Читать книгу Piers Morgan - The Biography - Emily Herbert - Страница 5

The year was 1965, and the Swinging Sixties were well under way: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were battling it out for the title of Greatest-Ever Rock Band, while society was being turned on its head. Now the age of deference was over and a new egalitarian Britain was born, one that was to replace a keen interest in the lives of the aristocracy with an insatiable appetite for the world of the celebrity. And, on 30 March 1965, a child entered the world who would make a spectacular career on the back of that enthusiasm for celebrity before eventually becoming one himself: Piers Stefan Morgan had arrived. Legend has it that he was named after the brewery heir and privateer motor-racing driver Piers Courage – certainly he would go on to lead a similarly tumultuous life.

Not that he was known as Piers Morgan back then; rather, he was Piers Stefan O’Meara, the first of the two children of Eamon Vincent (a dentist) and Gabrielle O’Meara. His younger brother Jeremy arrived shortly afterwards. ‘Vincent’, as he was known, would die before his son was one year old. ‘When he died, I had a very strong mother and grandmother looking after me, being extra-strong for me and loving me unconditionally,’ Piers later recalled. ‘My mother has always encouraged her four children [she went on to have two more with her second husband] to live their dreams. If we’ve ever been in trouble, she’s defended us like a lioness.’ In fact, Vincent passed away tragically early, at thirty-one; he had been in a car accident and died in the ambulance taking him away from the wreckage.

Piers Morgan’s public persona has been a rumbustious one; never afraid of controversy, happy to participate in feuds and always giving as good as he gets. He comes across as extremely brash, something which caused quite a few people to dislike him at one stage in his career, although he calmed down considerably once he made the move from the medium of the printed word to television. Yet there was tragedy in his life from a very early age: to lose a father so young was a terrible sadness. Although he was lucky enough to acquire a stepfather, with whom he became really close, Piers has more in common with the celebrities who tell him about their own problems on ITV’s Piers Morgan’s Life Stories than would at first seem obvious. What’s more, he can be far more sympathetic than anyone might expect.

But Piers’ relationship with his mother was strong and this was to see him through the most difficult times until she married for the second time and provided him with a father figure. Although born and brought up in Sussex, he actually has a more international background. Technically, he is one-quarter English, three-quarters Irish (with a little Spanish thrown in): his mother Gabrielle Oliver was born in Battle, Sussex in the 1940s, to Matthew Dudgeon Oliver and Edith Margot Cantopher, who later divorced. Their story is typical of Britain at that time: a life spent in the Colonies, specifically India. Piers’ maternal great-grandfather William Joseph Cantopher was born in the province of Deccan in 1891. William’s father Bernard was a London University-educated civil engineer, who worked in Berhampore, Murshadibad and Bengal; William later returned to Britain in 1911, where he worked as a stockbroker. He married Edith Mary Kelly, also of Irish descent.

William and Edith had a daughter, Edith Margot, who married Matthew Dudgeon Oliver (who, just to complicate matters, was the son of John Dudgeon Oliver, who was born in China), and it was Matthew, Piers’ grandfather, who would go on to work on the Sunday People newspaper. Other ancestors have been traced back to Spain and Scotland. Mostly due to this Irish background, the majority of Piers’ forebears are Catholic but there is some Presbyterianism in there, too.

When Piers was still a toddler, his artist mother remarried a man with the rather splendid name of Glynne Pughe-Morgan, from whom he took his surname. The couple went on to have two children, Rupert and Charlotte. Indeed, it was only when he started to make his way as a journalist that Piers dropped the ‘Pughe’ to make himself seem more egalitarian. In truth, however, his was a privileged background – to begin with, at least.

As an adult, he developed a healthy respect for his brother Jeremy, who went on to serve in the Army (eventually rising to Lieutenant Colonel) but during their childhood the two battled constantly, as small boys will. ‘Piers used to torment me and physically bully me when we were small,’ Jeremy later told the Sunday Times’ ‘Relative Values’. ‘I remember him hitting me over the head repeatedly with a small, rubber yellow hammer. My mother couldn’t leave us alone. Later on, he’d bully me psychologically – niggle, niggle, niggle – until I got into a rage and beat him to a pulp. He fought like a girl, so he was easy to overcome.’

