Читать книгу Piers Morgan - The Biography - Emily Herbert - Страница 9

Piers Morgan was now in the chair of the News Of The World, Britain’s biggest-selling daily. Right from the start, he had jumped in with both feet and showed he had what it takes. And he clearly wasn’t willing to tolerate the old Fleet Street ways, in which lunch lasted the best part of the day; on his arrival, long-serving staff were somewhat dismayed to read a notice telling them to confine lunch to one hour from then on. ‘A few had been in the habit of having the traditional Fleet Street liquid lunch,’ observed Piers, rather primly for him. ‘I’ve only been a journalist seven years, so all I know is the new-style journalism.’ But his always excellent timing really couldn’t be bettered at this juncture for, right in front of him, one of the biggest stories of the decade was unfolding.

Indeed, it was a story that was to cover more than one decade, for it concerned the Prince and Princess of Wales. The pair had married in 1981, amid much talk about the ‘stuff of which fairytales are made’, and promptly went about disproving anything of the sort. After producing Princes William (1982) and Harry (1984), the royal marriage had fallen apart and, in December 1992, it was announced that the couple were to separate. Princess Diana drove newspaper sales as no one had ever done before and, in the wake of the royal separation, fascination in her only grew, much to the advantage of the press, who charted every twist and turn in her life story. Of course, at that time, no one knew the story was to end in tragedy but there was a huge appetite, among both journalists and readers, for anything at all to do with Diana.

It was in August 1994 that Piers’ News Of The World broke a story that not only dominated the news agenda but also began to hint for the first time at quite the extent of Diana’s collaboration with the press. When Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story was published in June 1992, it had caused uproar but it was not until Diana’s death that it was revealed she had been closely involved with it all. Now, for the first time ever, she was caught out briefing a journalist – and all because of Piers.

The story that precipitated the huge row ran in the News Of The World. It alleged that art dealer Oliver Hoare had been subject to 300 nuisance phone calls, some picked up by his wife, who then involved the police. The police discovered the calls originated from Kensington Palace and, more specifically, Diana herself, at which point a senior unnamed politician stepped in to persuade them to drop the case to avoid further embarrassment.

It was no sooner published than several interested parties swung into motion. First, inevitably, there were concerns that it was Prince Charles’ camp deliberately planting stories to make his wife look bad, a view that would appear to have been supported by Diana herself. A huge story appeared in the next day’s Daily Mail – under the headline WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? – in which friends of the Princess claimed there were people out there who were trying to make her appear unstable. ‘I feel I am being destroyed,’ she told journalist Richard Kay. ‘There is absolutely no truth in it.’

However, on the same day, the Sun (the News Of The World’s stable-mate) carried the headline QUEEN’S FURY AT PLOTTING DIANA, with a picture showing the Princess getting into a car with Richard Kay. His by-line had been on many stories involving Diana, always with a sympathetic angle and almost invariably quoting ‘Friends of the Princess’. Finally, this picture proved what many had long suspected, namely the so-called ‘friends’ were none other than the Princess herself. In this particular instance, she had been briefing Kay about the angle to take to rebut the claims, on top of which Kay himself had rung Piers on the Saturday before the story was due to break to make the Princess’s case. Diana subsequently went on to claim that she had made her own investigations and discovered a little boy (unnamed) who lived in Kensington Palace was the real culprit, but it was pretty obvious to everyone else what had really gone on.

Scarcely a day went by without a new ‘Diana’ story at this point, but this particular piece really stood out, as it involved a politician stepping in. It was hinted to be either Nicholas Soames (unlikely, since he is a close friend of Prince Charles) or William Waldegrave (who had links to the royals), but the identity of the man in question was never made clear. Then there was the minor matter of how such an extremely detailed story made its way into the public domain with widespread suspicion that it had been leaked by the police, although Piers would not be drawn. ‘Suffice it to say, this is a story which has been fairly common knowledge in the police for some time,’ was all he would admit. The affair itself had also been widely suspected by Fleet Street, but this was the first time there was some real proof.

