Piers Morgan

The headline was accompanied by an open letter from Morgan parodying Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war on Germany in 1939.

"It was intended as a joke, but anyone who was offended by it must have taken it seriously, and to those people I say sorry," he said.

Germany won the match and went on to win the championship final at Wembley Stadium, London.

Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan ( O'Meara, born 30 March 1965 ) is an English broadcaster, journalist, writer, and television personality.

Morgan was born in Reigate, Surrey on 30 March 1965, the son of Vincent Eamonn O'Meara, an Irish dentist from County Offaly, and Gabrielle Georgina Sybille (née Oliver), an English woman who raised Morgan as a Catholic.

A few months after his birth, the family moved to Newick, East Sussex.

His father died when Morgan was 11 months old; his mother later married Glynne Pughe-Morgan, a Welsh pub landlord who later worked in the meat distribution business, and he took his stepfather's surname.

He was educated at the independent Cumnor House prep school between the ages of seven and 13, then Chailey School, a comprehensive secondary school in Chailey, followed by Priory School, Lewes, for sixth form.

After nine months at Lloyd's of London, Morgan studied journalism at Harlow College, joining the Surrey and South London Newspaper Group in 1985.

He began his career in 1988 at the tabloid The Sun.

Morgan began to work as a freelance at The Sun in 1988, at this point dropping his double-barrelled name.

In 1994, aged 29, he was appointed editor of the News of the World by Rupert Murdoch, which made him the youngest editor of a British national newspaper in more than half a century.

He told Hunter Davies in December 1994 that he was personally recruited by Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie to work on the newspaper's show business column "Bizarre", his first high-profile post.

Although he was not a fan of pop music, he was considered skilled at self-publicity and became the column's main writer.

"I became the Friend of the Stars, a rampant egomaniac, pictured all the time with famous people – Madonna, Stallone, Bowie, Paul McCartney, hundreds of them. It was shameless, as they didn't know me from Adam", he told Davies.

In January 1994, he became editor of the News of the World after being appointed to the job by Rupert Murdoch.

Initially an acting editor, he was confirmed in the summer, becoming at 29 the youngest national newspaper editor in more than half a century.

In this period, the newspaper led with a series of scoops for which Morgan credited a highly efficient newsdesk and publicist Max Clifford.

From 1995, Morgan edited the Daily Mirror, but was fired in 2004.

Morgan left this post in 1995 shortly after publishing photographs of Catherine Victoria Lockwood, then wife of Charles, Earl Spencer, leaving an addictive disorders clinic in Surrey.

This action ran against the editors' code of conduct, a misdemeanour for which the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against Morgan.

Murdoch was reported as having said that "the boy went too far" and publicly distanced himself from the story.

Fearful of a privacy law action if he had not criticised one of his employees, Murdoch is said to have apologised to Morgan in private.

The incident was reported to have contributed to Morgan's decision to leave for the Daily Mirror editorship.

Morgan's autobiography The Insider states that he left the News of the World for the Mirror of his own choice.

It asserts he was an admirer of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for most of her period of office, making the appointment surprising as the Mirror is a Labour-supporting title.

As editor of the Daily Mirror, Morgan apologised on television for the headline (rendered in upper case) "Achtung Surrender! For You Fritz Ze Euro Championship Is Over" on 25 June 1996, a day before England met Germany in a semi-final of the Euro '96 football championships.

He was the editorial director of First News from 2006 to 2007.

In 2008, Morgan won The Celebrity Apprentice US, appearing with future US president Donald Trump.

Since 2022, he has been a presenter for TalkTV on the programme Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Morgan was the editor of the Daily Mirror during the period in which the paper was implicated in the phone hacking scandal.

As a television presenter, Morgan hosted the ITV talk show Piers Morgan's Life Stories (2009–2020) and the CNN talk show Piers Morgan Live (2011–2014).

In 2011, Morgan denied having ever hacked a phone and stated that he had not, "to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone".

The following year, he was criticised in the findings of the Leveson Inquiry by chair Brian Leveson, who stated that comments made in Morgan's testimony about phone hacking were "utterly unpersuasive" and "that he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it".

The judge in a 2023 court case against Mirror Group Newspapers found truthful evidence that Morgan knew about private phone hacking from a reporter, shared a method of phone hacking with a media professional while being questioned about a reporting scoop, and that Morgan played another's private phone message in the newsroom he had received from another tabloid editor.

Morgan's outspoken views and controversial comments on Good Morning Britain have led Ofcom to adjudicate on multiple occasions.

In March 2021, Morgan left the programme with immediate effect, following his criticism of the Oprah with Meghan and Harry interview.

Ofcom received over 57,000 complaints from viewers, including a complaint from Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, herself; Morgan was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing by Ofcom.

In 2014, Morgan became the first editor-at-large of the MailOnline website's US operation.

He co-presented the ITV Breakfast programme Good Morning Britain with Susanna Reid (2015–2021), and has also been a judge on the talent shows America's Got Talent (2006–2011) and Britain's Got Talent (2007–2010).