Early on in Piers Morgan’s memoir of his career as a tabloid editor, there is a very funny incident. It is a Saturday in 1994 and Morgan, then editor of the News of the World, knows that the Sunday Times, his broadsheet stablemate, has bought the serialisation rights to Jonathan Dimbleby’s book about Prince Charles. Its editor, John Witherow, declines to tip Piers off about what’s in the book. So Piers decides to get one over on his snooty rival.
He gets his colleague Rebekah Wade to sneak into the Sunday Times’s offices dressed as a cleaner. She hides in the loo for two hours waiting for the presses to roll, then jumps out, snaffles one of the first copies to be printed, and legs it back to the NoW. ‘I had a copy of the Sunday Times before Witherow did, and it was sensational stuff.’ Morgan gets his staff to ‘crash all the text straight into the paper’.
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