Susanna Reid reveals how Piers Morgan has changed her for the better

While Susanna Reid poses for the camera wearing a black cut-out frock, sandwiched between a couple of male models, two thoughts spring to mind.

Number one: what would the ever-opinionated Piers Morgan make of his Good Morning Britain co-host’s sexiest Fabulous cover to date? And number two: my oh my, how she has changed.

On Susanna’s debut Fabulous photo shoot back in November 2013, the then BBC Breakfast presenter and Strictly Come Dancing contestant was – how should we put this? – a touch on edge. The thigh-skimming skirts on the rail were rejected as mum-of-three Susanna voiced concerns about the scrutiny such styling would attract.

But here, four years later at our studio in east London, she is letting loose. She doesn’t quibble about any of the clothes and poses happily with our bow-tied beefcakes – a concept she would have certainly KO-ed during her BBC days.

“I’m in a very different place now than I was back then. Maybe I’m more relaxed,” says Susanna, 47, before offering one explanation for her calmer, carefree self.

Step forward Piers Morgan.

“Piers has certainly helped me shed that fear about how I’m going to be judged,” she says. “I used to fear online comments, but now I just think: ‘We’ll make it work.’”

The Piers effect hasn’t stopped there. According to Susanna, the controversial former newspaper editor has worked tirelessly to “train the BBC out of her” by encouraging her to be more like him. Ahem. To the unversed, this involves airing often inflammatory opinions – and to hell with the consequences.

“‘After 20 years at the BBC,’ he said, ‘You can’t be this unopinionated any more,’” Susanna explains. “So I maintain utterly my political neutrality – how I vote, whether I vote, my particular views on things. But on other matters, for instance feminism, I’ve unleashed my opinions and gradually I’ve built that up. He’s unleashed me!”

We witnessed the all-new say-it-like-it-is Susanna a month ago during a discussion with Piers about Emily Ratajkowski’s provocative shoot for Love magazine, in which she writhed around in her knickers and bra on a table covered in spaghetti.

After Piers, 52, tweeted: “This is Emily Ratajkowski ‘promoting feminism’. Somewhere, Emmeline Pankhurst just vomited,” Susanna defended the Gone Girl actress on air, arguing that the shoot did nothing to undermine her feminist values.

“Emily was making a very deliberately provocative statement,” Susanna says today. “She is a lingerie model, she will do what she likes, and that doesn’t give men a right to assume anything about the message she is sending. She is absolutely in charge of what happens to her body, and that in itself is a feminist statement.”

Piers has been hauled over the coals plenty of times for his outspoken views, and Susanna believes that he sometimes goes too far, “but that’s something he’d acknowledge as well”.

Like Emily Ratajkowski, Susanna knows first-hand the frustration of being told by a man how to behave.

A tweet pinned at the top of her Twitter page reads: “You know that feeling when you feel like you need more men telling you how to do your feminism right? No, me neither,” and is in response to some male critics who believe she could have done more to defend Emily.

Last January, after Piers ranted about “rabid feminists” at the Women’s March in Washington DC – comments that led Ewan McGregor to pull out of a scheduled interview at the last minute – Susanna was again criticised for not challenging Piers enough over his controversial views.

Susanna shakes her head and takes a bite of her breakfast sandwich.

“Anybody who watches the programme knows that Piers and I have fierce arguments all the time about feminism, what is a feminist act, how women should treat their own bodies and how men and women should talk about women’s bodies,” she explains.

“Piers has his own opinions and can do what he thinks is right when it comes to feminism, and I have my opinions and will decide what I do in accordance with my own values.”

Diplomatic, personable and professional to her core after nearly three decades in broadcasting, Susanna is the yin to Piers Morgan’s yang, and their dynamic – a curious mix of bickering, banter and best of friends – is working.

The pair have been credited for pushing Good Morning Britain’s ratings through the roof. The show’s viewing figures have trebled since its launch three years ago, and now regularly peak at 1 million. It’s progress that Susanna describes as “phenomenal”.

When conversation turns to the gender pay gap – a problem exposed within the BBC last summer after the salaries of the broadcaster’s top-paid stars were published and which recently led BBC China editor Carrie Gracie to quit in protest – Susanna won’t reveal whether her GMB income (a reported £500,000 when she joined the show) matches Piers’.

“There’s a particular issue around the fact that the BBC is paid for by licence-fee-payers’ money and they had a responsibility to disclose,” she says. “I don’t think that everybody should then have to talk about their own salary. Carrie has done something incredibly courageous and principled, but I don’t want to talk about my personal circumstances.”

There’s no denying that Susanna’s circumstances are pretty great by anyone’s standards.

