids, and anyone connected with them.
I was surprised nobody in the American media made a big deal out of my tabloid past when I got the job.
This will give them all the encouragement they need.
FRIDAY, 8 JULY 2011
Andy Coulson has been arrested over alleged phone hacking and illegal payments to police. He is fighting his case.
Andy’s another of my oldest friends in journalism. He lost his job as News of the World editor a few years ago in the wake of the first phone-hacking scandal, when the paper’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, was jailed in 2006 for hacking royal employees’ phones.
Andy then became David Cameron’s communications chief, doing a brilliant job in helping him become prime minister. But he quit in January, as the heat from the new hacking allegations became too hot for Downing Street to handle.
Cameron has reacted to the news of the last few days by announcing a full judge-led inquiry into the scandal. This is clearly going to be an absolute shit-fest.
I hope I can stay out of it all, but I fear anyone who has been involved in running a tabloid in the last decade is going to be dragged into the melee.
SATURDAY, 9 JULY 2011
William and Kate, or the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they’ve now been formally renamed, have come to L.A., and I was invited to a BAFTA dinner tonight to welcome them.
I spied Barbra Streisand, my singing heroine.
‘Ms Streisand, how do you do? I’m Piers Morgan …’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I watch your show.’
‘Really? Would you come on it?’
‘Maybe. But only if you learn how to pronounce my name properly. It’s Strei-sand, not Strei-sund.’
It was fascinating to see celebrities looking so star struck themselves around the royal couple – proof to me that William and Kate have quickly become the biggest celebrities on the planet.
Only Tom Hanks seemed in control of his senses.
‘I don’t normally go to many parties,’ he admitted to me. ‘But when this event was announced, my wife said we had to go.’
Hanks recently pulled out of a planned CNN interview with me at the last minute.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Honestly? I was tired.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Yep. That’s it. I had a ridiculous schedule and decided something had to give …’ Then he looked straight into my eyes and smirked. ‘And that something was you, Piers.’
SUNDAY, 10 JULY 2011
Caught up with the sad scenes outside News International in East London last night, as News of the World staff all came out brandishing copies of the final edition of the paper.
I recognised a few old faces from the production team that worked for me there in the mid-nineties, and the shock and dismay on their faces was really upsetting to see.
They’ll have had nothing to do with the news-gathering process, and will now really struggle to find other work in national newspapers.
Very few people will give a damn what happens to them now, but I do.
THURSDAY, 14 JULY 2011
Hugh Hefner’s been stood up almost at the altar by his twenty-five-year-old fiancée, Crystal Harris, and I landed the first interview with him about it tonight.
Hef, eighty-five, was philosophical.
‘I was for a moment potentially devastated,’ he admitted. ‘But I got such remarkable emotional support from friends …’
Our cameras cut to the green room where two sexy young blondes lay preening on a sofa.
He departed by clambering into a brand-new Bentley with the licence plate HEF 1 – clutching his new Playmates on each arm, and sporting a massively smug grin.
The healing process seems to be going well.
FRIDAY, 15 JULY 2011
Rebekah has resigned after a week of unrelenting pressure.
‘I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we have hurt,’ she said in a statement.
I feel so sorry for her. She’s one of the hardest-working people I know, and has given her life to the Murdochs. She’s also been an incredibly loyal friend to me over the years, way beyond the call of normal friendly duty.
I always say you can work out who your real friends are by asking yourself who would get out of bed at 4 a.m. and come and help you if you were in trouble.
Rebekah’s one of those people for me.
This will hit her hard.
Rupert Murdoch himself met with Milly Dowler’s family in London today, and made a fulsome personal apology.
I’ve never seen him look so shaken.
A further indication of the severity of what is happening here.
MONDAY, 18 JULY 2011
Rebekah has been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and making illegal payments to public officials, which she strongly denies. And two of Britain’s top policemen have now also quit over the hacking scandal. This is ripping apart the whole fabric of the British establishment.
The media, police and politicians are all trying to kill each other in a real-life game of Reservoir Dogs. It’s ugly and nasty, and it’s going to get uglier and nastier.
TUESDAY, 19 JULY 2011
Rupert Murdoch appeared before members of Parliament today to be quizzed over the scandal.
‘This is the most humble day of my life,’ was his opening line.
Extraordinary.
But not quite as extraordinary as what happened next.
As he was giving evidence, a protestor ran forward and tried to hit him with a custard pie. Rupert’s young wife, Wendi, sprang from her chair and punched the guy. It was a magnificently quick, gutsy reaction.
I was still laughing about it an hour later when I heard one of the MPs, a Conservative called Louise Mensch, claim at the hearing that I had boasted about using phone hacking to get stories about newspapers in my book The Insider.
This was complete nonsense.
I never wrote any such thing.
The only reference I made to phone hacking in the book was when I revealed how I had once been warned about the practice, by someone who feared my own phone may have been hacked.