It crowned Piers as the king of scandal – life and blood to a newspaper like the News Of The World – and was the culmination of a stunning successful six months in the editor’s chair. This was the biggest story he’d run to date, but it was by no means the only one: since taking on the editor’s mantle, he’d revealed Tory MP Hartley Booth’s relationship with former researcher Emily Barr, leading to Booth’s resignation from a junior government post. He then published a similar piece about Labour MP Dennis Skinner (THE BEAST OF LEGOVER), and also revealed the affair between Lady Bienvenida Buck, then married to another Tory MP, Anthony Buck, and the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Peter Harding – who was also forced to resign – but topped that with a story about the Tory MP Alan Clark’s affairs with a mother, Valerie Harkess, and her two daughters, Josephine and Alison, whom he’d nicknamed ‘The Coven’. The injured husband and father, James, posed with a horsewhip and admitted he would like to use it on the great man himself.

This was an impressive tally by any standards but it was the royal stories where Piers really came into his own: his first ‘Diana’ story was that her psychiatric records had been stolen; this was followed up by the Hoare piece, which in turn led to a story from one James Hewitt, to the effect that he’d been the recipient of silent phone calls, too. Then came material about Diana’s affair with Hewitt, still not widely known about at the time.

All of this mattered, not just for the entertainment of the nation but because Piers was still so very young. There had been plenty of grumbling about a lack of experience when he’d first got the job and yet, from the moment he took up the post, he’d been all but setting the news agenda. Meanwhile, he was careful to praise his reporters. ‘They are the ones who bring in the stories,’ he told The Spectator. ‘This isn’t false modesty; the only credit I would take is having the balls to run the stories.’

Royal stories, especially those involving Diana, could be tricky to handle, too. Despite the public’s voracious appetite for anything involving ‘Shy Di’ (who came close to bringing the Monarchy down), they adored her and, while they would read scandalous stories about her, there was a line over which no paper nor editor should step. Alleging nuisance calls while maintaining a sympathetic aura wasn’t that easy, and there was a big risk in becoming the first paper to reveal Diana’s own extra-marital affairs but the News Of The World somehow managed to pull it off.

‘On the Hewitt-Diana story, I held a council of war with my three top executives,’ recalled Piers. ‘I often do this because I’m only twenty-nine years old and I’m aware I have experienced journalists around, but I do have to make the final decision.’

Then there was the issue of the Monarchy itself. At the time, the Republican movement in Britain was not a strong one but sometimes newspapers running anti-Windsor stories, especially those owned by the Australian-born Republican Rupert Murdoch, were accused of base motives. Piers, however, was having none of it.

‘I totally believe in the Monarchy as an institution,’ he declared, ‘but I don’t agree with royals behaving like the rest of us. If we’re going to give them palaces to live in, then they should behave in a regal manner. Princess Diana’s come out of it well… she’s loved more than she ever was.

‘My ultimate defence of stories is that they are 100 per cent true. I don’t make moral judgements. Sometimes my mother rings up and tells me to leave Diana alone. My grandmother will say, “That’s a revolting load of rubbish you printed this morning,” but, when I press her further, she will admit she found it entertaining.’

And so did everyone else.

Piers didn’t usually bring his age into anything and he sounded far more himself when defending the publication of the Bienvenida Buck/Sir Peter Harding story, described by some people as a ‘sad’ case. Sir Peter had been forced to resign from his post and his estranged wife had been pictured looking distraught.

‘I don’t think he’s a sad case at all!’ insisted Piers. ‘I’d do the same thing again tomorrow. He was the Chief of the Defence Staff, behaving in a way that was quite appallingly stupid for a man in his position and also compromising the job he was doing. All army officers had only recently been sent a memo saying that adultery would result in dismissal, yet, while the Gulf War was raging, he was wining and dining his mistress. It was hypocritical. I’m no great moraliser but I think it’s wrong for people in positions of power to commit adultery if, by so doing, they leave themselves or their jobs exposed. And it’s wrong if they’re preaching one thing and doing another.

‘I’m not dictating to ordinary people but say a married woman sleeps with the village policeman, her husband finds out, there’s a fight and someone tells the News Of The World then we’ll 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.

