Piers Morgan: The making of a TV tyrant

The newly decamped ‘Good Morning Britain’ host has always had an impulsive love for a feud – but, asks Vincent Wood, is there a real Piers Morgan beneath the media facade?

Motormouth: as a child bartender in his parents’ village pub, Morgan says he ‘loved holding forth, hearing the sound of my own voice, and a lot of people found it amusing. So I just carried on’ (Reuters/Toby Melville)

When Piers Morgan talks about his life, he talks of conflict. He relishes feuds, and the opportunity to make up from them. He trots out stories of being punched in the face and battered in the headlines as punctuation to the episodes of his life. He will gladly point out that he is yet to leave a job without being fired – a half-truth considering his rise from night reporter on The Sun to the youngest newspaper editor of a generation when he took on the News of the World at 28.

As with all culture war contrarians with a taste for outrage, the question becomes whether he means any of it. Is it the real Piers when he casts doubt on Meghan Markle’s account of her experience with mental illness? When he delegitimises the experience of trans people? Or is the real Piers the Mirror editor who took on the government over the Iraq war? The bullish Good Morning Britain interviewer that No 10 refused to sit their ministers in front of for 201 days? Is he a rent-a-gob willing to pull out a contrary and frequently damaging viewpoint at a moment’s notice, or a champion of the tabloid moral cornerstone that is public interest, and the purest distillation of vox populi?

Of course he can be both of these men. His life has been one of warring contrast – on the one hand the loud, spiky caricature of a mad newspaper boss who is driven by wars of words, on the other a subtle social chameleon who schmoozes and amuses those around him to survive.