Piers Morgan

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand nine.

Presenter0:26

My castaway this week is Piers Morgan.

Presenter0:29

A Fleet Street editor before he was thirty, he spent more than a decade at the helm of first The News of the World and then The Mirror.

Presenter0:36

He pioneered a style of journalism that fed off the day to day lives of celebrities, and won a fistful of awards for his scoops that exposed their extramarital affairs. By his own admission, he relished the feuds he fought, so when the fall from grace came there were plenty of people rubbing their hands with glee.

Presenter0:54

First were allegations of dodgy dealing, buying shares in a firm his own newspaper was about to tip. Then he published false pictures of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners.

Presenter1:05

Since then he's written a very well received memoir, forged a successful career as an interviewer, and latterly has become something of a television celebrity both here and in America.

Presenter1:16

He is, according to one friend, the ultimate proof that self confidence and self belief can become a self fulfilling prophecy. You were just twenty eight years old then when Rupert Murdoch handed you the reins of the News of the World.

Presenter1:30

What do you remember of that moment? Was it a formal interview? Did

Piers Morgan1:32

No, funnily enough I have very vivid memories because I was back in Miami for the first time since I got given the job only two weeks ago. I was the pop editor of The Sun. I was twenty eight. Kelvin Mackenzie was editor of the paper and just said the boss wants to see you. Here are your tickets and Murdoch met me and then said let's go for a walk on the beach and we actually both took our shoes and socks off and walked through the surf of Miami Beach for about two or three hours.

Presenter1:59

It was exactly what I was saying.

Piers Morgan2:01

It was extremely surreal, and because I had an inkling that it might be.

Piers Morgan2:05

A new job of some sort, but I had no idea what. I'd actually bought every serious magazine I could possibly find at the airport on the way out into Miami. And blissfully, this was all that kept coming up. It was like, what do you think of Clinton? Then I said, well, I think what he's doing in Sierra Leone is really quite disturbing, Mr. Murdoch, and so on. So trying to drag myself away from this terrible, stereotypical, brash young pop editor. And it must have worked because we finished this walk, and then he said to me, Right, we're going to go to a party tonight for all the Fox television affiliate stations. And I found out I got the job and he introduced me to one of his top executives in America with the words, this is my friend Piers Morgan. He's the new editor of the News of the World.

Presenter2:51

That was it.

Piers Morgan2:51

That's how I found out. And he just looked at me and winked. Did you phone your mum? I phoned my mum, who was g to be perfectly honest, was quite torn between obvious, you know, delight at this amazing promotion for me and utter horror that it was the need of the world. You know, this was a family where we had, you know, a very middle-class Sussex family where the papers we got were the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, and that was it.

Presenter3:16

It seems ridiculous that I'm about to ask you, Piers Morgan, this question, but did you ever wonder that you were up to the job?

Piers Morgan3:21

I wondered every day if I was up to the job editing the news of the world with its premium on exposure and scandal and all that kind of thing. I didn't know if I was really kitted out to do that kind of thing. I was younger than anybody else in the newsroom. And I could see all these older guys looking at me and I just overheard one of them saying, Good God, he's younger than my grandson. And I I remember looking at him and laughing and they were all just waiting for me to get it wrong. Tell me about your first desk. What have you chosen?

Presenter3:48

Yeah.

Piers Morgan3:48

The first disc is really the record that used to get me up to edit newspapers. It's called Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones and I used to genuinely play this almost every morning before I got into my shower and it just has that kind of energizing, reviving magic to it. By the time it finished I was ready for another day in the warzone.

Speaker 34:13

Don't stop.

Speaker 34:24

I've been running hot

Speaker 34:28

I don't go my time.

Speaker 34:31

Yep, it's all me up.

Presenter4:34

The Rolling Stones and Start Netflix played each morning, Piers Morgan, as you as you say you're in the shower, you would play that to get you going as you went in.

Piers Morgan4:40

Yeah.

Speaker 34:40

Uh

Piers Morgan4:40

Yeah. That to get you going is you went in.

Presenter4:43

Probably more information than I needed, but to get you going, to go in and edit the News of the World and you said that your mother, apart from sort of understanding that somehow she should be proud, also she and the rest of your family slightly horrified because they were a Daily Mail reading together.