‘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.

‘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 he’d recently been running, for barely a week had gone by without another scandal in the News Of The World setting the pace.

‘If they are Tory MPs, and have been elected by preaching family values and use their wife and children in publicity photographs, they deserve to be exposed if they commit adultery,’ he declared. ‘If, say, David Mellor [the Secretary of State for National Heritage, who was forced to resign after a series of scandals], when he stood for election, had said vote for me and, oh, by the way, I’ll frequently be unfaithful to my wife during the time I’m your MP, and they still voted for him, then good luck to him. I’m not personally laying down rules – I’m just saying that the public servants paid for by us have got to be accountable. It’s not just politicians. Of course I sympathise with people like Mrs Mellor and her children, but innocent people always suffer when there’s any sort of scandal. The Financial Times might expose some crooked City con man, but no one criticises them, though there will be innocent people who suffer.’

However, it was not just politicians and clergymen who featured in the News Of The World – just about any celebrity caught out doing what they shouldn’t have been doing did so, too. But Piers was prepared to mount a strong defence. ‘It is a different agenda with pop stars,’ he acknowledged, ‘they court newspaper publicity to sell their records, so they have to accept the bad publicity as well. You may think that’s a pretty spurious argument. In actual fact, I’ve had pop stars’ representatives begging me to run their sex scandals.’

Despite all this success, his hard work was beginning to take its toll, too. Piers’ marriage was to stagger on for many years to come, but now, with his eldest son Spencer still just one, he and Marion embarked on a separation. Piers himself was remarkably unforthcoming on what lay behind the move and steadfastly refused to answer questions (ironic, as he himself conceded, for an editor of the News Of The World) and, indeed, the two were to eventually reunite. But it was the first sign that his marriage would not stay the course: pressure of work, marrying too young… it was all to add up.

But Piers was doing so well professionally that nothing else seemed to matter. He was also well aware of the person to whom he owed everything – Kelvin MacKenzie. Indeed, he was quite fulsome in his praise, describing him as ‘inspirational’ and ‘incredible’.

‘There are people in key positions around the world who are there because of him,’ he proudly declared. ‘If that’s the only thing he’s remembered for, then that’s still a hell of an achievement.’

And he drew a lot from his old mentor in terms of management style (not least frowning on all-day drinking), but, while Kelvin could be a terrifying boss, roaring with rage at his hapless lieutenants, Piers was – if not gentle as such – a little easier to deal with. ‘I wouldn’t say anyone here is terrified of me,’ he mused. ‘People here enjoy coming to work, but they know that I expect a certain standard and I won’t tolerate mistakes. I don’t like going out for lunch and things like that. I want to be visible so that, when someone wants a decision taken, I can make it rather than have them wait for me to come back from a freebie lunch. I’m full of respect for the staff here; they took me on as a rookie and helped me learn my trade.’

Of course, one of the reasons why he wanted to maintain a constant presence in the office and was always careful to praise his reporters was because he was still so very young. Despite a hugely successful first year in the job, there were still doubters in the industry, to say nothing of his own staff; many had actually been passed over in favour of him and so they might be forgiven for feeling cautious. It simply made good sense to keep them on side.

‘I suppose the age thing was a problem,’ Piers admitted to Business Age on the anniversary of his starting out in the job. ‘There are a lot of older people here but journalism is the one profession where age has never mattered. Whether you’re seventeen or seventy-five, as long as you know what you’re doing, you get respect. I had to gain respect very quickly, and the only way to do that was to produce great stories. I guess I was lucky because we got those stories, thanks to people who’ve been here longer than me.’

It was altogether a different tone to the one he had set at ‘Bizarre’, where it had been all about him: now it was all about the paper. Piers had lost none of his knack for self-publicity (indeed, he never would), but he knew that he needed to present an entirely different persona. In short, he had to grow up – and fast.

