Morgan's dilemma

The 'Daily Mirror' stayed anti-war. Its readers didn't. The editor, Piers Morgan, tells Ian Burrell how the paper has softened its line - but kept its integrity

Hold the front page. It's week three of the second Gulf War and Piers Morgan sits in his office and confesses that he misjudged the mood of the British people and – more importantly – the sympathies of the readers of the Daily Mirror. Taken aback by the violent swing in public support for the Iraqi conflict, he admits that he has taken an editorial decision to remove the Mirror's anti-war stance from the front of the paper.

"We no longer address the anti-war issue on the front page. We just tell the story as it happens," he says. "I felt that we could carry on being pretty aggressively critical on the front page and we caught a bit of a cold to be honest."

After war started, the Mirror stuck determinedly to the pre-conflict style that had seen it brand Tony Blair as the "Prime Monster". The paper pictured civilian casualties and prisoners of war alongside the question: "Still Anti-War? Yes, Bloody Right We Are". But by last Friday, the tone had changed markedly, with a photograph of the face of Saddam Hussein accompanied by the vague question: "What Will He Do?"

Morgan admits he didn't want to water down the Mirror's stance, but he realised he was out of step with his readers. "I personally slightly misjudged the way that you could be attitudinal on the front page in the way that we were, once the war actually started," he says. "A fascinating thing happened, something I have not experienced in 10 years editing papers. I have never seen such a switch in public opinion."

According to an ICM poll last week, 49 per cent of Mirror readers back the campaign in Iraq and only 38 per cent disapprove of it; quite a problem for Britain's most overtly anti-war paper. Still convinced that he correctly gauged the level of public opposition in the build-up to the conflict, Morgan describes as "an interesting lesson learned" the realisation that he had got the tone wrong once the bombs started falling. "It's entirely down to the natural sense in this country – particularly among the tabloid readership – that once a war starts, if we're involved, we must unequivocally support our boys and girls."

It seems extraordinary that Morgan should find himself in this position, coming from a "huge military family", with one army officer for a brother and another for a brother-in-law. But Morgan says that some of his military relatives and contacts are surprisingly liberal. Andy McNab, the former SAS man who is writing for the Mirror, told him that many squaddies were "left-wing". He also helped Morgan to understand that, after the start of hostilities, the paper had "slightly over-egged our anti-war approach". Morgan may have found the lesson "interesting", but his circulation managers probably found the learning experience more painful. They may have looked ruefully at the outpourings of former readers in the letters pages of rival papers like captured prisoners of war. Margaret Duguid from Blackpool wrote to the Daily Express to say: "I bought the Daily Mirror every day. Until, that is, it ran the headline: 'Sickening, but what the hell does America expect when it treats PoWs like this?'"

Morgan admits that the Mirror lost between 1.5 and 2 per cent of its readers during the first week of the war, although he claims they have returned after the change in front-page coverage. Nevertheless, the newspaper has for the first time in its long history dipped below two million in circulation, a significant blow for colleagues trying to generate advertising revenue.

One would have thought it was also a source of embarrassment to the editor (who inherited 2.4 million sales when he took up his post in 1995) – but he appears to see the declining readership as inevitable. Morgan, 38, said: "The Mirror's circulation has declined for 40 years predominantly because it used to be the only working-class paper and therefore people instinctively all bought it." Aside from obvious tabloid rivals, the paper now competes with 24-hour TV and radio, the internet and free papers, he says. "I would say that the rate of decline of the Mirror is significantly less than it used to be and that we've done, in my view, a bloody good job in keeping it where it's been."

He also complains of the marketing muscle of his former employer Rupert Murdoch, enabling The Sun to undercut its rival by 7p in some parts of the country. "It has totally skewed the [circulation] figures and cost them a fortune," he says. But he acknowledges that The Sun, under its new editor, Rebekah Wade, has rediscovered the bold identity it had when he made his name there as a 24-year-old showbiz editor.

This, he says, is not just a way to heap further scorn on Wade's predecessor, David Yelland, with whom he had a long-running and personal spat. He says: "I was no great fan of Yelland, as people know, but I was no great fan of his paper either; he made it terribly self-indulgent and unreadable." Wade, like Morgan a former News of the World editor, is "much more in tune with what her readers want". Morgan says: "You can see a much more aggressive approach, more gung-ho on the war. It's not my cup of tea, but I think for her readership it's bang on."

But the Mirror editor gripes that, in terms of war coverage, he has been given a raw deal by media commentators. While he has to defend himself for "what I think is a fairly consistent line; not hypocritical, quite a brave one," he moans that The Sun has escaped censure for almost ignoring the bombing of an Iraqi market.

He is most critical of the Daily Mail's editorial stance, which he terms "rankly hypocritical". He says: "They were totally opposed to the war until it started, and then they totally swing behind it and say what a great idea it all is. It's purely commercial and it's probably saved them from having some of the slight issues that we've had to confront, but I'd much rather confront them from a position of integrity than from a position of hypocrisy."

But then, Morgan didn't really have that option. He may have a small figurine of Sir Winston Churchill on his desk in Canary Wharf, but after printing up placards for marches by the Stop The War Coalition, he could hardly have redefined himself as a British Bulldog. In the circumstances, toning down the front page and remaining anti-war inside the paper was the best course of damage-limitation. "If the Mirror had suddenly gone gung-ho like The Sun we'd have had even worse problems, because a large body of our readers completely agree with our stance on this. That would have been much more disastrous."