Piers remembers something similar. ‘My brother wasn’t the most quick-witted of spanners,’ he told the Sunday Times. ‘He had a very short fuse; I found it amusing to light it and watch it explode. We were very competitive and my mother did everything to stop us fighting. I’ve just always loved verbal combat; my whole family are like that – rebellious, into debating and feuding. We’re Irish Catholics. It gets fiery. I love it.’

Of course, the two are extremely close in age and it was clear, listening to both of them, that they were extremely pugnacious. Neither has ever been afraid of a tussle, albeit in very different fields: Piers in the world of celebrity and Jeremy out on the battlefield. But the existence of a younger brother was to give Piers a moral authority in later years, something he couldn’t have dreamed about back then: when he was criticised for apparently not supporting the War on Iraq while he was editor of the Mirror. In his defence, he could point out that his own brother was serving in the Army and, naturally, he backed our boys; it was just the field in which they were fighting that he didn’t like.

But the journalism bug bit very young, as did the bad habits that famously go along with it. ‘I was really into newspapers at five or six, and used to point out the headlines that grabbed me,’ Piers revealed in an interview with the Independent. ‘I learned to read through the papers; whether this is good or bad, I have yet to work out. My parents ran the Griffin Inn and at Fletching C of E Primary, near Lewes, East Sussex, I was one of the few kids who every night went to the local pub. Ever since then, as a journalist, I have staggered to the pub after work.’

Indeed, he did more than that, helping his parents run their business from a very young age. ‘I used to do the bottling up at 5am, then come to school,’ he revealed in later years. ‘I used to get in trouble for that [at school]. I think they thought I had an alcohol problem as a child.’

He maintains this is where his somewhat brash personality began to develop. Pubs are not places for quiet people and the young Piers was forced to fight to get heard. He succeeded, and began to develop a trademark style from an early age. ‘I was always very cocky and noisy in the pub,’ he admits. ‘I loved holding forth, hearing the sound of my own voice, and a lot of people found it amusing so I just carried on.’ It was a philosophy he was to continue into later life.

And he was a clever boy; although Piers would never shine academically, his achievements have been enough to defeat many a lesser man and required a good deal of native wit, something he possessed right from the start. ‘Piers was unusually bright: at four he was reading Tolkien,’ his brother Jeremy recalled. ‘Later, he was into newspapers and Arsenal Football Club. I liked rugby, fishing and Commando magazine. We led independent lives, apart from cricket: we played it endlessly in our garden in Sussex. We became known at Sussex County Cricket ground – Imran Khan even invited us to the nets to bowl at him.’

Again, a reference to ‘newspapers’, something that was to surface repeatedly in stories about Piers’ early life, and another early clue to his eventual destiny was that his birth father had also once been a journalist, although Piers did not discover this until he himself was an adult. It was on a visit to Ireland, where both sides of the family originated, that this came to light. ‘There I was in the middle of southern Ireland in a place called Banagher and all these people came up to me, who had known my father,’ Piers told The Times. ‘His mother persuaded him to become a dentist because there was more money and security and all that, but it was interesting to find out that it’s obviously in the blood, you know.’ Indeed, it was there on both sides – his mother’s father was a ‘proper investigative journalist’ on the Sunday People in the 1970s and it was this connection that would first introduce him to the world he was to dominate.

Piers always considered his stepfather Glynne to be his true father and emphasises that he treated him as if he were his own son. ‘You know, he’s been absolutely incredible,’ he later said. ‘He took on two young boys when he was in his twenties and did a great job for us. All four of us children had a lovely upbringing and a lot of fun. It wasn’t privileged and we didn’t have much money, but we had a great time.’

Another important family member was Piers’ grandmother Margot, who looked after the children on a day-to-day basis while his parents ran the Griffin Inn. ‘Unbelievably long hours, catering to maybe 200 people a day,’ was how Piers described it. Within the family, Margot was known as ‘Grande’, and she and Piers have maintained an extremely close relationship; he has since dedicated one of his books to her and also moved his grandmother into one of his properties when she got older.

