Surprise: Piers Morgan wrote a pretty good book

Piers Morgan is something of a ham these days, between talent gigs and his role as US editor-at-large for celebrity photo bucket site the Daily Mail.

Worse, he's dull and predictable. You can practically type his latest Trump fanboy tweet before he does.

But it wasn't always like this.

In 1994, the 29-year-old Morgan was working as a gossip columnist for The Sun when he was personally chosen by News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch to become editor of another tabloid in his stable, the News of the World (shutdown in 2011 over a phone hacking scandal).

The next year, he was poached by publishing group Trinity Mirror to edit the Daily Mirror, a mass-market rival to The Sun that traditionally leaned toward Labour.

At first, everything went to script. Morgan duly fawned over the up-and-coming Tony Blair.

But things started to go to heck after that. 

Murdoch papers endorsed Blair before the 1997 election, helping the PM win back conservative blue collar voters lost during the Thatcher and Major years.

Blair returned the favour, giving The Sun a series of scoops, including the news of his wife's pregnancy in 2000.

Perhaps because he was blocked from his usual inner-circle social angles, perhaps because his brother was in the military, (or, who knows, out of genuine belief), The Mirror under Morgan became increasingly hostile to Blair, culminating in its militant opposition to the second war in Iraq.

Again and again, Morgan cleared the front pages of The Mirror to better pound readers with the latest news about what he saw as a corrupt war.

In May 2004, one of those scoops was a series of photos that purported to show British soldier abusing Iraqi prisoners.

But it soon transpired that Piers had been duped. The photos were actually mocked up in the UK.

Ironically, the broader story was true. It transpired that coalition forces had abused and humiliated prisoners — in the process losing the battle for hearts and minds and contributing to the unrest and grinding civil war that continues to this day.

But that was all in the future, and of no use to Morgan who had become the victim of a conspiracy to discredit him — or perhaps just to make some dollars from his yen for chequebook journalism.

It seems almost rather quaint in these days of almost non-stop fake news among the tabloids, and the President of the US repeating them, but the young editor was forced to walk the plank.

Just months after resigning, he published a memoir called The Insider (Ebury Press, 2005). Today, it's marketed on Amazon for its celebrity gossip, and there is some of that as it covers Morgan's decade at the News of the World and The Mirror. 

But the book's raison d'etre is to reveal the intimate relationship between Tony Blair and the tabloid press.

Yes, the Morgan ego is ever-present and in many places it's self-serving (notably, it skips pretty lightly over the second major scandal of Morgan's editorship, his insider-trading scandal where he was alleged to have taken advantage of an early glimpse of the Mirror's share-tipping column).  

But a lot of it also burns with fury, and political and media junkies will find many of the details fascinating.