Piers Morgan seeks a pretty penny for his thoughts
Just when you thought the ebullient Piers Morgan had gone unnaturally quiet, the swashbuckling former Editor of the Daily Mirror has employed a literary agent to secure a deal for his memoirs.
Morgan has appointed the highly regarded Eugenie Furniss from William Morris to represent him at big publishing houses. Furniss, who represents Ethan Hawke of Lord of the Rings fame, was reluctant to discuss her new client. “It is true that I have been engaged by Piers Morgan, but it is very early days. No deal has been done,” she said.
Morgan, still in negotiation with Trinity Mirror over a £1 million payoff, declined, in his usual colourful terms, to speak to me.
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Not only is he considering writing his memoirs, based on the extensive diaries he kept in his ten years as Editor of the red top, he is also close to finishing a book with Methuen on Arsenal’s all-conquering season in the Premier League. Morgan, whose greatest literary triumph to date is a seminal work on the boy band Take That, has dozens of stories to embarrass the great and good of the showbusiness and political world.
One of his many qualities as an editor, alongside his remarkable indefatigability, was his ability to be perfectly at ease across the various milieux that a tabloid editor inhabits. His carefully manufactured blokish charm would be employed at showbiz parties, but his brand of shamelessly populist rhetoric was used to great effect on the Today programme, and even, on the rare occasions when he was not on TV, in the Mirror newsroom.
Morgan may yet get a bigger payoff than the £1 million that has been reported. Since he was dismissed the company’s stock market value has risen sharply, which has done wonders for his share options.