Piers Morgan4:56

Literary family, yeah, and it was I mean, none of them were exactly jumping for joy because this was not a paper that any of them read. So it was almost like the ultimate good news and bad news. You know, my son, my brilliant son, has been made editor of a national newspaper at twenty eight. What's the bad news? It's the news of the world.

Presenter4:58

Definitely.

Presenter5:13

And you're part of a a big lively family, plenty brothers and sisters.

Piers Morgan5:17

Yeah, I've got I've got uh two brothers and a sister and they're I mean, I'm the least opinionated one of the lot of them, so Christmases can get extremely hostile. Uh very opini all the family are very strong characters, um, very opinionated, especially on my mother's side, you know, my grandmother's a a wonderful matriarch.

Presenter5:34

And so round the family table at lunchtime or whatever, would you would you have at Sunday lunch a good old Barney about about politics and stuff?

Piers Morgan5:39

Oh, yes. I mean, always. And and really quite aggressive. I mean, it would when I was younger, it would often end with me and my immediate younger brother, who's an army colonel now, we'd often come to blows, you know.

Presenter5:43

Yeah, but

Presenter5:50

And little peers

Piers Morgan5:51

Yeah.

Presenter5:51

Yeah.

Piers Morgan5:51

So

Presenter5:51

Yeah.

Piers Morgan5:51

Oh

Presenter5:51

It was little Piers-like.

Piers Morgan5:52

Well, I asked my mother about this, and she said you were just a very happy chap, always smiling, always having fun, quite creative. Had a sort of irrational interest in newspapers for a young boy. So I was six or seven and reading the Daily Mail every day, which can't be good for your health. I had an incredibly happy childhood. You know, we never had a lot of money. My parents both worked very, very hard, ran a country pub down in East Sussex and worked seven days a week. And despite the fact they had these four kids and worked so hard, we just had an incredibly, from my memory, incredibly blissful time.

Presenter6:24

It strikes me your mother must have been a very um strong positive character. You were saying you were a positive little boy, because the man who brought you up as dad and who who is essentially your dad had not in fact fathered you because your your father had died. So she must be quite a powerhouse to sort of manage to engender optimism in her children, in her family. I'm just saying, yeah, I mean my mum you know.

Piers Morgan6:30

Yeah, it is.

Piers Morgan6:33

No.

Piers Morgan6:34

Yeah.

Piers Morgan6:40

Yeah, I mean my mum, you know, my father died when I was uh this one year old and my mum remarried a few years later and I I was very lucky that she married someone who took on these two boys as it was at the time and became the only dad I've ever known, obviously. Um but I think that you know the the the great powerhouse has always been, you know, my mother and my grandmother, you know, two of the strongest women you'd meet who've been through a lot of very difficult things.

Presenter7:04

Tell me about your next piece of music then.

Piers Morgan7:06

The next piece was kind of a tribute really to all these extraordinary females in my life. So it's Charles Asnavore's For Me Formidable. And I think every man needs formidable women around him, I think.

Speaker 37:19

You are the one for me, for me, for me, for me, la ble.

Speaker 37:26

You are my love, very, very, very, very table.

Speaker 37:33

And I poured pour a journey in the direction in the Shakespeare my Desi, Daisy.

Presenter7:49

Charles Asnavour and Formie, Formie Dable. Can't quite roll my R's the way he says there. Um so Piers Morgan, as a little boy, I I don't know why I'm saying this, incredibly competitive, I'm imagining.

Piers Morgan7:54

Yeah.

Speaker 37:54

Yeah.

Piers Morgan8:00

Yes, very competitive. Yeah, well, the whole family well, I think if you have two brothers then every day is another w another war.

Presenter8:07

You said there wasn't much money around. You were sent to boarding school at eight, so a little enough money to do that.

