I actually didn’t care that much about the [Jeremy] Clarkson stuff until he began behaving ridiculously, smacking me round the head. He’s perfectly entitled to smack me around the head, but the idea that smacking editors will help your PR is rather short-sighted.

The first quote refers to the contents of Morgan's book The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade. The Mirror published photographs of Clarkson kissing a woman who was not his wife on two occasions. For this, he punched Morgan at the British Press Awards in March 2004, an incident Clarkson wrote about in The Sunday Times.