The Herald - The Herald Magazine
And then there was paranoia
at certain debates and think, ‘That person didn’t really have enough tools to compete’. That’s never a good look, and I’ve tried to evolve.”
When you do look back on his debates – and boy, are there a lot of them – what stands out most is his relentless energy. Whether sparring on social media or powering through crack-of-dawn production meetings, Morgan lives at a mile a minute, and his commitment and ability are hard to question.
“I think every journalist is exhausted this year,” he says, “but there’s no doubt 2020 is exhilarating from a news point of view. If news is your trade, you’ll never have a bigger story than this.”
Morgan was born in East Sussex in 1965, and became the youngest UK newspaper editor when he took over at the News of the World aged 28. He then spent nine years helming the Daily Mirror, winning Newspaper of the Year in 2001, but was sacked three years later.
Victory in America’s The Celebrity Apprentice brought a much-debated friendship with Donald Trump, which went on to include TV interviews, fulsome praise, searing criticism, and finally Trump unfollowing Morgan on Twitter. “I don’t see myself as a political animal,” he says, “I see myself as a journalist, and despite being a friend of his, I’ve always tried to be fairminded.”
His American adventure continued with a CNN talk show, before he returned to the UK to host Good Morning Britain. “I like the British media best,” he says, “the Americans think they have the best media in the world, but they think they have the best everything in the world. Coming back has been fantastic. I’ve loved breakfast TV more than I ever thought I would.”
Given his complaints about the present, Morgan is remarkably positive about the future. “Things will get worse before they get better, but I’m an eternal optimist. I say to people ‘I know it’s tough, but this will be over, and when it is, head to your favourite pub, have a curry, drink 10 pints and toast freedom.”
If he has any thoughts in the meantime, he’ll let you know.
Wake Up: Why The World Has Gone Nuts by Piers Morgan, Harper Collins, £20
ONE BY ONE Ruth Ware
(Harvill Secker, £12.99)
REVIEW BY SUSAN SWARBRICK
RUTH Ware has a knack for nailing the creeping fear and paranoia that builds in eerie, isolated locations. She weaves her gripping thrillers in secluded forests, remote country houses and claustrophobic cruise ship cabins. It’s a winning formula.
Her 2019 book, The Turn Of The Key, about a live-in nanny and four children, was a well-received update of Henry James’s 1898 gothic suspense and horror novella, The Turn Of The Screw, pitched at a modern audience. Ware’s latest novel, One By One, continues in that vein with a deftly written homage and contemporary twist on Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, And Then There Were None.
The book opens with a chilling news report: a deadly avalanche, a series of grisly deaths and the authorities blamed for not stepping in sooner. As has become her modus operandi, Ware hooks the reader into a glamorous world that glitters with danger. In the case of One By One, if you like seeing selfaggrandising hipsters being killed off, then you have come to the right place.
Things begin in typically idyllic fashion as an eclectic group of guests arrive at a swish Alpine chalet in the exclusive French ski resort of Saint Antoine for their corporate retreat.
They are the founders, shareholders and senior employees of a social media music app called Snoop – a cross between Facebook and Spotify – which allows people to listen to the same tracks as any fellow users they are “snooping” on.
As you might expect, the Snoop mob are a gratingly ridiculous and preening bunch with laugh-out-loud job titles that include “head of beans”, “chief nerd”, “friends tsar”, “head of cool” and “law man” (a tongue-in-cheek nod to some wellknown tech start-ups).
The reason for their pow-wow is to decide whether to go ahead with a billion-dollar dotcom buyout that could make them rich, although not without some sacrifices. The clock is ticking on the offer and with the group split about what to do, tensions run high.
Two opposing camps form under co-founders Topher St Clair-Bridges and Eva van den Berg, who each have starkly different visions for the company’s future. At loggerheads, the team hits the ski slopes to blow off steam. Not all of them make it back from an ill-advised decision to tackle a treacherous black run. Moments later their cabin is hit by an avalanche. Then members of the group start getting picked off one by one.
Their picturesque, snowy retreat morphs from a welcome escape to an oppressive prison as the temperature drops, mobile phone reception is cut off, food begins to dwindle and the mountain rescue fail to arrive. As various protagonists set off to find help, things begin to unravel.
Ware tells the story from two perspectives. There’s chalet girl Erin, whose cool, collected demeanour hides a murky past, and Liz, a former Snoop employee who never fitted in with the gang’s effortlessly cool and affluent backgrounds, yet with a small but crucial share in the company, finds herself a pawn in the takeover bid.
A novel’s resonance novel is often down to the time and place that a reader consumes it. As we all live under the omnipresent threat of lockdown, escapism to another kind of suffocating isolation and terror proves curiously uplifting.
One By One is a galloping read packed with dark secrets and all the page-turning prowess you would hope for from a psychological thriller and murder mystery.
Even if you do have an inkling of the killer’s identity early on, the twisting plot is such that you will still be left guessing who will survive and who will meet an unfortunate end. The climax of a perilous, high-speed cat-and-mouse chase through the snow will make you gasp.