Piers Morgan: ‘Cameron has shown no support for Andy. That’s reprehensible’

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/oct/05/piers-morgan-david-cameron-andy-coulson-phone-hacking

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To his many detractors, last week should have been the worst of times for Piers Morgan. Having lost his nightly CNN show earlier this year, the former Daily Mirror editor’s name was dragged back into the phone-hacking scandal when his old employer finally admitted guilt. Yet a few days later Morgan was made editor at large in the US for Mail Online, prompting this paper to ask just how many lives a man of so many career highs and lows had left. “Only used up six so far, despite all the Guardian’s efforts,” he replied.

Morgan’s ability to survive so many controversies – including being fired as Mirror editor after nine years over fake Iraqi prisoner abuse photos – while staying relentlessly upbeat (he describes CNN cancellation of his nightly show as a “mutual” decision) makes him a love/hate figure for many. Approaching 50, his reputation is such that his mother presented him with a silver pot of Marmite when he moved to the US, which he keeps in a “mini-pub” full of British memorabilia in his hacienda-style house in Los Angeles. This alcohol-stuffed shrine to his career also contains skull-shaped bottles of tequila, which he calls “Nick Davies” after the Guardian reporter who exposed the phone-hacking scandal.

Morgan’s tendency to treat wrongdoing as a joke has got him into trouble – and possibly out of it again – several times during his career, nearly all catalogued by this paper. Before the phone-hacking revelations rocked the newspaper industry, Morgan was almost alone among editors in talking about it publicly, whether in a 2007 interview in which he said it was an “investigative practice that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years”, or telling Naomi Campbell that “loads of newspaper journalists” were tapping phones in a 2007 GQ magazine piece, or in a Desert Island Discs appearance two years later.

After being questioned under caution last December and watching one of his closest friends, Andy Coulson, go to jail, Morgan is more circumspect, but only a little more. Why did he talk about it and fail to condemn it? “Talking about something is not the same as doing it or being party to it. There’s a big difference.

“I gave a full account at [the] Leveson [inquiry]. I gave as much as I possibly could there from my memory.” Yet the judge called Morgan’s assertion that he had no knowledge of alleged phone hacking “utterly unpersuasive”. Morgan replies, “I suspect that Lord Leveson is not my biggest fan just generally but you’ll have to ask him why.”

Four former Sunday Mirror journalists were arrested last year over alleged phone hacking. Trinity Mirror has agreed to pay compensation to 10 individuals and faces nearly 50 civil claims in total involving all three of its national papers, including the Daily Mirror. Morgan has repeatedly denied that he has ever hacked a phone or asked anyone else to do so. “To this day not a single journalist who worked for me has been arrested or charged in connection with any offence at the Daily Mirror,” he adds.

Signs that the issue is still festering came again in last week’s Private Eye which said that Morgan held sway over the Sunday titles too. He describes this as a “hatchet job” as he was “was never editor-in-chief of the Sunday Mirror”.

As for the cases settled last week, including a £30,000 payment to the former England manager Sven Goran-Eriksson, Morgan says lawyers use his name to get more publicity. “There’s a massive difference between civil actions and criminal actions and everyone needs to remember that.”

He is furious at what he describes as Jeremy Paxman “deliberately misconstruing” a conversation they had which Paxman said amounted to instructions in hacking. “If I told you there was a spate of muggings in Hyde Park and to be careful, does that mean I’m instructing you in the art of mugging or does it mean I’m giving you a warning about a practice I’ve been made aware of?” asks Morgan. But who made him aware of it? “I’m not going to go over old ground.”

Morgan is nothing if not loyal to his old tabloid friends such as Coulson. He is angry that the ex-News of the World editor and No 10 communications director spent so long in high security Belmarsh prison for a non-violent crime but is even more outraged at David Cameron. “Cameron was one of Andy Coulson’s closest friends and both were incredibly embedded with each other. And at no stage has Cameron shown support for Andy, either publicly or privately, and I find that reprehensible.

“I would never do that to a real friend and I don’t think real people would. And frankly to just do it for political expediency stinks.” Watching the Tory party conference, Morgan says: “I listened to Cameron talk about trust. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”

One person and group he will not comment on when it comes to phone hacking is Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, the NoW’s former owners, however. “I’m not going to get into criticising News Corp’s handling of this, other people have done that.” Instead he mentions the company so many times I start to believe he’s negotiating for a job at Fox, a suspicion reinforced when he suggests he would take one if offered.

He also appeared hurt when Murdoch, taking offence at one of Morgan’s many daily tweets, responded “Once talented, now safe to ignore”. Morgan, who was playing golf with Kevin Pietersen at Wentworth, says he immediately thought of “committing career suicide” by firing off an intemperate response, but a few calls to those with the “ear” of the media mogul led Murdoch to send another tweet apologising and calling Morgan “a friend and a legend”.

Morgan calls this classic Murdoch – “If he feels under attack, it’s spray gun bullets but, on other hand, if he feels he got it wrong he says so” – yet it also has all the hallmarks of classic Morgan, mixing as it does celebrity, self-mockery and the eventual revelation of himself as a star.

The job with Mail Online was first broached in February by the website’s editor-in-chief Martin Clarke, who was the Daily Record’s editor when Morgan was at the Mirror. After two “very pleasant dinners at fashionable Manhattan restaurants” with Clarke and Mail editor Paul Dacre the deal was done. The amount he is being paid for three short columns a week would “only get you sandal wearers all upset” if revealed, he says. With no editorial control he “won’t have to defend anything but what I write”.

Dacre and Clarke want him to be “provocative, edgy … they want me to be myself”. His first column on Thursday attacked president Obama’s handling of the Isis crisis and was syndicated to Fox online. He wants to be controversial and is mulling other TV work, he says. A documentary about guns is in the pipeline.

“It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that I rather like controversy,” he adds. “I’ve spent most of my adult life embroiled in it in one way or another.” He attracts a huge amount of abuse online but, unless it comes from a Murdoch, it doesn’t seem to bother him. “I have a really thick skin and I find them easy to deal with.”

Though a loyal supporter of the tabloids and British papers in general, he can’t resist a jibe at them. With 4.25 million Twitter followers, he says: “When I tweet I get a bigger audience than all you newspapers together.” And he wonders why people hate him.

CNN offered him an opportunity to do 20 big interviews over two seasons, he says, but he declined because CNN president Jeff Zucker wouldn’t let him co-produce it with his Insider production company and hire his own staff. This positive spin was dented by sources talking to Politico.

Morgan, with three sons from his first marriage in the UK, does seem to want to spend a bit less time in the US. “It doesn’t suit me lifestyle-wise any more. I miss Britain too much.” After the interview, he is going off for “mani/pedi from a fantastic Vietnamese place in Beverly Hills … when in Rome”. There’ll be no polish or colour though, “just a firm British clipping operation”.

Curriculum vitae

Age 49

Education Cumnor House prep; Chailey secondary school, East Sussex; Harlow College journalism course

Career 1987 reporter, South London News; Streatham and Tooting News 1989 showbusiness editor, the Sun 1994 editor, News of the World 1995 editor, Daily Mirror 2004 sacked 2005 publishes first memoirs; buys Press Gazette 2006 judge, Britain’s Got Talent; launches First News 2009 ITV chatshow host; GQ columnist 2011 replaces Larry King on CNN with Piers Morgan Live 2014 show cancelled, joins Mail Online as editor-at-large (US)