PIERS MORGAN: “WE GOT IT WRONG”

The morning after Germany beat Croatia to set up a semi-final against England, the Daily Mirror ran their ‘Achtung! Surrender’ front page, declaring: ‘For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over’. Piers Morgan was the Mirror’s editor and said at the time it was “a joke that people didn’t get, that’s all”. Today, he tells FFT he made a poor decision

“I cringe now when I look back at the ‘Achtung! Surrender’ front page, and ‘We’re going to give you Edam good thrashing’ before we played the Dutch – although we did. We were very jingoistic. It was towards the end of that period when tabloids were doing that, and you’d have ’Allo ’Allo and Dad’s Army on TV.

“On the day of the ‘Achtung! Surrender’ front page, we declared football war on Germany and had a tank that was going to roll into the offices of Bild newspaper, the tabloid in Berlin. We also had a Spitfire that was going to dive-bomb the German training ground and drop the front page on their players as they trained. Both plans were aborted. The Spitfire was aborted on the runway because we’d had a thousand complaints by 9am, and realised that this may not be a good idea.

“The reaction did surprise me, though, because I had grown up working on Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun when that sort of thing was par for the course and was all seen to be good tabloid fun. But it was a wake-up call, and the moment when the press got a message of ‘Cut out the xenophobia and jingoism, because that kind of humour is done’ – and quite rightly.

“Things are very different these days. You wouldn’t see any headlines like that any more, and rightly so. We’ve all moved on and, dare I say, grown up a little bit.”