Early Life

Piers Morgan was born in Sussex, England in 1965 to an Irish dentist who died when Morgan was only two years old. At birth, Morgan was named Piers Stefan O'Meara, but Morgan's mother remarried after his father's death, and Morgan adopted the surname Pugh-Morgan. Morgan and his stepfather were close, and Morgan, having never really known his birth-father, calls him 'dad.' His parents were middle-class English, running a pub and supporting Margaret Thatcher. When Morgan was 13, the family could no longer afford to send him to private school so he had to leave behind the classmates he knew. At his new school he was picked on and in true schoolboy style the 'Pugh' in his name was altered to 'Puke.' Morgan dropped the Pugh from his name later on, a move some have attributed to a desire to separate from his middle class roots, but that Morgan himself said was just because Pugh-Morgan was too long for a byline.

As a child, Morgan showed an early affinity for the media. As early as age seven he would sit at the table, devouring the daily newspapers, reading the headlines and discussing the day's events with his parents. By the time he was a teenager, he was writing news articles - he even sold a piece to the Mid Sussex Times and then to Cricket Magazine at the age of 14. "It gave me the real taste of the excitement of a byline," he said of the sale. It's not too much of a surprise, then, that a few years later when the time to consider a career rolled around, Morgan had it set in his mind that he would become the most famous media personality in Britain. He developed a master plan, and opted not to take up an offer to attend Warwick University to study History. That would have kept his master plan on hold for a few years while he completed his education. So instead, he went directly to Harlow College and dived into the formal study of journalism as soon as he could.

Morgan's first formal journalism gig was at the South London News, and then he joined The Sun to write the gossip column entitled "Bizarre." As The Guardian put it, Morgan spent his years at The Sun "...grinning inanely while posing next to a succession of personalities." Morgan wouldn't disagree with The Guardian's characterization of his initial years in media, as he himself told the BBC he made a point of putting himself in the middle of stories, posing for pictures with celebrities, and generally getting his name and face out there for all of Britain to see. The tactic worked. By 1994, at the age of only 29, Morgan secured his place in British media history when Rupert Murdoch named him as editor of News of the World. Piers Morgan was the youngest editor of ever of News of the World, and the youngest editor of a paper in Britain in five decades. The News of the World had the largest circulation of any paper in the country at the time, and the editorship gave Morgan a platform in which to put his hard-charging, oft-controversial journalistic methods on display for a huge population of readers. He even helped breach the previously untouchable barricade of the royal family.

By the summer of 1994, Princess Diana and Prince Charles' marriage was well on its way to its official end, and Morgan and News of the World weren't going to miss out on the opportunity to publish on potentially juicy royal scandals. Morgan had caught wind that James Hewitt, an officer in the British military, wanted to spill the beans about his affair with Princess Diana. With no fear of potential repercussion or for the longheld level of dignity with which the royals had been treated, Morgan reached out to Hewitt and arranged to interview him for a story. He and his associate even bugged the hotel room where the interview took place, ensuring they would have proof of everything that was said. Then, that fall, a book about Prince Charles and his private life was set to be published. While News of the World didn't have any excerpts, The Sunday Times did. Morgan wasn't ready to give up a scoop to another paper, nor was he willing to take 'no' as an answer when he was denied access to information from The Sunday Times. Instead, he directed Rebekah Brooks who had also helped out on the hotel interview, to disguise herself, sneak into The Sunday Times offices, grab a copy, and get it back the News of the World as quickly as possible. She succeeded, and Morgan and News of the World was able to publish huge news about the Diana and Charles drama for the world to see, well before every other paper except The Sunday Times.

If he wanted to be a famous journalist, why did Morgan settle for running gossipy relationship stories? Well, to him, everything was news. "There is a type of snobbish, pompous journalist who thinks that the only news that has any validity is war, famine, pestilence or politics. I don't come from that school."