Piers Morgan

Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan (né O'Meara; born 30 March 1965) is an English broadcaster, journalist and writer. He began his career in 1988 at the tabloid The Sun. In 1994, at the age of 29, he was appointed editor of the News of the World by Rupert Murdoch, which made him the youngest editor of a British national newspaper in more than half a century. From 1995 Morgan edited the Daily Mirror, but was fired in 2004. He was the editorial director of First News from 2006 to 2007. In 2014 he became the first editor-at-large of the MailOnline website's American operation.

As a television presenter, Morgan hosted the ITV talk show Piers Morgan's Life Stories (2009–2020), the CNN talk show Piers Morgan Live (2011–2014), and co-presented the ITV Breakfast programme Good Morning Britain (2015–2021) alongside Susanna Reid. He has been a judge on the television talent shows America's Got Talent (2006–2011) and Britain's Got Talent (2007–2010). In 2008 Morgan won The Celebrity Apprentice, appearing with the future United States president Donald Trump. He was a presenter for TalkTV (now known as Talk), hosting the programme Piers Morgan Uncensored from 2022 to 2024, before leaving the network and moving the programme to YouTube. Since September 2025 a weekly highlights show from YouTube episodes of the show has aired on Channel 5.

Morgan was the editor of the Daily Mirror during the period in which the paper was implicated in the phone hacking scandal. In 2011 Morgan denied having ever hacked a phone and stated that he had not, "to [his] knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone". The following year, he was criticised in the findings of the Leveson Inquiry by chair Brian Leveson, who stated that comments made in Morgan's testimony about phone hacking were "utterly unpersuasive" and "that he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it". The judge in a 2023 court case against Mirror Group Newspapers found truthful evidence that Morgan knew about private phone hacking from a reporter, shared a method of phone hacking with a media professional while being questioned about a reporting scoop, and that Morgan played another's private phone message in the newsroom he had received from another tabloid editor.

Morgan's outspoken views and controversial comments on Good Morning Britain led Ofcom to adjudicate on multiple occasions. In March 2021, Morgan left the programme with immediate effect, following his criticism of the Oprah with Meghan and Harry interview. Ofcom received over 57,000 complaints from viewers, including a complaint from Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, herself; Morgan was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing by Ofcom.

Early life and education

Piers Morgan was born as Piers Stefan O'Meara in Guildford, Surrey, on 30 March 1965, the son of Vincent Eamonn O'Meara, an Irish dentist, and Gabrielle Georgina Sybille (née Oliver), an Englishwoman who raised Morgan as a Catholic. A few months after his birth the family moved to Newick, East Sussex. His father died when Morgan was 11 months old; his mother later married Glynne Pughe-Morgan, a Welsh pub landlord who later worked in the meat distribution business, and he took his stepfather's surname. He was educated at the independent fee-paying Cumnor House prep school, between the ages of seven and 13, then Chailey School, a comprehensive secondary school in Chailey, followed by Priory School, Lewes, for sixth form. After nine months at Lloyd's of London, Morgan studied journalism at Harlow College, joining the Surrey and South London Newspaper Group in 1985.

Press career

At the Murdoch titles (1988–1995)

Morgan began to work as a freelance at The Sun in 1988, at this point dropping his double-barrelled name. He told Hunter Davies in December 1994 that he was personally recruited by the Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie to work on the newspaper's show business column "Bizarre", his first high-profile post. Although he was not a fan of pop music, he was considered skilled at self-publicity and became the column's main writer. "I became the Friend of the Stars, a rampant egomaniac, pictured all the time with famous people – Madonna, Stallone, Bowie, Paul McCartney, hundreds of them. It was shameless, as they didn't know me from Adam", he told Davies.

During this period in 1993/1994 Morgan was the pop group Take That's official biographer releasing two books on the group and having exclusive access documenting their meteoric rise and impact not seen since the Beatles.

In January 1994 he became editor of the News of the World after being appointed to the job by Rupert Murdoch. Initially an acting editor, he was confirmed in the summer, becoming at 29 the youngest national newspaper editor in more than half a century. In this period, the newspaper led with a series of scoops for which Morgan credited a highly efficient news desk and the publicist Max Clifford.

Morgan left this post in 1995 shortly after publishing photographs of Catherine Victoria Lockwood, then wife of Charles, Earl Spencer, leaving an addictive disorders clinic in Surrey. This action ran against the editors' code of conduct, a misdemeanour for which the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against Morgan. Murdoch was reported as having said that "the boy went too far" and publicly distanced himself from the story. Fearful of a privacy law action if he had not criticised one of his employees, Murdoch is said to have apologised to Morgan in private.

The incident was reported to have contributed to Morgan's decision to leave for the Daily Mirror editorship. Morgan's autobiography The Insider states that he left the News of the World for the Mirror of his own choice. It asserts he was an admirer of the former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher for most of her period of office, making the appointment surprising as the Mirror is a Labour-supporting title.

Daily Mirror editor

As editor of the Daily Mirror, Morgan apologised on television for the headline (rendered in upper case) "ACHTUNG! SURRENDER; For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over" on 25 June 1996, a day before England met Germany in a semi-final of the UEFA Euro 1996 football championships. The headline was accompanied by an open letter from Morgan parodying Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war on Germany in 1939. "It was intended as a joke, but anyone who was offended by it must have taken it seriously, and to those people I say sorry," he said. Germany won the match and went on to win the championship final at Wembley Stadium, London.

Under Morgan's leadership, the Daily Mirror spent £16 million on a rebranding project, including the dropping of "Daily" from the masthead in February 1997, which was later reversed. Roy Greenslade wrote in August 1999 that Morgan's editorship "has made a huge difference: his enormous enthusiasm, determination and focus is a major plus".

Morgan was the subject of an investigation in 2000 after Suzy Jagger wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph revealing that he had bought £20,000 worth of shares in the computer company Viglen soon before the Mirror's "City Slickers" column tipped Viglen as a good buy. Morgan was found by the Press Complaints Commission to have breached the Code of Conduct on financial journalism, but kept his job. The "City Slickers" columnists, Anil Bhoyrul and James Hipwell, were both found to have committed further breaches of the Code and were sacked before the inquiry concluded. Further enquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry in 2004 cleared Morgan of any charges. On 7 December 2005, Bhoyrul and Hipwell were convicted of conspiracy to breach the Financial Services Act. During the trial it emerged that Morgan had bought £67,000 worth of Viglen shares, emptying his bank account and investing under his (first) wife's name as well.

The Mirror attempted to move mid-market in 2002, eschewing the more trivial stories of show-business and gossip, and appointed Christopher Hitchens as a columnist, but sales declined. In October 2003, journalist and television personality Jeremy Clarkson emptied a glass of water over Morgan during the last flight of Concorde in response to some photographs published in the Mirror. In March 2004, at the British Press Awards, Clarkson punched Morgan three times during another argument. In Campbell v MGN Ltd, the Law Lords in May 2004 found in favour of model Naomi Campbell on privacy grounds after the Mirror had published a photograph of her entering a Narcotics Anonymous clinic. Morgan was critical of the judgement saying it was "a good day for lying, drug-abusing prima donnas who want to have their cake with the media and the right to then shamelessly guzzle with their Cristal champagne."