Piers Morgan plumbs the depths of shallowness

WHAT makes a middle-aged father of four children truly happy? Time with the kids? A relaxing stroll with his wife? Seeing the new baby take its first step? Nah. Piers Morgan declared in a column two weeks ago: "I'm never happier than when bombing down Sunset Boulevard from my Beverly Hills home in my Aston Martin and Prada shades." This, from a man of 48. Morgan plumbs extraordinary depths of shallowness. His weekly dispatches from LA are an endless list of celebrities he's met, swanky restaurants he's dined in and beautiful women he has allegedly charmed. Now it's falling apart. Morgan's chat show with CNN is to be axed amid dismal ratings. For a man who simply adores being among the rich and famous, the future looks rather dull. I never thought I'd write this but I feel sorry for Piers Morgan.

STRANGELY enough, Morgan's chief tormentor, Jeremy Clarkson, is a very similar sort of person. They are both "phwoar!" men. At some stage in life most people, and especially hard-nosed media people, grow out of the bedazzled stage. They come to realise that a car is a device for getting from A to B and that celebrities are just like ordinary people, only richer and often more insecure. Not so the "phwoar!" men. Like 10-year-olds with a new Lego set, their wide-eyed excitement goes on and on. Clarkson has been going "phwoar!" at cars for at least 30 years and Morgan goes "phwoar!" at Tinseltown. When there's nothing around to go "phwoar!" at, they throw insults, and occasionally punches, at each other. Eternal children.

SOMETHING about Morgan and Clarkson puts me in mind of hedgehogs. We had a reminder this week of why these endearing little chaps (the hedgehogs, that is) have become so rare. Our new gravel drive, laid only a few days ago, has been turned into a lunar landscape of craters by badgers looking for grubs. The badgers moved into the nearest wood at about the time we moved into Chateau Rhodes, 30 years ago this summer. As the badgers have prospered, the crunchy, delicious hedgehogs have vanished.

INCIDENTALLY, those of us who stay put in our houses are regarded by some economists as cheats. A few years ago a think-tank suggested that, because people who move house regularly pay stamp duty, those who do not are somehow evading stamp duty. They seriously suggested a "stay put" tax. The idea was roundly rejected but I bet it's still in a drawer, somewhere in Whitehall, waiting . . .

WHY did the National Council for Civil Liberties get into bed, so to speak, with the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1970s? Possibly because an early meeting of PIE was picketed by the extreme-Right wing National Front. On the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, if the NF were against PIE then NCCL should support it. And thus was laid a toxic egg, to hatch into a very smelly mess for Harriet Harman 40 years later.

IF THE Northern Ireland peace process makes it impossible to try a man accused of mass murder, so be it. The decision not to bring John Downey to trial may be the result of a cock-up by police but it is also part of the process of forgiving and forgetting. The price we pay for an end to violence is the heartbreak and dismay of the bereaved as they see the alleged killers of their loved ones go free. But it must be an equal process. If Downey is not to be put on trial for the murder of four soldiers in the 1982 Hyde Park bombings, then let us have no more nonsense about pursuing the soldiers involved in Bloody Sunday or the cops accused of killing IRA members and supporters. It must all end, right here, right now.