UR TV CAST

He is told to “think very carefully”, because a similar story a few years earlier had driven a man to suicide. “I was a bit taken aback,” he confesses.The account of his long tenure as editor of the Daily Mirror lacks these little insights into everyday life in a tabloid office. Instead, it is an account of the big stories to which the name Piers Morgan is attached, and the gallery of famous people who passed through his life.A thread running through the years is his feud with Cherie Blair, who loathed him. There is also his relationship – almost a love affair – with Princess Diana, who skilfully manipulated him. There are also the famous Piers Morgan blunders, all dutifully recorded.And it must be said that he does not spare himself or indulge in pointless self-justification. After the Mirror’s front page treatment of the Euro 96 championship, with its headline “Achtung! Surrender”, he notes the receipt of a record 956 letters of complaint and that “even Bobby Charlton’s called me thick”.

On 8 June 1995, after another mishap, he records that “I’ve emerged as a complete and utter hypocritical berk” whereas on 10 February 2000, “I emerge as a hypocritical twat”.By 1 April 2003 “we have a problem”, because his decision to turn the Daily Mirror into a campaigning vehicle against the Iraq war has driven away 80,000 readers – and that is before we reach the final disaster of the fake photographs that cost him his job.There are those who believe that Morgan behaved courageously over the war and did not deserve his fate – who would equally condemn his wife-swapping stories and anti-German antics – but for Piers, there seems to be no great moral distinction between one form of journalism and another. There are just ups and downs in a turbulent career.The entry for 13 June 1995 caught my eye. Tony Blair is under attack from Woodrow Wyatt, a renegade ex-Labour MP. “Blair stopped him dead in his tracks, fumbled under his seat and pulled out my framed picture of Woodrow in his old Labour campaigning poster with the caption ‘Woodrow Wyatt says Labour is good for Britain and good for you’,” Piers wrote.Actually, Mr Morgan, that was my poster, and it still hangs on my toilet wall. I told him about it at some party late in 1994 and he asked to borrow it to make a copy. Only now, 10 years later, do I discover what he did with that copy.

When Aaron Lansky’s grandmother emigrated to America, she arrived with “a single cardboard valise packed with all her life’s possessions” – including a photograph of the parents she would never see again. Her older brother met her at Ellis Island, took her to the Manhattan ferry and threw the case overboard “You’re in America now,” he told her. “It’s time to leave the Old Country behind.”

When Aaron Lansky’s grandmother emigrated to America, she arrived with “a single cardboard valise packed with all her life’s possessions” – including a photograph of the parents she would never see again. “It’s time to leave the Old Country behind.”
Jews like the older Lanskys, keen to reinvent themselves as Americans, felt it essential to jettison much of their heritage, and specifically to abandon Yiddish and embrace English. It fell to Aaron, “American through and through”, to (metaphorically) “go back to the harbour to reclaim what was lost”. In 1980, at the age of 23, he boldly decided “to save the world’s Yiddish books”. “When I say I have to believe in a project, what I mean is I have to have a gut feeling It’s almost a physical thing.