FRIDAY, MARCH 1
I’ve always wanted to be a historically important Principle, spoken of in the same hallowed terms as John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, Aristotle’s Mean Principle or David Hume’s Principle Of Evidence.
Finally, it’s happened.
At the Contagious Live marketing conference in London, delegates were introduced to the ‘Morgan Principle’, which was described as: ‘The theory that the more you p*** off Piers Morgan, the more PR you get. The infamous Greggs vegan sausage roll is the perfect example of it.’
For the past decade, I’ve tried to persuade Sir Michael ‘Parky’ Parkinson to do my Life Stories show, but he has always resolutely declined. Then, a few weeks ago, I plied him with fine wine at my favourite restaurant – Cambio de Tercio in Chelsea – and he finally crumbled
I now envisage a whole new career path where I simply sit at home and people pay me vast sums of money to attack their brands.
Happy days!
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6
Gender identity is a hideously complicated issue. But until today I never realised just HOW hideously complicated.
On Good Morning Britain, Susanna Reid and I interviewed a Florida parent named Ari Dennis. They (that is the pronoun we had to use for Dennis as ‘they’ identify as non-binary gender-fluid) live with two other transgender people, one of whom is ‘their’ spouse.
‘They’ have two children – Hazel, eight, and a one-year-old ‘theyby’ (gender-neutral for baby) currently named Sparrow.
Sparrow, whose birth sex has been kept secret, is being brought up with no known gender so that ‘they’ can self-identify ‘their’ gender whenever they choose.
Hazel was initially raised as a girl and had a different birth name, but decided at four to self-identify as non-binary gender-fluid and now also prefers to be called ‘they’.
When I suggested to Dennis that ‘they’ were being dangerously deluded and abrogating normal parental responsibility, ‘they’ snapped that I was being ‘childist’.
This was a new one on me, so I asked for clarification. ‘Childism,’ they replied, ‘is the normalisation of children because they’re young, assuming they can’t have opinions or ideas and denying them their identity and autonomy.’
‘So,’ I responded, ‘if a three-year-old child decides “I’m no longer a boy or girl, I’m no longer going to be called Bob, I want to be called Doris” and I say no, then I’m guilty of childism?’
‘Potentially,’ they answered.
I don’t know where to start with this, other than to say I hereby self-identify as a deeply bemused human being.
THURSDAY, MARCH 7
For the past decade, I’ve tried to persuade Sir Michael ‘Parky’ Parkinson to do my Life Stories show, but he has always resolutely declined.
Then, a few weeks ago, I plied him with fine wine at my favourite restaurant – Cambio de Tercio in Chelsea – and he finally crumbled.
Today, I spent more than three hours grilling one of my personal heroes about his remarkable life, and he turned out to be the perfect interviewee – funny, sharp, revealing, provocative and poignant.
He also gave me the most unexpectedly emotion-charged moment I have experienced from any of my 90 previous guests.
‘You’ll never get to me to cry,’ vowed the notoriously tough and thick-skinned Yorkshireman before we started.
Then, halfway through the show, he suddenly broke down and wept uncontrollably for nearly a minute.
I won’t say what it was about until nearer the time the show airs later this spring. But I will say that it came out of nowhere and nearly moved me to tears too.
Afterwards, Parky apologised to me for ‘losing it’. But I told him he had absolutely nothing to apologise for.
Life Stories takes people back to places and people that they have often rarely ever discussed in public.
It would be more surprising to me if the guests DIDN’T get emotional.
What Parky’s tears told me is what has mattered most to him in his life, and it’s definitely not having once being attacked by Emu.
SUNDAY, MARCH 10
England football star Raheem Sterling and I haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, not least over his contentious – and in my view unfounded – claim that the British media is racist towards black footballers.
But he scored a brilliant hat-trick for Manchester City today, prompting me to tweet: ‘Can’t be anyone playing better football in the Premier League than Raheem Sterling? Incredible how much he has grown under Pep Guardiola, on and off the pitch. And admirable.’
‘Wow Piers,’ he replied. ‘Thx, I appreciate. Did someone hack your account?’
Even his jokes have improved.
MONDAY, MARCH 11
Les Dennis, I learned this week, has been harbouring a deep-seated grudge against me for the past 17 years. It apparently goes back to when he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2002 and suffered what he himself later referred to as an ‘emotional meltdown’ in front of millions of viewers. It was a shambolic, toe-curling, tearful performance, driven by the ongoing breakdown of his marriage to my now good friend Amanda Holden.
In a particularly excruciating moment, Les even ended up sobbing away to a bunch of chickens. Hence the Daily Mirror, of which I was editor at the time, running a headline about him asking: ‘IS THIS THE MOST PATHETIC MAN IN BRITAIN?’
It seemed a perfectly reasonable question to pose given how pathetic Les was actually being, and the fact he was voluntarily doing it on live reality television.
But he was so incensed by it that unbeknown to me, he’s refused to appear with me on TV ever since. ‘I won’t go on Life Stories,’ he told comedian Richard Herring for his podcast. ‘And I’ll go on Good Morning Britain on a Thursday when Ben Shephard’s there.’
Not any more you won’t, sunshine. You’re banned from GMB for as long as I’m there.
As for Life Stories, no offence – but I’d rather do Amanda.
TUESDAY, MARCH 12
Yesterday’s GMB was the highest-rated in our show’s history. Turns out that people really like choking on their cornflakes.