‘Mr Morgan,’ said the faux-regal voice at the end of the line, ‘this is Earl Spencer. I’ve got you now, you bastard.’ Suffice it to say, this call didn’t happen last week after the alleged ‘historian’ was forced to publicly apologise for publishing a lie about me in his new book. (He accused me of being Mirror editor in 1993 when it published gym photos of Princess Diana in a notorious invasion of her privacy that cost £1 million in damages – but I didn’t join the Mirror until 1995.)
However, the irony of what that call was about isn’t lost on me, 31 years later. I was editor of the News of the World at the time, and one of Spencer’s friends passed us a letter from him revealing his plans to leave his ailing wife Victoria and take their kids to America, where he’d be a TV reporter. Spencer waited until our first edition dropped with the scoop before calling to inform me it was a hoax. ‘That letter was all made up,’ he chortled jubilantly. ‘I suspected who your source was, so I wrote it to him knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist passing it on to you. And it’s all rubbish. Ha! What are you going to do now then, eh? Ha, ha!’ ‘Why didn’t you tell us before we printed the paper?’ I replied. ‘Ha! Because if I had, you would’ve pretended I hadn’t caught you out. You’re going to have to admit you’ve printed lies now, aren’t you, and apologise. Enjoy! Ha, ha!’ Like I said, ironic. As I read the Earl’s grovelling apology for printing lies about me, all I could think was: ‘I’ve got you now, you bastard. Ha, ha!’
My unlikely saviour back in 1995 was ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie – who, when I hurriedly called him for advice, observed: ‘That sounds like a disgusting attempt by Earl Spencer to con News of the World readers, using his family to do so.’ We switched headlines to ‘WHAT A CHARLIE – Althorp invents pack of lies about wife and kids to trick NoW readers’ and Spencer swiftly went from victim to villain in the court of public opinion.
I recently attended Kelvin’s 80th birthday party at Hampton Court. It was the Fleet Street equivalent of a Mafia Five Families reunion, only less aesthetically pleasing. The birthday boy’s most famous headlines adorned the tables, though didn’t include my all-time favourite which is still in my parents’ downstairs loo. It was based on a report about the debilitating effect of alcohol on male sexual performance and cautioned: ‘WARNING: DRINK’LL WRINKLE YOUR WINKLE.’
The weird thing about Spencer’s erroneous attack on me in his book, other than how fact-checkers at Penguin didn’t spot it (not least because they also published my bestselling diaries The Insider which covered that period of my career!), is that in 2000 he came to the Mirror for a surprisingly convivial ‘make-up’ lunch, notable for his failure to recognise a famous fellow guest. ‘Many thanks for an interesting and enjoyable lunch,’ he wrote to me afterwards. ‘A varied guest list, the airing of many subjects, and the Mirror’s hospitality all made for a justifiably long session at the table. I feel bad not remembering Carol Vorderman. Still, she looks a lot better now than I can ever remember her looking in Countdown.’ Memory clearly isn’t his strong point.
Talking of lunch, and memory failures, Diana’s former chef Darren McGrady was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying that after I dined with her at Kensington Palace, she told him afterwards I was a ‘jerk’. To set the record straight, I invited her former butler Paul Burrell – who served the meal that McGrady had cooked – onto my Uncensored show and asked if that was true. ‘No!’ he replied. ‘You got on like a house on fire! I don’t want to blow smoke in your direction, but she liked you.’ Now that’s a historian I can trust.
Of course, my Spencer schadenfreude may be short-lived if the apocalyptic warnings of AI killing us all come to pass. In his last TV interview, Professor Stephen Hawking told me AI was the biggest threat to mankind’s survival. ‘The great danger is if we let it self-design, for then it can improve itself rapidly and we may lose control,’ he explained. That was nine years ago. I fear we’ve either reached that point – or are about to.
‘Any news on the knighthood, yet?’ texted Dame Joan Collins. Well, I’m reliably informed our senior royals are as giddy as Lottery winners at seeing Spencer’s vindictive, disingenuous, King-bashing book causing him global humiliation for getting basic facts wrong. My pleasure to serve, Your Majesty.
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