Piers Morgan8:11

Yeah, I was actually a day boy until I was 11 or 12. Oh, right. And then I decided I wanted to be a weekly boarder after that. So I only got incarcerated at my own volition. But I went to a fantastic prep school down in East Sussex. Did you write for the school newspaper? I didn't really have one. What we did have, we had this wonderful lady called Nancy Milner Gullen, who had a discussion group every week. And it would just be one huge Barney. It would be like sort of young version of question time. And I'm sure that a lot of the way I am now, and the fact that I love that kind of debating and sort of polarizing opinion, all that kind of thing, that all came from those days where we were just encouraged to be very, very forceful and animated.

Presenter8:14

Oh right.

Piers Morgan8:49

and hopefully informed and articulate in our argument.

Presenter8:53

Did you have ambition for yourself at that age? Did you think I want to be a whatever?

Piers Morgan8:57

I think that in all honesty I've never had any direct ambition for any of the jobs I've ended up doing. I think I had a love of newspapers, which was a bit weird for a boy of my age. Um so I think I had a love for that. I lo I love the feel of newspapers, the smell of newspapers. So that was my real love and passion. It remains the case now. But I don't think I ever had a game plan.

Presenter9:16

You you had to also quit posh school and go to just the normal comprehensive.

Piers Morgan9:19

And go

Piers Morgan9:21

Yeah, I mean that was a pretty big moment. You know, I think it was a bigger moment for my mum than me really. She just wanted me to go to public school. I got a bursary scholarship to Ardenny College, which ironically would have left me at the same school at the same time as Ian Hislop. So I think probably for the nation's sake, just as well that I was frog marched off to the local comp. But I I honestly think it was the best thing that ever happened to me. The friends I made there have become the closest friends in my life.

Presenter9:46

Tell me about your next piece of music.

Piers Morgan9:47

The next piece, well this this always brings back really happy memories again. On Friday nights my little routine at the Daily Mirror used to be that I would get my driver to pick up my kids, my three sons, and bring them to Canary Wharf and then we would I would normally drive myself and them down to Sussex and we just loved this song and we'd all sing along and some of the happiest memories I have of my kids were just sticking on this song, Dean Martin and Hey Mumbo, Mumbo Italiano. I defy anyone to listen to this and not just feel slightly uplifted by life.

Speaker 210:20

But take some advice by Sano Learn how to mumble. If you're gonna be a square, you ain't gonna gonna wear it. Mambo Italiano, hey hey mambo Mambo Italiano go joe Shake it like a Giovanna Hello kiss a digi you get happy in the feature when you mumbo Italiano

Presenter10:33

Yeah.

Presenter10:35

Shake it like a tiabana

Presenter10:49

Dean Martin and Mambo Italiano. I'm going to well this is an unfair thing to do, but journalists do it all the time, of course, don't they? Quote people back at themselves many years later. You once said there's no point in pretending what you're doing is good for the human spirit. This is of being a tabloid editor. Most of the time the public interest defence is trumped up nonsense. The reason we're doing it is to sell papers and amuse and titillate people. Never a truer word was spoken.

Piers Morgan11:15

Probably. That's probably I think that's probably the honest truth about it, yeah. I think that as a tabloid editor, too often I I heard them try and launch these defenses of stuff when actually it's kind of more honest, just to be more straightforward and say your job is to sell newspapers. And but lots of what tabloid newspapers do

Presenter11:15

Problems, man.

Piers Morgan11:32

Somewhere along the line someone's getting damaged by this. You know, now a lot of the time it is defensible. Some of the times it isn't defensible at all.

Presenter11:40

Uh you mentioned that you almost ended up uh going to school with Ian Hislop. Who knows? Maybe you would have been the best of chums. But that's certainly that's certainly not the case now. You you are somebody who relishes a feud, and you've had this ongoing feud with Ian Hislop and very recently

Piers Morgan11:44

Who knows?

Piers Morgan11:46

That's certainly

Presenter11:55

He has said with a great deal of passion that one of the difficulties of trying to keep the freedom of the press intact is that it's been horribly degraded by people who go out essentially and rake through other people's love lives for a front page.

Piers Morgan12:07

I know, but he's such a sanctimonious buffoon. I mean the Private Eye is one of the most intrusive and inaccurate newspapers in the country. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Private Eye. I thoroughly enjoy reading it, as long as it's about somebody else, not me. Like everybody reads Private Eye. But I will not take lessons on any of those things from Ian Hislop.