I was incensed.
And even more so when the story suddenly blew up on the internet.
‘British Member of Parliament says Piers Morgan boasted of being phone hacker!’ screamed tweets, Facebook posts and media blogs.
Meghan rang.
‘I’m getting inundated with calls. What do you want me to say?’
‘That I’ve never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any stories based on the hacking of a phone.’
This seemed to have little effect in quelling the rising storm.
I spoke to Jonathan, who suggested I go on CNN, live, to make my position clear.
By chance, Wolf Blitzer had already booked Louise Mensch, so I offered to appear at the same time.
It made for an explosive encounter.
I went straight on the attack, angrily branding her a liar and challenging her to repeat the allegations on air – without the legally privileged protection she had in a parliamentary committee room.
She declined to do so.
Mensch was insistent: ‘I said what I said in the committee. To repeat something outside of Parliament doesn’t give me the cloak of privilege. Mr Morgan is a very rich man.’
She added: ‘I’m sure that the ferocious investigative journalists at CNN and across the news media in the United States will take careful note at what was said in the committee, and look into it.’
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br /> I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
She was now urging journalists all over the world to dig into completely false allegations she’d made about me, simply because she hadn’t read my book properly.
I was still seething when I got home tonight.
This is going to be used as an excuse to rub my nose right in the mire of this scandal, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Rebekah also gave evidence today, and I tweeted my support to a ‘great and loyal friend’.
Head of PR at CNN, Christa Robinson, called: ‘Please think twice, this was a bad idea. You are your own man – you don’t need to come to anyone’s defence today.’
‘I don’t ditch my friends in a crisis,’ I replied. ‘Sorry, Christa, but she’s been there for me for twenty years through heavy shit for me. Time for me to support her in her hour of need.’
‘The world doesn’t know your friendship,’ Christa responded. ‘And maybe today’s not the day you want to highlight that. I would just think about it.’
Of course, she’s trying to protect me and CNN. I get that.
But I’m not throwing Rebekah to the wolves like everyone else seems to be doing.
Simple as that.
WEDNESDAY, 20 JULY 2011
CNN president Jim Walton called and we had a long chat about the phone-hacking stuff. He couldn’t have been more supportive, and I greatly appreciated it.
But I can’t pretend this isn’t all massively annoying now.
Journalists are rummaging over every word I’ve ever written or said, desperate for any semblance of ambiguity about phone hacking or any other unethical journalistic activity.
I can almost taste their blood lust.
SATURDAY, 23 JULY 2011
Tom Watson, MP, one of the leading UK parliamentary investigators into the scandal, tweeted this afternoon: ‘I’ve not seen any evidence linking Piers Morgan to hacking, and I’ve seen a lot of documentation these last two years.’
This should keep at least some of the dogs at bay.
But I’m getting besieged with calls from media everywhere, and it’s both agitating and unnerving.
Later, news broke that Amy Winehouse is dead, from a suspected overdose. What a senseless waste of a fabulous talent.
Fran, Celia’s brother, plays saxophone in her band, so knows only too well the hellish journey to oblivion that she’s been heading down for a while now.
This was not entirely shocking news to anyone who knew what Amy was doing in her private life.
But it’s an utter tragedy, nevertheless.
SUNDAY, 24 JULY 2011
Louise Mensch is still in full-on attack mode, hurling all sorts of wild allegations at me.
She’s obviously desperate to vindicate herself, but I’m having none of it – and firing back at every outlandish tweet claim she’s making.
This probably isn’t the most sensible PR strategy.
Meghan keeps urging me to say nothing, and let it blow over.
She sent me a hilarious email from her mother:
‘I saw all of the stuff online about Piers. I wish they would leave him the hell alone. Who the hell cares? Didn’t this happen fifteen years ago? Why don’t they pick on something legit like Casey Anthony.’
Coincidentally, Jonathan then forwarded me an email from his dad, containing a quote from the poet, Humbert Wolfe:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(Thank God) the British journalist!
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
Both made me laugh. And, God, I need a laugh or two right now.
TUESDAY, 26 JULY 2011
Spencer’s eighteen today.
He’s never been arrested, suspended from school or stomach-pumped.
And like his brothers, he makes me laugh every time I speak to him.
Not sure you can wish for much better than that from a son.
THURSDAY, 28 JULY 2011
Larry King was asked by GQ magazine today: ‘Would you rather spoon Piers Morgan for three nights in a row, or put your iPhone in a blender and drink it?’
He replied: ‘What does “spoon” mean?’
GQ: ‘It’s when you lie in bed and cuddle, both facing the same direction. You’d be the back spoon.’
Larry: ‘I’d do the phone thing.’
FRIDAY, 29 JULY 2011
Woke up in L.A. at 5 a.m. to discover a ridiculous rumour exploding on Twitter that I have been suspended by CNN because of the phone-hacking scandal.
