Apparently, being famous is all it is cracked up to be, judging from this book. Paris Hilton recognises him at a party at the Playboy Mansion. Tony Blair greets him at Lord Levy’s leaving party with, ‘Hello, Piers, how are you?’ This is echoed by Sylvester Stallone a few pages later: ‘Yo, Piers, how ya doing?’ He has been admitted to the club.
He is aware that this transformation is likely to attract a certain amount of hostility — particularly from people with their noses still pressed up against the glass. But he claims to be able to cope with this. ‘Britain’s Got Wankers,’ someone shouts out, as he drives past in his Maserati, having spent six weeks in Los Angeles. ‘God — and I really do mean this — it’s good to be home,’ he writes.
It is clear, though, that this non- chalance is an affectation and he really does care what people think. The book is an odd mixture of self-aggrandisement and self-deprecation: one minute he is bragging about how he helped Gordon Brown come up with one of his best put-downs of David Cameron, the next he is cheerfully repeating a joke that Stephen Fry is fond of making: ‘What’s the definition of countryside? The murder of Piers Morgan.’ These are two sides of the same coin, namely, an acute sensitivity about how he is perceived.
I suspect that beneath Morgan’s bluff exterior he is quite thin-skinned. He wants very much to be liked and it is a source of constant pain that he isn’t, at least not by everybody. Indeed, it is this personality defect that makes Piers such a good memoirist — like Alan Clark, he is constantly imagining slights where none exist — and God Bless America is as entertaining as his previous two diaries. From the first page it is clear that hiding behind the bombast and braggadocio there’s a vulnerable little boy, yearning for our approval. And fame probably isn’t the panacea he imagined.
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