Unless Piers Morgan is careful, Richard Desmond could buy the Mirror

Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, is an opponent of the coming war against Iraq. Fair enough. Many of us are unhappy about it. But he has taken his opposition to extreme and, I would say, imprudent lengths. To use a military analogy, he has fired off his biggest nuclear missiles without first going through the range of lesser weaponry. Last week there was an enormous picture of Tony Blair on the Mirror’s front page with his hands covered in blood. It referred to an inside rant by John Pilger. The previous day the front-page headline had told George Bush to ‘Cool it, Cowboy’. Day after day the paper inveighs against war. Most of its readers may be sceptics, but I cannot believe that they relish coverage that is both hysterical and obsessional. Our boys, after all, are steaming towards the Gulf. What will the Mirror do when the fighting starts? It is one thing to argue that there is insufficient proof to justify war against Iraq; quite another to depict Tony Blair as a mass murderer on a par with Saddam Hussein.