It was all complete nonsense, started, as I quickly worked out, by a fake tweet from a fake account, masquerading as coming from a well-known Fleet Street journalist.
But to my astonishment, Channel 4 News host Jon Snow, one of the most respected news broadcasters in Britain, fell for it, and tweeted the news himself, with what can only be described as undisguised glee.
‘Piers Morgan suspended by CNN,’ he wrote. ‘The rise and rise, and fall and rise, and fall of Piers Morgan!’
I could almost picture the spittle of foaming delight spilling from his lips.
He was quickly followed by senior journalists from The Guardian and Reuters, as the Twitterverse celebrated with collective joyous delirium.
Meghan called. ‘I’m getting hundreds of calls saying you’ve been suspended. What the hell’s going on?’
‘It’s complete nonsense, started by a fake tweet.’
‘So why are so many journalists tweeting it too?’
‘Because they’re idiots who haven’t even bothered to check. Let me deal with it.’
I tweeted my statement: ‘Sorry to disappoint you all, but I’m afraid poor old Jon Snow got duped by a fake Twitter account.’
Suitably chastened, Snow responded: ‘Retraction ahoy! Jon Snow suspended from Tweeting Piers Morgan henceforth … dupe was duped alas … apologies old chap … Sorry, I mean young man!’
‘Ironically,’ I replied, ‘we’ve now seen the rise and rise, and fall and rise, and fall of Jon Snow’s credibility. Back to the naughty chair for you, Snowy.’
I had to laugh.
When I was fired from the Daily Mirror, Mr Snow was one of the more censorious of my critics for me allowing myself to be so dreadfully duped.
In a strange way, his cock-up seemed to calm everyone down.
Particularly when Louise Mensch finally issued a public apology for defaming me.
In a letter to her own committee, she said she had ‘wrongly stated’ that I had boasted of hacking phones.
‘I must apologise to Mr Morgan for the error,’ she concluded.
Jim Walton rang.
‘That’s great news. Be gracious in your response.’
He was right. There was nothing to be gained by being churlish.
I tweeted the following: ‘Apology accepted, Louise Mensch – thank you.’
MONDAY, 1 AUGUST 2011
Meghan didn’t receive any media calls today. First time since the phone-hacking scandal blew up.
‘Think we’re over the worst now?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
WEDNESDAY, 3 AUGUST 2011
A nice email came in overnight from an old Mirror colleague, James Steen, who wrote a gossip column for me at the paper.
Piers, I’ve been watching the saga unfold, and it is particularly odd when I think back to my times with you.
I remember you saying, ‘Be mischievous as hell, but don’t break the law.’ And something like, ‘Infuriate, irritate and go to all the bars. But never do anything that’ll get you behind bars.’
In short, I am utterly astonished that your integrity is being questioned. It’s ludicrous.
Though I notice those who are now dishing out the questions are people who are best known for avoiding answers.
All the best,
James
THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2011
I spoke too soon about the hacking saga calming down.
Harriet H
arman, the deputy leader of the Labour party, and one of the world’s most crashing political bores, has demanded I return to Britain immediately to ‘answer serious questions’.
Of all the reasons to go back to Britain right now, I think doing so at the behest of Ms Harman has to rank lowest on my list.
Late tonight, a story broke that David Leigh, chief investigations editor of the Guardian – who first broke the hacking scandal story – admitted himself phone hacking a suspected arms dealer a few years ago, in an article he wrote for the paper after Clive Goodman’s conviction. I’m sure nothing will happen to him, though. This is a tabloid witch-hunt, and all dodgy things a ‘serious’ newspaper has done will be ignored or put down to being ‘in the public interest’ – which is indeed his justification.
It’s the same hypocrisy that plays out when they report tabloid scoops, run acres of material from them, and then write editorials condemning the tabloid for publishing the story in the first place.
SATURDAY, 6 AUGUST 2011
A bad day for America.
Its credit rating has been downgraded – something that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
And thirty Special Forces soldiers have died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
Many of the victims were members of SEAL Team 6, the elite unit that captured and killed Osama bin Laden. Though none are thought to have been on that particular operation.
Both these blows will further damage the country’s confidence when it can least afford to be timid.
WEDNESDAY, 17 AUGUST 2011
One of the more remarkable aspects of my interviewing career, in print and on TV, is that nobody has EVER walked out on me. I must have done more than five thousand interviews in various forms over twenty-five years, but despite the occasional deeply awkward encounter, I’ve escaped the ultimate badge of interviewing disrespect.
And then came Christine O’Donnell.
Ms O’Donnell became an American political star during the country’s mid-term elections last November – despite eventually losing her bid to become a senator.
She’s a leading member of the Tea Party – the populist conservative movement named after the original Boston Tea Party incident in 1773, when colonists boarded British ships and chucked a huge quantity of tea cargo into the sea. A senseless waste of our great national drink, which helped trigger the full-scale American Revolution.
Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney Page 13