Piers Morgan: on being hated and the art of zen

Following Piers Morgan's visit to his old manor as guest editor of the Daily Mirror this week, the paper has today published Brian Reade's interview with his former boss. "The last time I saw Piers Morgan in Canary Wharf he was pale, drawn and stressed, a target of national loathing and soon to be unemployed," says Reade. How times have changed, he adds. "Except, of course, for the loathing." Boom boom! And just in case you missed it, Reade reminds readers of what his fellow hacks have called Morgan: "A vulgar overblown monstrosity" and "a self-consciously odious celebrity who trades on his widely accepted repugnance to infuriatingly lucrative effect". Do the harsh words hurt, he asks Morgan? "Does anyone like waking up and being called a fat, talentless, useless git? Not really," says the former Mirror boss. "You pretend you don't mind, but underneath it all you want to kill the bastards ... I take a huge deep breath, let it out, and it just fades away. It takes 10 seconds. Then it's gone." Except, Monkey remembers, when it was News of the World TV critic Ian Hyland slinging the mud, in which case Morgan could never resist slinging some straight back.