Gabrielle had a fair bit to contend with, not least because her son displayed an aptitude for the profession he was to make his own from early on. ‘I was always incredibly nosy and fascinated by news,’ he told the Independent in 2008. ‘I also loved reading papers from a very early age. My mother remembers me pointing to a headline about a rape case when I was six and asking: “Mum, what does it mean when it says this girl was raped?” Quite a tricky enquiry to navigate for any parent.’ But she managed, and Piers continued to be fascinated by news and how it was reported in the press.

Perhaps rather surprisingly to some, given the rough-and-tumble nature of the world he was to come to inhabit, first in journalism and then in show business, Piers was brought up a practising Catholic and attended church regularly. Further, he was given instruction in the religion by nuns, something he enjoyed.

‘I don’t want to overdo my devoutness because I think a proper devout Catholic would see me as pretty lapsed – it’s just that my whole family, apart from my dad, are believers and that’s the way we were brought up,’ he told The Times. ‘You’d just go along [to the nuns] and chat for an hour, and I liked the purity of the nuns and their pure view of life and the world. It was nice. I don’t think that I’ve led such a pure life as those nuns, no. But I thought there was an idealistic side to them that was rather nice, you know. Always looking for the good in people is a nice trait to have.’

It was pretty much the polar opposite of what he himself would go on to do, but it hinted again at the more empathetic side of his character that was to make him an excellent interviewer once his television career proper took off.

Up to the age of seven, Piers attended Fletching Primary School in his home village, where he later recalled winning the ‘Christmas decoration on your head’ competition, before moving to Cumnor House and then Chailey, near Lewes in West Sussex. It was a bit of a comedown: Cumnor House was a private school, while Chailey was a comprehensive, but he coped with the change. ‘I was very happy in my schools,’ he recalled. ‘I bounced between the two types of education; at seven, after the local primary, I went to a fee-paying prep school three miles away – Cumnor House – and was a boarder between eleven and thirteen. I noticed there was more money and it was better resourced. And there was daily sport – brilliant! A kid tossed a jar of magnesium into the swimming pool and blew it up. Although I’m now involved with the npower Climate Cops Campaign, in those days we weren’t really aware of the environment, but I do remember thinking, that’s not the most environment-friendly thing!’

In fact, his tone veered wildly when discussing his education; he found the transition from private to state school quite traumatic and had to endure some bullying, more of which below.

The young Piers was fairly typical in his television and radio tastes back then. Later, as an adult, he was asked what programmes he had enjoyed. ‘Thunderbirds, Dallas, Dukes of Hazzard, Morecambe and Wise, Selina Scott and all the big boxing fights,’ he told the Independent. ‘Try getting your shrink to analyse that little lot! As for radio, I used to pretend to my schoolmates that I listened to John Peel, but of course listened instead to Peter Powell – who has transformed himself into one of the most successful talent agents in the country (well, he has to be, he manages me).’

It was standard fare for the 1960s and 70s, and revealed both mainstream tastes and a solid Middle England background. One of the secrets to Piers’ success in all aspects of his life, from outrage over the Iraq War to his judging on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent, is that he understands exactly what his audience/readership is thinking – because he is one of them.

Writing held an appeal from early on. When Piers was just fifteen, he wrote his first piece, a 1,500-word article about his village cricket team’s visit to Malta for the Mid Sussex Times. For this, he was paid £15. ‘I was so excited that I framed the cheque,’ he later revealed on finding his forte. From then on, it was obvious what he planned to do.

And his education, after the local primary school, first at a private school and then a state one, was to stand him in good stead, as he admitted in a more positive reflection on his schooling. Both he and Jeremy completed their education that way round (whereas his two younger siblings attended state school first and were then educated privately) and he felt the experience had done him a power of good. ‘I think my education was, in many ways, perfect,’ he declared. ‘I went to a great prep school until I was thirteen and then I got my snobbish creases ironed out [at Chailey, near Lewes], where some of the kids did give me a hard time for being a posh twit.’ His younger siblings suffered a lot of snobbery, he says, having come from the state sector.

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.