Piers Morgan, not Oprah, is the biggest ego on US TV

By Amanda Platell
Last updated at 8:56 AM on 19th January 2011

Piers Morgan has been called many things — fewer than a third of them complimentary — but at least he’s a man of his word.

Seven years ago, when he and I co-presented a political interview show on ­Channel 4, he boasted to me: ‘I’m going to be the next Michael Parkinson.’

Having been recently sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror for running fake pictures of ­British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners and still tainted by the scandal of buying shares in a company that had been tipped by his newspaper, this seemed most unlikely.

Ego clash: The duel was ultimately a cat-and-mouse game. Oprah was the cat, toying with a tenacious mouse who was a little out of his league

But the comment was typical of Morgan’s gargantuan ego. Even the little detail of ­having virtually no experience in TV presenting was never going to get in his way.

While others laughed at such ambition, Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan finally triumphed this week by taking the seat from the legendary Larry King on CNN.

Forget Parky’s old Saturday-night slot. To grab one of the top jobs in American TV with a reported salary of £5.5million, the man has turned himself into a phenomenon in this celebrity-driven age.

As Oprah sold her TV channel, Piers was busy selling Piers

His first guest was Oprah Winfrey, a woman he described with typical hyperbole as ‘the biggest, the ­richest, the most powerful star in the world’.

One couldn’t help but feel that such an accolade was one that 45-year-old Piers would dearly love to claim for himself one day.

However, the duel was ultimately a cat-and-mouse game: Oprah, the cat, toying with a tenacious mouse who was a little out of his league.

But that’s the problem with the modern celebrity interview — with interviewer and interviewee being equally famous, it tends to putrefy into a battle of egos.

Whereas Parkinson always relegated his own self in order to reach the core of his guest and tease out fascinating anecdotes, the idea of downplaying his own ego just doesn’t occur to Piers.

In any case, as the actor Harrison Ford said, interviews on American TV are no longer about ‘the truth’ — they’re simply about ‘selling product’.

Probing: Oprah teased Morgan, saying 'you're gonna make me weep'... But she never did

And boy