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editor of a paper, you’ve got to exude absolute confidence from the moment you get in to the moment you go to bed because, if you don’t, the staff are going to be, “Oh God, he doesn’t know what he’s doing!” I had to pretend I knew what I was doing, even if I didn’t,’ he revealed later on.
    In the meantime, he had to get his team together – and fast. Journalist Sue Carroll had been deputy editor of the News Of The World and had also been stepping into Patsy Chapman’s shoes, as and when necessary. Now she was offered an executive post but turned it down and left the paper. Rather ironically, several years later and after a stint at the Sun, she was to end up as the Mirror’ s star columnist, but Piers himself had made an effort to get her to stay, something that smoothed the way for their relationship further down the line.
    Instead, Phil Hall was taken on as Piers’ deputy. With a background on the People and the Sunday Express, he was felt to have a strong news background. Meanwhile, the cavalcade thundered on: in June, it was announced that Patsy was not coming back, and Piers was promoted from acting editor to the real thing, although, in fact, everyone had known, right from the start, that he was the de facto guy in charge.
    Circulation, the lifeblood of any newspaper, began torise and, with it, Piers Morgan’s star. His tenure at the News Of The World was to prove a controversial one but, as so often in his career, he managed to be right in the middle of the action – just as it was all going on.

CHAPTER THREE
ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT
    P iers Morgan was now in the chair of the News Of The World, Britain’s biggest-selling daily. Right from the start, he had jumped in with both feet and showed he had what it takes. And he clearly wasn’t willing to tolerate the old Fleet Street ways, in which lunch lasted the best part of the day; on his arrival, long-serving staff were somewhat dismayed to read a notice telling them to confine lunch to one hour from then on. ‘A few had been in the habit of having the traditional Fleet Street liquid lunch,’ observed Piers, rather primly for him. ‘I’ve only been a journalist seven years, so all I know is the new-style journalism.’ But his always excellent timing really couldn’t be bettered at this juncture for, right in front of him, one of the biggest stories of the decade was unfolding.
    Indeed, it was a story that was to cover more than one decade, for it concerned the Prince and Princess of Wales. The pair had married in 1981, amid much talk about the ‘stuff of which fairytales are made’, and promptly wentabout disproving anything of the sort. After producing Princes William (1982) and Harry (1984), the royal marriage had fallen apart and, in December 1992, it was announced that the couple were to separate. Princess Diana drove newspaper sales as no one had ever done before and, in the wake of the royal separation, fascination in her only grew, much to the advantage of the press, who charted every twist and turn in her life story. Of course, at that time, no one knew the story was to end in tragedy but there was a huge appetite, among both journalists and readers, for anything at all to do with Diana.
    It was in August 1994 that Piers’ News Of The World broke a story that not only dominated the news agenda but also began to hint for the first time at quite the extent of Diana’s collaboration with the press. When Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story was published in June 1992, it had caused uproar but it was not until Diana’s death that it was revealed she had been closely involved with it all. Now, for the first time ever, she was caught out briefing a journalist – and all because of Piers.
    The story that precipitated the huge row ran in the News Of The World. It alleged that art dealer Oliver Hoare had been subject to 300 nuisance phone calls, some picked up by his wife,