Presenter12:27

Of course, Ian Hislop's not here to defend himself. We shouldn't get into too much of a personal slagging match about what he publishes and what you in the past have published. But it's not a good idea.

Piers Morgan12:35

I'm just trying to put it into some sort of perspective.

Presenter12:37

Well, I'm wondering as a twenty eight year old then, when you were making decisions about what and essentially who you put on your front page, if any of that came into play, if you thought, well, this this is a woman with uh children or here's a man with a marriage that's uh on the surface.

Piers Morgan12:51

Yeah, increasingly it did. I mean the o yeah, I think look, to be honest with you, when I first started, I was twenty-eight, I was carefree, I didn't really give things much thought. I think that that brought with it a bravado, courage and daring that you wouldn't get if you were forty, but it also brought a sense of slight abandonment about the reality of what you were doing to people. And I think that as I got a bit older and went through my own trials and tribulations, my view of the pleasure to be derived from that kind of thing began to diminish.

Presenter13:20

And what about this nice middle class boy who would have to be dealing with I mean, essentially people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people's phones, people who take secret photographs, who do all that very nasty down in the gutter stuff. How did you feel about that?

Piers Morgan13:26

Well

Piers Morgan13:29

Yeah.

Piers Morgan13:32

How did you feel about that? Well, to be honest, let's put that in perspective as well. Not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the the staff themselves. That's not to defend it, because obviously you were you were running the results of their of their work. I I'm quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. And I make no pretense about the stuff we used to do. I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide and certainly encompassed the high and the low end of the supposed newspaper market.

Presenter13:38

Really?

Speaker 313:50

Uh

Speaker 213:50

Okay.

Presenter14:04

Weren't you once at a lunch where I mean a very intimate lunch with Prince William, where he said why was it that he he was much younger then, of course, why was it that the papers had to be so horrible to mummy?

Piers Morgan14:13

Yeah.

Presenter14:13

What did you

Piers Morgan14:14

Yeah.

Presenter14:14

Sata.

Piers Morgan14:14

Well, it's just me, him, and Diana. I thought it was a very good point to make. He was thirteen and a half. I felt very sorry for Prince William. But I also did point out to him, not forcefully, he was a boy, but I said, Look, you know, you have to understand your mother's one of the most famous people in the world. You are public property, I'm afraid, to a lot of extent, and you're just going to have to learn to live with it. But, you know, the easy thing for me to have done would look Prince William in the eye and say, well, leave your mum alone. But then he didn't know that his mum used to ring me up on a regular basis, giving me stories about herself to discredit her rivals. I did. So it was a two-way street.

Presenter14:48

Let's take a break for some music. What have you chosen next, Piers?

Piers Morgan14:51

Oh, the next piece is actually I I'm a secret uh jazz fiend and I was in New York about three months ago and I just heard this guy and I didn't know much about him. I knew vaguely that he was a great jazz saxophonist, a guy called Chris Potter and he was just spellbinding. I could just imagine being on a desert island, hopefully with a big fat cigar, thinking about my life and listening to Yesterday by Chris Potter and thinking, you know what, life isn't too bad out here.

Presenter15:46

Chris Potter and yesterday. That was an intriguing little picture you painted there, Piers Morgan, about sitting with William, aged thirteen and a half, and his mother, Diana, in Kensington Palace, I presume it was, in her private apartments, having lunch. That's the sort of access that very, very few people get, and it's open to the editors of our daily and and Sunday newspapers. It must be intoxicating.

Piers Morgan15:57

Presumably.

Piers Morgan16:09

Oh, completely. I found it extraordinary. I mean, I had amazing access to Tony Blair when he's Prime Minister.

Presenter16:14

In your book, you say fifty-six times. Fifty-six one-to-ones. One to one, which is different, of course, from peop people in many positions in life meet Prime Ministers and Premiers at receptions and shake their hand and they exchange banalities. But actually, here you were, one to one. And what was he doing? Tony Blair was.

Piers Morgan16:16

Fifty-six one-to-ones.

Piers Morgan16:19

Yeah

Presenter16:30

Asking your opinion, uh trying to curry favour with you.

