Piers Morgan has slammed Elaine Paige for her recent comments about Susan Boyle. During an interview with the Daily Mail, Paige was reported to have compared Boyle’s sudden rise to fame to that of a virus. However, the former Cats star later complained she had been misquoted.

“Elaine Paige has come out with some extraordinarily bitchy remarks about Susan Boyle, saying she’s a ‘virus’ that she ‘doesn’t feel any pride for’,” Morgan wrote in his weekly Daily Mail column. “I, of course, presented the TV special at Christmas in which Susan sang a duet with Ms Paige, and got twice the ovation that Susan’s idol received. This, coupled with the fact that Susan has sold ten million albums and become a global superstar in a way Ms Paige never came close to achieving, may explain her pathetically jealous and mean-spirited hissy fit.”

British paper The Daily Mail recently reported Paige referring to Boyle as “a virus really that spread across the world in a nanosecond.”  In a statement to the Daily Mail, Paige clarified: “I wasn’t referring to Susan herself; I was referring to the speed of her fame spreading as fast as a worldwide viral marketing campaign.”

Boyle’s meteoric rise to stardom is well-documented, from her appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent,” which was viewed over 100 million times on YouTube, to the release of her first album, “I Dreamed a Dream.” The album, which came out in December, had the largest ever sales debut for a female artist.

The Scottish singer has long referred to Paige as a musical idol, even telling “Britain’s Got Talent” judges she wanted to be “as big as Elaine Paige.”  On Dec. 13, a longtime dream of Boyle’s was realized when Paige performed with her in a television special.  The two sang a duet from Chess.

On the Jan. 31 episode of her BBC Radio 2 program, Paige said she was “dismayed to read the remarks attributed to me in the Daily Mail,” and called the paper’s representation of her remarks “incomplete and misinterpreted completely.”