No longer a friend of the famous
Lloyd Evans
DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM? INSIDER DIARIES OF FAME, POWER AND NAKED AMBITION by Piers Morgan Ebury, £17.99, pp. 370, ISBN 9780091913915 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Piers Morgan is big in the US. After his dismissal from the Mirror in 2004 he spent a thankless year as a freelance hack in Britain before popping up as the token ‘nasty Brit’ on Simon Cowell’s blockbusting show America’s Got Talent. This book traces his journey from sacked hack to superstar but unlike The Insider, Morgan’s chronicle of his first 20 years as a tabloid journalist, the new memoir covers barely 20 months. There’s enough padding here to insulate a barn. Morgan reprints in its entirety a Mother’s Day article listing ten important things Mrs Morgan taught little Piers when he was in shorts. The chaste details of his fling with Telegraph gossip columnist Celia Walden will make fascinating reading for Piers and Celia. There’s a whole page devoted to the moment when Frank Bruno’s wife phoned by accident, thinking Morgan was a taxi driver. And even the racier passages — Sharon Osbourne calling Madonna a c**t — are clogged up with solemn rumination:
Am I not in danger of becoming the very thing I despise most — a talentless Z-list celebrity wannabe whoring myself around the TV airwaves just for the sake of being famous?
Mulling over one’s relationship with the godhead of fame is one of the defining characteristics of celebrity. Agonising about one’s true abilities is another. But unlike most celebs Morgan has plenty of talent. He’s handsome, sharp and quickwitted and he has a natural authority on television. His gift for nimble and devious cross-examination would have made him a formidable presence at the Bar. During a magazine interview for GQ he bamboozles George Galloway into admitting that the assassination of Tony Blair would be morally justified. His anger can be as intense as any satirist would wish and his flights of invective have a horrible force and compression. But his favourite targets, Cherie Blair and Kate Moss, are unworthy of his whetted nib. He records an encounter with Cherie at an awards ceremony. ‘She smiled regally, as the Queen did when I once met her — not a smile of warmth so much as a grimace of controlled revulsion.’ One of the defects of this book is that the people he skewered so viciously in The Insider (most notably the Blairs) will no longer speak to him, so his contacts here are less interesting and extensive. Of the senior Labour figures who are still on friendly terms it’s John Reid who comes across as the most relaxed and human. In 2005 when Reid was defence secretary he made a morale-boosting trip to Iraq. His speech to the troops began with a newly published poll. ‘The army’s approval rating is 88 per cent,’ he told them, ‘and politicians are on 7 per cent. However our combined rating is therefore a healthy 95 per cent.’ This easy humour contrasts rather grimly with Brown and his entourage. Morgan assures us that the private Gordon Brown is
relaxed, chatty, gossipy and extremely charming. Then I watch him on TV and he turns into one of the Thunderbirds speaking in a relentless high-speed monotone and doing one of the worst staged smirks I’ve ever seen.
Ed Balls and Alistair Darling are also, apparently, a couple of back-slapping funlovers when the cameras aren’t running. ‘But put them on Newsnight and it’s like an undertaker’s taken over the airwaves to announce mass euthanasia for anyone who laughs in public.’ Disturbing news for the Labour party which is about to fall into the hands of Brown, Balls & Darling. If this trio, which sounds like a gay cabaret act from the 1980s, is truly at its rock-’n-roll best behind the scenes then the solution is obvious. Keep them there. Permanently.
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