Piers Morgan16:33

He was trying to formulate my opinion in my head to a benefit to himself. Of course he was. He was Prime Minister. He wanted the mirror to be on his side. Did you have a bit of a crush on him? Not a crush, no, no, Kirsty, no. I had certainly I liked him a lot personally for a long time. I felt it was a it was

Presenter16:50

You yourself have written that there was a sort of not quite a homoerotic edge, but there was a little bit of a sort of you both rather just loved being around each other.

Piers Morgan16:54

Yeah.

Piers Morgan16:57

Well I there was a certain there was a certain three of us in this marriage thing, because I always used to be struck by the fact that if I went in to see Tony Blair in Downing Street, then I'd always get a call from Gordon Brown's office almost before I got back to the office inviting me in for tea or breakfast with Gordon the following day. So even then the competition for Tony's affection, for Gordon's, it was all very complicated if you read it to the Daily Mirror, because they're all trying to vie for what I thought was my affection, but of course was in fact my front page.

Presenter17:22

Oh, it's a front page love triangle splash, is it not? And what about then missing it? A little I know you don't miss editing a newspaper, and I know you also think that journalists are obsessed with this idea that you want to go back to Fleet Street, for want of a better term.

Piers Morgan17:24

Yeah.

Piers Morgan17:34

Yeah.

Presenter17:37

But missing the proximity to power, missing a word in the Prime Minister's ear here and there. But I still get that.

Piers Morgan17:43

But I still get that. I mean, I've known Gordon longer than Tony Blair. So I consider him and Sarah to be good friends of mine. And I talk to Sarah at least once a week. I talk to Gordon, you know, every couple of months. I might go in and have a chat with him. I have no agenda. I have no side to me. And I see him probably as much as I ever used to. So I still have that. I don't miss that side of things at all. Don't get me wrong. I pick up the paper some days. I still get five or six of them. And I think, God, I wish I was back in there today. That looks what fun to be in there today. You know, the day that Jackie Smith's husband had to hold his hands up to watching an adult movie and claiming it off a taxpayer. You just think, I wish I was in the newsroom today. It would be such fun. What's your next piece of music then? It's actually one of the very few things that I can actually play on the piano. And I have, in fact, played this around the world whilst under the influence of alcohol, including in one memorable performance in a nightclub in Dublin where 300 people ended up chanting the chorus with me. It's the Beatles and Let It Be.

Speaker 318:42

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom.

Speaker 318:51

Let it be.

Speaker 318:55

And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom.

Speaker 319:04

Let it be

Speaker 319:07

Let it be, let it be.

Speaker 319:10

Let it be

Presenter19:11

The Beatles and Let It Be. In the introduction, Piers Morgan, uh I talked about some of your triumphs and also some of your tragedies and and probably well you say it might be the thing that people write when they write your obituary, the the biggest mistake you made was the Viglen shares. You you invested sixty seven thousand pounds of your own money in shares for a company that was the next morning tipped by your very own newspaper in the financial pages as one to invest in and uh you came a cropper.

Piers Morgan19:39

Yeah, big time. I mean it wasn't ever how people thought it was. They'd actually tipped that company twice before on the previous two weeks and the shares had already risen by over thirty percent. So it wasn't what it seemed. I was aware of how it looked and I absolutely hated the way that it then played out in the media. It made me look like the Nick Leeson of Fleet Street, that I was filling my boots using my newspaper to do this. I found it all horrific. I lost about a stone in weight, realized that this would then be with me forever, whatever the outcome of the investigation. But you know, all I can say is the Department of Trade and Industry launched a four-year investigation and at the end of it they brought no charges against me or any allegations of wrongdoing whatsoever.

Presenter20:22

Is that when it all stopped being a I mean, you often do describe I've heard you and read you in interviews saying, Well, it's all a game anyway and was that when it wasn't a game that was that when it stopped being a game for you, when you realized that actually you could uh not just lose your job, but lose your reputation?