‘The days of the rampant ego maniac are over,’ he declared. ‘The nation can breathe again. The staff here were as amazed as I was that I got the job. They’d already had three acting editors in three months, so it was a case of, “Oh, here’s another one. When’s it all going to stop?” They didn’t know me from Adam except that I wrote a column on the Sun, which was hardly the normal route to editorship. I wasn’t going to come in here and throw my weight around. I said to them, “If you give me your support, I’ll do my best for you.” I never regretted anything I did on the Sun. If people want to remember me for writing a book about Take That or being gunged on the Noel Edmonds’ show, that’s fine. I had great fun in those days, but the bottom line is I don’t miss it.’

Among other things, he was showing a talent to reinvent himself and that was standing him in good stead; he would have to do something similar about a decade later when he lost his job as editor of the Mirror in spectacular style, but for now he was displaying a crucial ability to change roles, learn fast, up the odds and still come out winning. And he wasn’t just the youngest editor on Fleet Street either, he was also the most-talked about and was producing some of the best stories, too. But he couldn’t afford to mess up, even now; some of those stories had been highly controversial and, although he was setting the agenda, along the way he constantly had to defend himself and he was certainly able to do that.

‘I fully understand that I’m in a powerful position but my motivation is not to slip up,’ he explained. ‘It’s easy to get carried away in this job and make mistakes that will haunt you for the rest of your career. The main concern I have is that I don’t drop a spectacular clanger and we get a big libel case. You’re talking about huge sums of money awarded arbitrarily by a jury under this strange libel system we live in, but we have to live by it. A simple error can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. What I’m saying is that every single thing that appears in the News Of The World is my responsibility. The buck stops here and I have to live or die by what we print. If I’m still sitting here in three years’ time, I’ll be very pleased.’

As it happened, he would be even more delighted at where he was to end up.

Piers had only been in the job for just over a year when he received one of the biggest accolades that his industry could bestow. The now-defunct BBC television programme What The Papers Say held annual awards, including one for Scoop Of The Year. At the beginning of 1995, this was extended to Scoops Of The Year because the News Of The World had achieved so many of them.

‘One of the worst things that can happen to someone who has been getting away with something is for someone to tell the News Of The World,’ said Russell Davies, who was hosting the event. ‘Indeed, its track record has been breathtaking. For those who miss the News Of The World, it is responsible for what most of Britain is talking about on Monday morning. During the course of 1994, the News Of The World consistently produced front-page stories which set the agenda for the week and left other papers trying to catch up. It was essential reading for millions of people.’

As editor, Piers collected the award but, as usual, he was careful to praise journalists working on the paper. ‘I’m delighted the consistently brilliant investigative work of journalists on the News Of The World has earned them this award,’ was how he put it. However, he was the one at the helm, steering the ship, taking risks, and no one was in any doubt that this was very much his award, too.

The next big scandal to hit the decks was actually courtesy of the Sunday Mirror, but, given that Piers himself had been behind so many recent sensations, he was forced to defend this one on a matter of principle. It concerned Rupert Pennant-Rea, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. Already a much-married man (he was with his third wife by the time the scandal broke), he had been having an affair with journalist Mary Ellen Synon but eventually called it off after four years in 1994. Incandescent with rage, Mary Ellen (who apparently harboured marital ambitions) told her former lover that she would expose him and so she did, although to extend the tension she took a year to go about it. When the story eventually broke, it was packed full of lurid details about lovemaking in the depths of the hallowed Bank and, shortly after it was published, Pennant-Rea resigned from his post. Unusually, Mary Ellen had not been paid for her story but she certainly got the result she wanted.

Pennant-Rea then announced that he had been driven out of office because the press was intruding on his life, a claim backed by the then Chancellor Kenneth Clarke. Questions were raised as to the morality of it all and this was not mere industry speculation; there were constant fears that a privacy law might be introduced, something that would certainly make any editor’s job a good deal more difficult. Almost immediately, however, the press rose up to defend itself: usually at one another’s throats, this time they spoke as one.