Besides co-hosting GMB four days a week (she wakes at 4am, is out the door for 4.10am and at the ITV studio 20 minutes later), she has presented two series of cooking show Save Money: Good Food and last year fronted The Murder of Becky Watts, a primetime stand-alone documentary about the police investigation into the disappearance of the 16-year-old Bristol student.

There are more documentaries in the offing, and Susanna is thrilled by the way her career is diversifying. But after a “work-crazy” 2017, she’s set on achieving a greater work/life balance. And she’s off to a good start.

Once Christmas was over and done with, she and her boys Sam, 15, Finn, 13, and Jack, 12, spent a night in a countryside eco lodge, where they locked their iPhones in the car to “completely switch off”.

Susanna, who abstained from social media over the festive period, has since deleted Twitter off her iPhone.

“I’m really relieved because it was taking up so much headspace,” she says. “I see Twitter as the equivalent of junk food – you’re getting little bits of stimulation, like you do with a burger, rather than nourishing yourself with a whole article and thinking through ideas properly.”

On her 47th birthday in December, Susanna captioned a make-up-free unfiltered selfie on Instagram with the words: “Older. None the wiser.” It attracted more than 13,000 likes, plus countless compliments from men and women raving about her natural beauty (in person, she looks a good 10 years younger than her age). Susanna insists her motivation for publicly going bare-faced was to promote positive body image.

“We sometimes look at other people’s photographs and think: ‘Why don’t I look that good in the gym? Why don’t I have abs like that?’ When you’re a professional TV presenter, you have professional make-up, professional hair, professional styling, but the reality is I have birthmarks and red skin and sometimes spots. It’s not always a glamorous picture,” she says.

“A couple of months ago, Piers and I went out one night and someone [commented online]: ‘You don’t look so good when you’re not made up and your hair’s not done.’ I wasn’t offended in the slightest. I thought: ‘Yes, that’s exactly the point!’”

Susanna says injecting fillers and Botox “doesn’t appeal right now” because ageing is “absolutely a blessing”. But when asked to ponder why so many young female reality stars are tampering with their facial features, she seems genuinely concerned.

“Comparison is the thief of joy, and social media puts a huge amount of pressure on us to be perfect,” she says. “Be proud of looking like you. No one else looks like you or is you. Value who you are and your life.”

This year, Susanna refused to make any New Year’s resolutions.

“Goal-setting is a little bit perfectionist, but there’s no perfect, is there?” she explains. “Sometimes we can set ourselves up to fail if we look too far ahead. It’s just about doing the right thing today.”

Dramas in Susanna’s personal life have undoubtedly shaped her desire to embrace the present as opposed to agonising over the past or future.

At the beginning of 2014, a few months after finishing runner-up on Strictly, Susanna split from journalist turned charity boss Dominic Cotton, 50, the father of her boys and her partner of 16 years.

On the rare occasion she spoke about the split in interviews, she appeared robust, but seeing Dominic move on quickly with another woman just months after their split can’t have been easy.

Today, Susanna proudly describes her home life in south-west London as “sorted” and talks with happiness of the fact that her ex remains an integral part of the family unit.

“Obviously I don’t talk in specifics and I can’t talk about our arrangement, [but] I’m a single mum – I’m not a single parent, because those children have two parents who are utterly, 100% involved in their lives.”

Piers once divulged that a few of his famous eligible pals have reached out to him by text to ask if he can “put in a good word” with Susanna, but she denies that he has ever played Cupid. In any case, she’s managing perfectly well by herself in the dating department, thank you very much.

“I haven’t been completely a foreigner to love over the past couple of years,” she concedes when pressed about romance. “If somebody emerges in my life, that would obviously be something that I would embrace. But I’m not going out looking for it [and] I’m not shutting it down completely.”

Susanna pauses for a moment.

“People keep talking about online dating. Do you think I should?”

When we suggest she waits to meet Mr Perfect IRL, she collapses into laughter.

“In a million years, I’m not going to do online dating. Of course I’m not!”

There is, of course, only one relationship that Britain truly cares about: that of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who announced their engagement last year.

“We will absolutely be all over it from a broadcasting point of view,” says Susanna of the eagerly-awaited May 19 wedding, unable to disguise her natural journalistic grit. As for Piers, there are more pressing matters.

“He’s cursing the fact that Meghan is off Twitter,” smiles Susanna. “Because now he can’t DM her and badger her for an invite!”

Five minutes after Susanna departs in her taxi, she sends Fabulous a text message of thanks. One of the kindest in the biz, Susanna Reid really is the First Lady of breakfast television.

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