Piers Morgan20:28

It certainly wasn't a game that

Piers Morgan20:37

It had that effect. It also gave me a ver a positive thing out of it. It gave me a very good insight, I thought, into being on the receiving end of the attack dogs. You know, I realized then what it was like to have people listening into your phone conversations. I was having paparazzi doorstep me, chase me down the street, shouting things. And how did that feel? It felt pretty uncomfortable. It felt pretty intimidating. I thought it was perfectly justified. I thought I put myself in an incredibly stupid position by buying any shares at all when I was editing a newspaper that ran a share tipping column. You know, to me, the share dealing was just a bit of a laugh. I came across very quickly, and it taught me a huge lesson. And I deeply regret ever buying those shares. I wish I'd never done it.

Presenter20:57

And how did that feel?

Presenter21:21

I wonder if you were living a life around about that time where, because of the atmosphere that surrounds especially, particularly tabloid editors, and because of, as we've described, uh the access that you were given and because of the chauffeur-driven cars and the nice pay checks and and the big life, the big London life, if you sort of felt untouchable.

Piers Morgan21:27

Take your

Piers Morgan21:35

Excellent.

Piers Morgan21:41

I think there is a bit of that. I think I certainly didn't give it any thought. And I think as a newspaper editor, you are living in a very high-octane, adrenaline-fuelled life. I certainly, I don't think you feel untouchable, but you feel incredibly powerful. You feel like you can almost do anything. You are, in terms of the newsroom, you're the God figure. Everything you say gets done. And you start to feel fairly omnipotent. So, you know, the share thing was just an incredibly difficult time for me. And I regret it deeply.

Presenter21:47

Hmm.

Piers Morgan22:11

Let's have some music. What have you chosen? This brings me neatly to Sunset Boulevard, which I think is a wonderful anthem really for everyone who dreams of going to Hollywood, about what the reality is of Hollywood, which is it's the land of dreams but mainly broken ones. It is in many ways a horrible sleazy cesspit of greed and gluttony and paranoia and insecurity and disgusting show-offs, which is probably why I feel so happy out there. And this is really the anthem of the young guy who goes out chasing the dream and kind of knows it's disgusting but thinks, you know what, it's worth it. I want to be a star. I heard it once when I was actually driving down Sunset Boulevard. And I just started laughing at the lyrics because I thought, yeah, this is kind of like me at the moment. You know, living a bit of a sleazy dream out here, but loving every second. And who cares if it all goes wrong? You can always say you were on Sunset Boulevard.

Speaker 323:05

Sure, I came out here to make my name. Wanted my room, I do soft fame, wanted my park and spaced borders.

Speaker 323:13

But after a year, one room hell A Murphy bad, a rancid smell, or paper peeling at the corners.

Speaker 323:22

Sunset Boulevard, Twisting Boulevard Secretive enriching, a little scary Sunset bull of hard, Tempting Boulevard

Presenter23:35

Alan Campbell as Joe, singing Sunset Boulevard from the musical of the same name. We'll come on to your Hollywood dream a little later. But for now, let's concentrate on this decision then as the editor of The Mirror to be very much against the invasion of Iraq. Why did you make

Speaker 323:41

But uh

Piers Morgan23:41

A little later.

Piers Morgan23:53

That decision. I just got a sense from all the military people that I knew, and some of whom were in my family, that this Iraq war was not what it should be. That there was no belief amongst the army people I talked to that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. So I didn't buy the argument. I thought it was wrong. And as it turned out, the mirror was absolutely right.

Presenter24:12

Concentrate more

Piers Morgan24:13

War on

Presenter24:13

On on the reason that you well, actually you were escorted from the building, the the mirror building. This is the photograph that you ran of an Iraqi apparently of an Iraqi prisoner of war being abused, being urinated upon by a British soldier. Did nothing strike you as odd about that photograph? It it was beautifully framed, it was not uh grainy, it seemed as if it had been taken with some care. It didn't really compare favourably to the ones that we knew right.

Speaker 324:29

Yeah.

Piers Morgan24:40

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. I'm not an idiot. I may be many things, but I'm not stupid. And obviously, we had checked these out thoroughly. You know, I have to assume that those pictures were a bit moody, as they say, in the trade, and perhaps they weren't what they seem to be. Although, to this day, nobody has ever come up with any evidence as to what they really are, where they were taken, what they really depict, or anything. You know, I got unceremoniously fired on the word of the government, who had already been found wanting on the question of why we went to war in the first place, and on the word of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who since then have now seen some of the worst war crimes alleged against them of any regiment since the Second World War. Look at the case of Bahamusa, the hotel receptionist. That was the QLR. They beat this guy up for three days and killed him.

