Piers pressure

WHEN controversial Mirror editor Piers Morgan was sacked over hoax pictures depicting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, he had two options: sink without a trace or swim like his life depended on it.

True to form he dived headlong into the murky world of celebrity, landed his dream job as a judge on Simon Cowell's number one US show, America's Got Talent, and recently published his second gossip-laden book, Don't You Know Who I Am? to the horror of some of the world's most famous faces.

''I don't pretend to be any great literary genius, I just try to provide knock-about entertaining diaries - people tend to read my books very quickly, rather like they used to read my papers,'' Piers says.

Looking tanned and healthy after a quick trip across the pond to watch the Cricket World Cup in Antigua, Piers, 42, is on sparkling form and perceptibly glows from his recent Stateside success.

''Simon (Cowell) thinks he's incredibly good looking - never underestimate how attractive he finds himself,'' he says when quizzed for probably the umpteenth time about Cowell's legions of smitten female fans.

''I'm a bit like that too,'' he admits with a smirk, ''but probably in normal life I don't think either of us would have had any women ever looking at us at all - the power of television can be an extraordinary thing.

''So I looked at Simon and thought, well, if he can make himself globally desirable to women by being Mr Nasty on TV, then I've definitely got a better chance - apart from anything else I'm about a foot taller than him.''

On a more serious note, Piers quickly adds that he has a huge amount of respect for Cowell's honest, straightforward attitude, and the fact that he takes the fickle world of celebrity with a very large pinch of salt.

''What you see is what you get with Simon - there's no dark side to him. He knows that there's a whole world out there full of people working hard while he's being paid hundreds of millions of dollars just for giving his opinion, but I was struck by how normal he was,'' he says.

Now a newly ordained celebrity, Piers seems to have made the move from 'Boy Morgan', Fleet Street's youngest ever tabloid newspaper editor, to Cowell's Stateside sidekick with remarkable ease.

''Over here I'm quite used to people spitting at me in the street,'' he says, ''but over there I could start with a clean slate rather than being the pantomime villain that I am in the UK.

''You don't edit a tabloid paper for as long as I did and not end up with that tag, and nobody goes into the modern media without expecting to get their arse kicked, but over there the Americans love their celebrities and let's face it, if someone like Heather Mills can do well over there, so can anyone.''

But Piers is a true Brit at heart, and having three young sons who live with his ex-wife Marion, he insists he'd never make a permanent move to America. ''I've got my three boys here so I'd never live there as I'd miss them too much, and anyway, I'm far too British, and I like country pubs, cricket and Arsenal too much to ever leave,'' he says, adding that despite his reviled red-top editor image, he's never once had a hard time from the British public. ''It's always the media - journalists I've fired, columnists I've sacked, people I've sued, that sort of thing,'' he says.

Although he keeps his hack's hand in with a monthly celebrity interview in GQ magazine and a column for The Mail On Sunday, it's pretty clear that Piers isn't exactly pining for his old job in Canary Wharf.

''To be honest, I miss some of the journalists I worked with but not the job, and I do feel that I had the best years in terms of news stories anyway.

''I had Blair starting off in power, the Diana years, and 9/11, so I had some of the biggest stories of my lifetime, won all the awards, dropped all the clangers, and got everything I wanted to do ticked off,'' he says.

And this undeniable air of contentment with life isn't the only change in Piers these days. Once famously scathing about the astronomical rise of talentless celebrities and reality TV stars, he even admits he may have been wrong on that score.

''I definitely understand the power of personality a lot more than I used to. I used to feel very strongly that you had to have a really great talent to be famous, but now I understand that that's not necessarily true,'' he says. ''I can honestly see why the Jades and Jordans do so well because people just get drawn to their very strong personalities - both good and bad.''

Currently filming the British version of Cowell's US show with Ant and Dec, Britain's Got Talent, it's a miracle Piers has any time for a personal life, but he has been dating Daily Telegraph diary columnist and author, Celia Walden, for the past year.

In fact, so smitten is he that on a recent trip to LA he bumped into Celia's favourite singer Stevie Wonder and asked him to propose to her on his behalf.

''Well, I met Stevie Wonder and just said 'Look, my girlfriend's your biggest fan and at some stage I might need your help, so if you can just put that on tape by Stevie command then I might well be able to use that one day','' Piers admits.

''Of course, The Daily Mail missed out the words 'one day' when they printed that bit of the book so it sounded like an immediate proposal and Celia immediately reacted by saying 'Don't be so ridiculous!'

* Don't You Know Who I Am?: Insider Diaries Of Fame, Power And Naked Ambition, by Piers Morgan (Ebury Press, 17.99).