Piers Morgan Lectures Charles Spencer on Accuracy While His Own Memoir Has Documented Date Errors

Piers Morgan has spent the past 24 hours treating one factual error in Charles Spencer’s Swan Song: Diana, My Sister as if he has personally discovered the collapse of historical scholarship.

There is just one rather awkward problem with this crusade for perfect chronology: Piers Morgan’s own memoir contains some spectacular problems with chronology.

Let’s start with Charles Spencer, because he did get something wrong.

In Swan Song, Spencer describes personally contacting tabloid editors to tell them they were not welcome at Princess Diana’s funeral. He says Morgan was “surly and annoyed” during their conversation, and then connects that reaction to intrusive photographs of Diana exercising at a gym that had been published by the Mirror group.

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The dates did not work. The gym photographs appeared in the Sunday Mirror on November 7, 1993. Morgan did not become editor of the Daily Mirror until October 1995 and was working for The Sun when those photographs appeared. Morgan quite correctly pointed out the error.  

And then something extraordinary happened in British public life: somebody admitted he had made a mistake.

Spencer issued a statement saying he had made an “incorrect assumption,” stressed that accuracy matters to him as a historian and apologised to Morgan. He did not, however, retract his account of their telephone conversation. His statement maintains that Morgan was “surly and annoyed” when told not to attend Diana’s funeral. Morgan disputes that characterisation and says he was respectful.  

Morgan nevertheless says he is continuing legal action against Spencer and Penguin Random House, demanding that the disputed material be removed and that damages be paid to the King’s Trust.  

Asked what he remembered about the phone call with Earl Spencer, Morgan denied Spencer’s description of his behaviour.

“It’s an absolute lie to say that I was surly. I could not have been more respectful,” he said.

Morgan was also asked whether his aggressive response to Spencer’s book was connected in any way to his long-running criticism of Prince Harry and Meghan Sussex. He dismissed the suggestion outright.

“Irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant,” Morgan replied. Fine. Morgan is entitled to challenge an inaccurate claim about himself.

Morgan might want to climb down from the lectern before preaching about historical accuracy. Spencer corrected an honest mistake; Morgan has made similar dating errors himself, yet he is turning this one into a full media tour.

Piers Morgan’s Very Flexible Calendar

Morgan published The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade in 2005. Despite the “diaries” branding, Morgan himself explained that he had not spent those years writing a traditional nightly journal. He reconstructed the book from contemporaneous notes, appointment diaries, messages, emails, cuttings and other records after his literary agent suggested putting his memoir into diary form. Contemporary reviewers immediately noticed that this method had produced some chronological peculiarities.  

One is almost too perfect for the present controversy. Morgan’s reconstructed chronology has also been criticised for placing a Blair meeting at Downing Street before Labour took office in May 1997. There was a slight problem. Tony Blair was not prime minister on March 26, 1997. John Major was.

The general election took place on May 1, and Blair entered Downing Street on May 2. In other words, Morgan’s supposedly date-specific account placed Blair inside No. 10 more than a month before he actually became prime minister. The error has been noted for years by journalists examining the reliability of The Insider.  

Awkward. And it was not the only one.

Piers Morgan has just been caught being a hypocrite again. 😩

After making a fuss about Charles Spencer making a minor date error, it turns out that in his own book, Piers describes in great detail having tea with Tony and Cherie Blair at No. 10 Downing Street in March 1997.… pic.twitter.com/OvF2n2D41Y

— Senior Lieutenant Zandi Sussex (@ZandiSussex) September 22, 2026

Reviewers also caught Morgan supposedly joking to Cherie Blair and Fiona Millar about being the “real axis of evil” in an entry dated November 2001. George W. Bush did not publicly introduce the phrase “axis of evil” until his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002. The line subsequently disappeared from the paperback edition.  

So perhaps we can retire the notion that one incorrect date automatically destroys an entire memoir.

Apparently, human beings, even newspaper editors who insist that their books have been meticulously assembled, can get dates wrong.

Charles Spencer got one wrong. He acknowledged it and apologised. That should be the beginning of the correction, not a basis for treating the entire book as inherently unreliable or demanding that it disappear from shelves.

The Funeral Part Isn’t Some Invention

There is also an inconvenient historical record surrounding the broader episode Morgan is now attacking.

Spencer really did ask tabloid editors not to attend Diana’s funeral.

Contemporary reporting from September 1997 records that editors from Britain’s mass-market tabloids agreed to stay away after Diana’s brother personally objected to their presence. A spokesman for Morgan, then editor of the Daily Mirror, confirmed that he would comply.  

The Daily Telegraph famously ran photographs of five barred tabloid editors, including Morgan, under the headline “The tabloid editors barred from Abbey.”

So Morgan arguing about whether he was surly during Spencer’s call is one thing. The underlying event — Diana’s brother telling tabloid editors that they were not wanted at her funeral — is contemporary historical fact.

Which makes Morgan’s attempt to turn one incorrect connection to the 1993 gym photographs into a referendum on Spencer’s entire credibility feel rather grandiose.

Morgan’s Own Record Deserves the Same Scrutiny

And if Morgan wants a broader discussion about journalistic credibility, there is quite a lot to discuss.

In 2004, he was sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror after the newspaper published photographs purporting to show British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner. The pictures were exposed as fakes. Trinity Mirror apologised “unreservedly”; contemporary reporting said Morgan refused to apologise before losing his job.  

Then there is phone hacking. To be precise — because precision is apparently the theme of the week — Morgan has repeatedly denied hacking phones, ordering anyone to hack phones or knowingly publishing stories obtained that way.

But Lord Justice Leveson did not simply wave away questions about Morgan’s knowledge of the practice. In his report, Leveson described Morgan’s attempt to retreat from his earlier public comments about widespread phone hacking in Fleet Street as “utterly unpersuasive.” The report did not find that Morgan authorised voicemail hacking.

Jeremy Paxman also testified under oath that Morgan had explained to him how voicemail hacking worked during a 2002 lunch, including the use of default PIN numbers. Paxman carefully said he could not know how Morgan acquired that knowledge. Morgan has denied that Paxman’s account demonstrates involvement in hacking and has maintained that he was warning people about phone security.  

That distinction should be reported accurately. But it also makes Morgan’s current performance as the immaculate guardian of documentary precision rather difficult to take seriously.

An Apology Is What Accountability Looks Like

There is something almost refreshing about the simplicity of Spencer’s response.

He got a fact wrong. Someone produced evidence. He corrected and apologised. That is not proof that everything Charles Spencer writes is true. Spencer’s recollections and interpretations are fair game for scrutiny, and Swan Song should be checked against the historical record like any other memoir.

But correcting an error is not evidence of some catastrophic absence of integrity. Correcting errors is what people with an interest in accuracy are supposed to do.

Morgan, meanwhile, has transformed the mistake into content, threatened litigation, questioned Spencer’s entire credibility and invoked the King’s Trust while positioning himself as the injured guardian of historical truth.

Unfortunately for him, The Insider is still sitting on bookshelves. And there, dated March 26, 1997, is Piers Morgan apparently drinking tea with Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street while Prime Minister John Major was still living there.

Perhaps before Morgan demands that Charles Spencer’s single date error invalidate Swan Song, he might explain how Tony Blair managed to get into Number 10 five weeks before the electorate put him there.

Historical accuracy is important, after all.