Piers Morgan25:31

Perfectly innocent guy. So let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. I got fired by revealing, I believe, an absolute truth. Those pictures may not have been what we thought. The allegation behind them absolutely true.

Presenter25:40

Those

Presenter25:45

More than being unceremoniously frogmarched out the front of the building with your belongings in a in a black plastic bag where once you had been the editor who reigned supreme, m m more than that, surely the most bitter moment must have been the apology that was written on the front page of the newspaper. Yeah. Made you physically sick.

Piers Morgan25:58

Yeah, maybe physically.

Piers Morgan26:01

Yeah.

Piers Morgan26:03

Maybe physi well, not physically, but maybe more of a puke, definitely. It was all quite weird. It's like having an out-of-body experience. You watch your own obituary on telly, and all I kept thinking was in a rather selfish way, God, I've got 11 minutes at the top of the news. That's quite good. What did your mother say to you about it all at the time? My mother was incensed and upset and furious. She would, has always been the most important figure in my life, incredibly supportive. And she knew that I'd published it absolutely believing the pictures to be genuine. I mean, this idea that somehow I would publish a picture that emotive at that time that I thought even had a chance of not being genuine. It's just ridiculous. Let's take a break. Tell me about your next piece of music, Piers. The next piece of music is just a really lovely ballad. This is a great love song by the greatest singer, I think, in the world, Stevie Wonder. It happens to be a favourite song of my girlfriend Celia and I's. And it's got really nice, simple lyrics which are self-explanatory. And I actually met Stevie Wonder last summer in LA. And in a drunken moment of madness, I got him to record on video a marriage proposal to Celia with the criteria, should I ever need to use this? So I don't want to get too excited if she hears this. So I actually have got Stevie Wonder now on tape ordering Celia to marry me. So should that moment ever come and she'd be lucky enough to be in that position, Stevie will be doing the proposing, which is pretty cool, I think, whichever way you look at it.

Speaker 327:30

If we are.

Speaker 327:34

On earth together, it's you and I.

Speaker 327:42

God has made us for love.

Speaker 327:48

It's true.

Speaker 327:52

I've really found someone like

Presenter27:57

Thank you.

Presenter27:59

Stevie Wonder and you and I. I hate to break the spell of romance, but the life of celebrity then, you you are now, of course, a celebrity. You're one of those people y you would have written about, that you would have splashed on your front page.

Piers Morgan28:03

The life of

Speaker 328:03

Uh

Piers Morgan28:03

Some of the

Piers Morgan28:10

I'm one of those people I would have poured scorn on, ridiculed and generally over obsessed about, yeah. In the in the way that tabloids do.

Presenter28:15

Yeah.

Presenter28:16

What would you have found if you'd raked through the celebrity Piers Morgan's bins, I wonder?

Piers Morgan28:20

Um, not a lot. I think I've always been quite an open book. Unlike a lot of celebrities and journalists, actually one of the most thin skinned people on on God's earth, I think that I've always been quite open about my failings.

Presenter28:31

You're a father of three boys, of course, and and you you spend a lot of time over in America. Do you filming? I I'm presuming you do a lot of filming. You have to do all the judging for uh America's Got Talent as well as over here in Britain where you are one of the judges in the same show. How much time do you get to spend with your boys?

Piers Morgan28:36

Do you filming? I I'm presuming you

Piers Morgan28:46

Probably more than when I was an editor actually. Before I would be getting up at six and getting home at midnight, you know, you never saw your kids at all. So although I I'm abroad a lot filming, when I'm in England I can see them a lot more than I used to. Do you have

Presenter28:59

The difficulty protecting your privacy.

