Have I got dirt on you

The Daily Mirror is digging for salacious material on Ian Hislop – and the Private Eye editor is hardly going to take it lying down. David Lister previews the biggest media scrap of the year so far. Seconds out...

What's eating the editor of the Daily Mirror? Or as he might put it, "What's up with YOU, Mr Morgan. Yes, YOU. What have you REALLY got against Ian Hislop?

Even readers of the new, campaigning, Daily Mirror must be a little surprised at the current target of their paper's venom. It's that cheery chappie on Have I Got News For You, to the large constituency of Mirror readers, and the editor of Private Eye to a much smaller constituency.

An even smaller constituency of mutual acquaintances might be more surprised still. Piers Morgan and Ian Hislop used to send their children to the same school. True, Morgan had a sticky experience on Have I Got News For You some time back, but the Mirror editor, who is not averse to a jape, would hardly hold a grudge for so long against someone he might one day be batting with in the parents' cricket match.

So, what can explain this recent teaser in the Daily Mirror? "He's got the weakest handshake in showbusiness and a sense of humour to match. Ian Hislop is also the man who just loves to dish the dirt on everyone else, thrills in knocking public figures off their perches – and salivates at the misery of others. Even his best friends don't escape his lofty moralising and condemnation – as poor coke-snorting, hooker-loving Angus Deayton discovered.

"Well today the Daily Mirror turns the tables on the potato-headed Have I Got News For You presenter. Because we've got a sneaky suspicion he is not quite the squeaky clean, saint-like choirboy he feigns to be. Nobody could really be THAT boring, could they?"

That mixture of humour and personal invective has the touch of Morgan, as does the ensuing exhortation to Mirror readers: "Have YOU got any dirt on the moon-faced midget? Have YOU had a bitter experience at his gnome-like hands? Have YOU got any distressing photographs Ian might prefer not to see reach a wider audience? Did YOU, God forbid, ever kiss him? Or worse... Perhaps YOU went to school with Ian at Ardingly College, Sussex, or Magdalen College, Oxford. Or YOU may have picked up priceless gossip on the sanctimonious little toad.

"We are not too bothered about how accurate the information is – after all, Ian has never been too worried about the truth getting in the way of a good story in his own tawdry rag – but there must be a semblance of truth to it. The only requirement is that it must be salacious enough to really, REALLY make him squirm."

Morgan said yesterday: "He is like the classic, weak handshake playground bully. It's true that I don't like him. I think he is a poisonous little twerp. But this is just a bit of fun, in fact a huge amount of fun. It seems to me a little odd that the guy who runs the best-known satirical magazine and the best-known satirical TV show can't take being the target himself."

Others believe that it is not just a bit of fun, that Hislop harping on about Morgan's marital problems in Private Eye have infuriated the Mirror editor. Yesterday the Private Eye editor was not commenting. One colleague said that at Private Eye they had no doubt this was true. Morgan denies it. "I have been in virtually every issue of Private Eye for the last 10 years," he says, "and I cut out the pieces and stick them on my loo wall."

Morgan also says that readers have responded enthusiastically with stories about Hislop, and when those stories are checked out, they will be published in a series of articles. That there is enough for a series might make even Hislop gulp.

The hunt for Hislop indiscretion is an enjoyable diversion for the Mirror from a price war that seemed to take an important twist last week, when the paper returned from the cut-price 20p to the full 32p in half the country, though remaining at 20p in London and other selected regions.

David Yelland, editor of the Sun, crowed: "They've surrendered very, very early."

Morgan, not unnaturally, disputes this, saying the plan was always to divide the country in two after an initial national pricing burst. He believes that News International is currently foxed by Trinity Mirror's strategy and he is amazed that some commentators thought the Mirror was taken by surprise by the Sun's tit-for-tat price cut. "Do they really think that I as a former Murdoch editor didn't know what his reaction would be?" Certainly, taking on Murdoch in a price war is folly. But Morgan is adamant that even now this is not the strategy.

What impressed him and the Trinity Mirror management was a report by the consultants McKinsey. They did not attempt to make any judgements on the paper's editorial content, but looked at "the science of how the paper lost readers". The statistics were interesting. Some 330,000 readers each year died for a start. And of the survivors, too many failed to take the paper every day. The price cut was to woo them to become more regular readers, and the strategy has added 180,000 a day, 40,000 more than Trinity Mirror anticipated.

Having said that, it's costing Trinity Mirror £20m, and such inroads into the budget cannot continue indefinitely. But they are rubbishing claims that they are already retreating. Morgan says: "Trinity Mirror are not an outrageously risk-taking business. The idea that they would go into something like this and start panicking after four weeks is ridiculous."

It is true that the Mirror strategy needs to be watched for longer before meaningful judgements can be made. It is also true that a strategy to woo Mirror readers into six-day-a-week loyalty does not take place in isolation. Those same readers are inevitably vulnerable to a cut-price Sun. And it is still too early to know how committed they are to Morgan's more serious agenda, more expensive as it is in half the country. Rupert Murdoch is a much trickier customer than Ian Hislop, who must know that his comeuppance will cause no distress among his many victims in Fleet Street.

As Angus Deayton is discovering, and as Hislop will discover if Morgan has his way, there's no shortage of people ready to unmask a satirist with a secret.