Piers Morgan compiles preemptive list of celebrities who aren't allowed to talk to him

Piers Morgan’s new, Larry King-replacing talk show has barely had a chance to underwhelm, but the host—whose bid to out-softball King on the air doesn’t seem to have affected his supercilious, self-aggrandizing off-screen demeanor—has already announced a list of banned celebrities who aren’t allowed to sit across from Morgan while he asks them how they got so great. As revealed late last week, Madonna is top of the list for being “too vegan for TV,” whatever that means, and also for being irrelevant because “we have Lady Gaga now.”

Asked to elaborate, Morgan recently revealed a long, tumultuous history of supposed run-ins that included things like “a bread roll throwing incident in London in the mid '90s” and also “an incident involving a pub owned by her recently departed husband, Guy Ritchie, where my brother was the manager,” but said these all paled in comparison to “the worst thing Madonna did to me”—namely, when her publicist told Morgan that Madonna was not pregnant while he was editor of the British tabloid The Daily Mirror, only for him to find out that she totally was when it was announced in a rival newspaper. It was clearly the worst blow to his journalistic credibility during his tenure there, except for that time he was caught running hoax photos of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. But the Madonna thing was also bad! (Madonna’s response to all this, via her rep: “Madonna doesn’t know who Piers Morgan is.”)

Today The Hollywood Reporter compiles a few more people whom Morgan refuses to talk to, including his fellow America’s Got Talent judge Howie Mandel (“too irritating”), MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (“just because it would really annoy him”), former British prime minister Tony Blair’s wife Cherie (“it would get violent”), and Paul McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills, who Morgan says has earned a “lifetime ban.” Morgan has long claimed that he introduced McCartney and Mills in 1999 (something Mills has denied), saying, “I realized I'd pushed one of the world's great gold diggers in the direction of one of my heroes. And as Paul puts it to his close friends, 'Thanks, Piers, you cost me 50 million dollars.' " Really, he says that all the time! Anyway, sadly, these people will never feel the hot wind of Morgan’s obsequious, ill-informed bluster in their face, not like Kid Rock and the Kardashian sisters, who are both scheduled to appear in the coming weeks.