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’. ‘Theft isn’t journalism, Morgan — you bastard!’ Witherow shrieks.
Zoom forward to the end of the book, and Morgan, now editor of the Mirror, is having a drink with Wade, now editor of the Sun, on the eve of the publication of the Hutton report. He becomes aware that the document she has face down in front of her is a leaked copy of the report, and that the Sun is about to scoop him by publishing. ‘All I had to do was get my hands on it, run out of the restaurant and file it to my newsdesk, and we would just about catch the first edition.’ When Wade’s attention lapses, he makes a grab for it. She’s just quick enough to see him coming, gets the other end, and the two newspaper titans are tugging a sheaf of A4 back and forth across a restaurant table.
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