Piers, as might be expected, was one of the most prominent voices. ‘It is absolutely ridiculous for the Chancellor and Mr Pennant-Rea to condemn the tabloids,’ he declared. ‘He only went after the Financial Times cleared half a page for the story. My information is he decided to go because he had been exposed to ridicule in the FT. It was a story about a man whose judgement is at the essence of our everyday life. When he took his mistress into the office of [Governor of the Bank of England] Eddie George and bonked her on the desk, he invited his own resignation. I’m amazed he hung on so long. It is the usual effort by the Establishment to turn attention on the tabloids, which had very little to do with it.’

In fact, Britain’s libel laws are far more draconian than they are in other countries and, in the mid-1990s, there were real concerns that a privacy law might be brought in. Although much of the drama surrounding the royal family was created – and leaked to the press – by the principal members themselves, the public was not so aware of it as they are today. Often journalistic intrusion in those days was condemned by those who didn’t realise the press was being used in the ‘War of the Waleses’. On the other hand, a dying and weak Conservative Government was filled with politicians with a vested interest in keeping their private lives out of the public eye.

When the then Prime Minister John Major announced it was ‘Back to Basics’ (in the full knowledge that his own affair with former Conservative minister Edwina Currie could come out at any time) and his ‘Minister for Fun’ David Mellor announced the press was drinking in the ‘Last Chance Saloon’, it was open season on anyone with anything to hide. At the same time, the charge was also levelled that newspapers, tabloids in particular, had too much power and should not be allowed to hound people out of office. Altogether, it was an uneasy time.

Stories such as Pennant-Rea’s were a case in point: was there really any public interest in exposing his affair (although it should be noted that it was his erstwhile mistress who shopped him, not some snooping tabloid hack) and should he be forced to step down? In truth, he had become a figure of fun and so his fate was almost certainly unavoidable, but it was a real concern for editors of the day.

In March 1995, Piers turned thirty and was still the youngest editor at the table. The scoops continued to roll in: the latest to feature was the Conservative MP Richard Spring, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Spring, it emerged, had enjoyed a ‘three-in-a-bed sex romp’ with a Sunday school teacher and another male friend. It made the front page of the News Of The World, and afterwards Spring duly resigned, which again raised eyebrows. After all, he was divorced, on top of which Odette Nightingale – the teacher in question – attended the ‘sex romp’ with a tape recorder in tow. ‘Entrapment is an ugly word,’ thundered some sections of the media, leaping to the high moral ground and, indeed, in this case, it did look as if the paper might have gone too far.

‘That anyone is entitled to privacy in their homes, in their cups or in their beds is a concept wholly alien to the News Of The World,’ boomed Lord Wyatt of Weeford in The Times. ‘The News Of The World has as good as asked for a privacy law. The Government and Opposition should no longer hesitate to produce it.’

The attack was a little odd, coming as it did not only from a fellow journalist but also one with a column on the News Of The World, writing under the moniker ‘The Voice Of Reason’.

Another former News Of The World reporter who didn’t wish to be named (it wasn’t a good idea to fall foul of Rupert Murdoch) was equally scathing. ‘Patsy [the former editor] would never have run the story on Spring,’ he declared. ‘Where’s the justification? He’s a single man, who’s been set up in his own home by a woman who’s getting a lot of money from the paper. I’m not saying we never put tape recorders under beds but they were a precaution in case we were sued. We’ve now got inexperienced journalists and an inexperienced editor leading us straight to a privacy law.’

Ultimately, it didn’t prove to be the case and, besides, such criticism was more often than not a case of sour grapes. Piers, as was so frequently pointed out, was young – younger than many of his staff and younger than most of Fleet Street – and yet he had already risen to a powerful position. This was bound to engender envy, and any mistakes (and in retrospect this might apply to the Spring story) were bound to be leapt on.

And then there was another aspect to the whole thing: the fact that broadsheets liked to denounce the antics of the tabloids while slavering over the details themselves. ‘What we are seeing yet again is double-edged hypocrisy, all the broadsheets splashing on our story on Monday and filling their boots with the salacious details they so condemn,’ snapped Piers. ‘And then saying how awful it was we ran the story in the first place but giving it wider currency, all the same.’

So who was right? Over a decade and a half later, there is still no privacy law in Britain – and Piers Morgan has certainly become one of the country’s best-known names.