Piers Morgan29:01

I tend to invade my own privacy quite aggressively, so I don't think I'll be able to do it. So you see it all before anyone else can. I couldn't give a damn about privacy. And I don't think I just find it such a ridiculous squealing argument from a bunch of pampered multi-millionaire egotists. People hide behind their children in this kind of situation. They use them as a tool. Normally, when they've been rankly hypocritical and they have sold their kids on the front cover of a magazine for fifty thousand pounds, sold their christening, sold their wedding. That's where you have to draw a line as a celebrity. How greedy do you want to be? And if you want to be greedy and sell your own privacy, you are not entitled to any privacy.

Presenter29:04

So you say it all before.

Presenter29:36

I'm glad you mentioned the wedding. Is it true that Celia Walden has turned you down repeatedly every time you propose to her?

Piers Morgan29:42

She'd like you to think that. No, I think look, we um Celia, I think, is someone who whoever ends up marrying her is going to be an extremely lucky guy. Let's just say I'm in I'm in a pretty good position at the moment. I've manoeuvred myself into into pole position.

Presenter29:56

Are her parents now speaking to you? I gather you didn't really hit it off with a trend.

Piers Morgan29:59

I get on very well with her parents.

Presenter30:00

Yeah.

Presenter30:00

Clear.

Piers Morgan30:01

Yeah. You shouldn't believe all you read in the papers, Kirstie. You of all people should know that.

Presenter30:01

The

Presenter30:04

What a fool I am. How are you going to be on the island? I imagine you will be chronically bored and maybe slightly depressed. A little bit.

Piers Morgan30:10

Yeah.

Piers Morgan30:12

Never depressed. I never get depressed about anything. No. I'm not.

Presenter30:14

Not anything. No. I'm not sure.

Piers Morgan30:22

I've made some sounds of

Piers Morgan30:23

I've miss people. I do like being around people. I think I like a good party. I like the buzz of a newsroom. I like the buzz of a big TV production. I like that. I like showing off as well. I don't see anything wrong with showing off. I think it's funny. Tell me about your final piece of music then. I was trying to think what I would have played at my funeral. Not that I ever want this day to arrive too soon, obviously. And I thought I could be really pompous and play something like Foray's Requiem, like Meteron, have the whole world honouring this great world statesman. Or I could be more realistic and play a piece of music as my coffin was led down the aisle to a weeping congregation of something that I thought would encapsulate my basic ethos on life. So I chose Always Look on the Bright Side of Life by Monty Python, which I think should be everybody's ethos.

Speaker 331:07

Always look on the bright side of life.

Speaker 331:15

For life is quite absurd, and death's the final word. You must always face the curtain with a bow.

Speaker 331:23

Forget about your scene, give the audience a gwin. Enjoy it, it's your last chance anyhow.

Speaker 331:31

So always look on the bright side of them.

Presenter31:37

Monty Python and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life So we've played Piers at your funeral with even

Piers Morgan31:42

Even you were whistling along the way. Even I.

Presenter31:43

Even I, yes, even I. So I'm going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take a book along with you. What would you like to take?

Piers Morgan31:50

Yeah, I mean like everyone, I think I gave it a lot of thought as to what book would I really find properly inspiring on a desert island. And actually I ended up with a book called An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan, who was of course chained to a Beirut radiator for five years with John McCarthy and Terry Waite. And it's one of the most powerful books I've ever read about the power of a human spirit. And I just thought that would be something that I would read on a desert island and think, you know what, life isn't too bad. You can come through this.

Presenter32:16

You you're allowed a luxury too, of course.

Piers Morgan32:19

The luxury item would have to be my cricket bat. Cricket is the great love of my life after my children and family and my cricket bat, even though I wouldn't even have a ball, I wouldn't need it, I could just relive my great innings, which will sound laughable to my village cricket team who can't recall many of them, but I could literally keep myself happy for a couple of years. I could be Dom Bradman, I could be Botham, Flintoff, Peterson and Morgan, probably in that order.

Presenter32:27

Uh

Presenter32:47

The cricket bat is yours, and if the waves were to threaten to wash away your discs, which one would you run to save?

Piers Morgan32:52

I think the one I would run and save would have to be Mambo Italiano, because it would always remind me of my sons who are the best mates I have in the world.

Presenter33:01

Piers Morgan, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Piers Morgan33:04

Thank you.

Presenter33:05

Yeah.

Presenter33:12

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.