Jeremy Clarkson on Piers Morgan - The Sunday Times 02/03/14
Clarkson can be an arse, but Morgan is a complete slime-bag.
Here is today's JC column - enjoy
I was going to write about Angela Merkel this morning. I really was, I promise. But then I thought: “Nah. Come on, Jeremy. Piers Morgan’s lost yet another job. He really is down this time. So why not fire up the laptop and kick him a bit?”
As you may know, the ghastly little weasel and I have history.
He ran some unpleasant stories about me on the front page of the Mirror several years ago, and whenever we met afterwards he thought it was all a huge laugh. A joke. No harm done.
My wife thought otherwise. And at the British Press awards gave him one of her hard stares from across the room. “Why’s your f****** wife looking at me like that?” he thundered. So I punched him. And then I punched him again.
And then I thought: “You know what? I don’t think this would ever get boring.” So I punched him again. And, annoyingly, broke my finger.
In another encounter, on the very last flight of Concorde into London, he was seated in the row behind me, droning on about his brilliance, so as we began our descent into London, and an inevitable encounter with the waiting bank of television cameras, I turned round and emptied a glass of water into his crotch.
“Look,” I said to journalists as we walked down the aircraft steps, “the idiot’s wet himself.”
We’ve tried over the years to shake hands and make amends but he always ends up doing something moronic and the feud starts all over again. Only recently he wrote in his truly amazing Mail on Sunday column about how he’d been chatting at a party to Samuel L Jackson and various other big-name Hollywood stars when I’d walked over.
Apparently I stood on the fringes of their matey chat until the humiliation of being a small fish in a big pond was too much to bear and I sloped off. That simply didn’t happen.
It makes you wonder about all the other events that Morgan writes on. All those chance meetings with “Bobby” De Niro in swish Los Angeles restaurants. All those clever put-downs to his detractors. All that Hello! magazine back-patting bonhomie.
How much of it happened only in his imagination? It’s more likely he spends his evenings in a hotel suite, on his own, with all the TVs tuned in to his CNN show in a one-man quest to shore up the ratings.
God, they were low. This was a show, remember, that was being aired round the world. Billions had the ability to watch it but few did. In fact Morgan attracted a global audience smaller than the BBC daytime show Cash in the Attic. He was even beaten by Kerry Katona: The Next Chapter, an ITV2 programme that followed the downward spiral of the dimwitted cocaine enthusiast.
I heard that he was going to be dropped about six months ago. And have been sitting here for all of that time, loving his stupid Twitter boasts about his huge fame and lavish lifestyle, knowing that he didn’t know what I knew.
Things aren’t much better for big M, little organ, back home in Britain. Because here his show Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, in which he makes orange people cry, has obviously run its course.
Gone are the days when he could get the prime minister to come on and sob; now it’s Tony Blackburn and Beverley Callard (nope, me neither).
This, then, is a man who was fired from the Mirror for publishing obviously faked pictures of British Army bods abusing Iraqi prisoners. A man who was accused of insider dealing. A man who is about to lose his show on CNN and who might very well hesitate over returning to Britain because the police may want to talk to him, again, about phone hacking.
He is a friendless, broken shell. So you might imagine that with his life in tatters, he’s sitting in his condo, crying his eyes out over pictures of himself.
But no. Instead he’s busy telling everyone that he now has more Google pages than the Pope. Yup. He really does believe that there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. And he thinks that so long as he can keep his name in the papers he will get another job. Yeah, right.
Morgan probably thinks he’s cast himself as a sort of pantomime baddie, and in time he may indeed end up at the Swindon Wyvern doing just that, throwing sweets into the audience and then trying to duck and weave when they are thrown back — along with all the chairs.
But actually he isn’t a pantomime baddie. He really is genuinely awful. It’s something we’ve all known since we first clapped eyes on him with his arm round some teenage pin-up in the showbiz pages of The Sun. “My ‘pal’ Simon Le Bon”, the caption would read. Really? So why doesn’t Simon have his arm round you?
Later we saw him strutting his stuff on a Simon Cowell talent show and we won’t go into detail here about how he got that gig.
And today he’s trying to argue his CNN show failed because the Americans didn’t take kindly to his misguided attempt to spark a debate on gun control. Nonsense. His show failed because the viewers hated him. Everyone hates him.
And that’s a big problem when you are trying to play the fame game. You can upset some of the people some of the time and survive — thrive even. But if you upset all of the people all of the time, you will fail.
And he has. And I couldn’t help but notice that as the news broke, it stopped raining and the sun came out.
