For a time after the attacks on the twin towers the readers of the Daily Mirror were, like everyone, in a sombre mood and willing to set aside the latest celebrity and reality-TV gossip in favour of more serious fare on the front page.Morgan became the hero of editors' conferences. Most are stories that cause a ripple but don't sell any more papers. It was a fearless environment," he remembers.Stories he treasures include Lady Buck and the Chief of the Defence Staff; Alan Clark and his coven of mistresses; and Diana and James Hewitt. The scoops earned him the editorship of the Daily Mirror, where the stories ranged from reporter Ryan Parry's undercover investigation into royal security - "extraordinary," says Morgan - to the memoirs of the palace butler Paul Burrell and the first interview with Diana's security man Trevor Rees-Jones.Morgan says: "Looking back on [my time at] the Mirror, of the 20 biggest tabloid stories of the past decade, the Mirror probably had 15 of them. Only a few rare scoops, such as the Paul Burrell story, have the power to boost sales, and even then the effect soon evaporates.Ironically, it was the most serious story of recent times - September 11 - that seems to have lured Morgan into what became a series of misjudgements of the public mood.

The extraordinary breakthrough came just five years later when, at the age of 28, he was offered the editorship of the News of the World.He has always assumed that it was MacKenzie who mentioned his name to Murdoch, and a number of exploratory dinners with the News Corp chairman followed "I hadn't edited a paper bag I was editing a pop column. But a lot of courage comes out of innocence, and you are not bothered about much. It's not best results, it's not a university degree, it's not anything. If they can come into my office and charm me, they can charm anyone."Clearly he was a young man with considerable charm and a plausible manner, who brought in exclusive stories and came to the attention of Kelvin MacKenzie when he was appointed to run the Bizarre pop column on The Sun when he was 23. Foot-in-the-door merchants, he believes, belong firmly in the movies "The number one thing I look for in any journalist is charm. How dare you patronise me like that," the young lady said.For Morgan, this was "a brilliant insight" into the need to avoid making assumptions about people and the importance of empathising with them, and the absolute necessity for journalists to have charm.

The 19-year-old Morgan suggested that her life must have been really terrible. "What are talking about? How often do you get your leg over every week? I love it, and I love the nice fur coat and the nice flat. Morgan believes he has had more one-to-one sessions with Blair than any other journalist - up to 10 times a year. "It would be pompous to say it is historical, but it is certainly an interesting insight into what went on and how he changed and Gordon Brown and the other cabinet ministers rose and changed," he says.Piers Morgan was a funny, precocious child who loved newspapers from the age of six or seven and never wanted to be anything other than a journalist. When he started on the Streatham and Tooting News in south London, he almost immediately found himself covering the Brixton riots.He also remembers interviewing a young prostitute after a routine court case.

Morgan says he had an "amazing" degree of contact with the princess, partly because he was younger than most national editors, and partly because "she was a sucker for a charming boy from the villages". This included a long lunch with the princess and Prince William, at which no topic was off limits. Morgan says that he has unearthed eight pages of detailed notes of this "astonishing" meeting.He also became a national editor at the time that Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. He has nearly finished a memoir, written in diary form, of his 11 years as a national newspaper editor - two years in charge of the News of the World, and then nearly a decade editing the Daily Mirror.He will not confirm that the advance for the book is around £1m but, in the best traditions of the tabloid trade, Morgan is promising revelations on everyone from Diana, Princess of Wales to the Prime Minister. He explains that he never kept a diary in the Alan Clark way, sitting down to write 2,000 words every night. What he did do was keep detailed notes of all the private meetings he had with powerful, famous and notorious people, and there are also many boxes containing cuttings, letters and other items he found interesting.Also in the best tabloid tradition, there will be the sound of grinding axes and old scores being settled.