The Net Closes Around Piers Morgan

By Toby Young

It has taken several weeks for Piers Morgan to become entangled in the phone hacking net, but it now looks probable that he’ll receive an invitation from John Whittingdale MP to appear before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. That is an extremely perilous position for the ex-editor of the News of the World and the Daily Mirror to find himself in.

Morgan’s eventual summons was probably inevitable, but he has not helped his cause by allowing himself to be drawn into spats with Louise Mensch MP and Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes.

His name first surfaced in connection with this scandal during the House of Commons emergency debate on phone hacking on July 6th. Liberal Democrat MP Adrian Sanders claimed that the Daily Mirror had used “voicemail interception to reveal Sven-Goran Eriksson’s affair with Ulrika Jonsson” and that it had done this “when under the auspices of Piers Morgan”.

This was followed up by a more detailed account of the same episode on Guido Fawkes’s website in which the blogger claimed that in 2002 James Scott, then a Daily Mirror showbiz reporter and now the deputy editor of the Sunday Mirror, listened to Ulrika Jonsson’s voicemails and discovered several messages left by a Swedish-speaking man. Scott played the messages back to a half-Swedish Daily Mirror secretary who translated them, revealing that the mystery caller was Sven-Goran Eriksson. From there, the Mirror was able to piece together the story that the the two were having an affair and duly broke it on April 19th, 2002. Curiously, it was credited to the 3AM Girls rather than Scott and the 3AM Girls went on to win Scoop of the Year for the story at the 2003 British Press Awards.

In a follow-up post, Guido pointed out that in The Insider, the first volume of Morgan’s diaries, the ex-tabloid editor revealed that he knew how to hack phones. The revealing entry is dated January 26th, 2001:

Apparently if you don’t change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don’t answer, tap in the standard four digit code to hear all your messages. I’ll change mine just in case, but it makes me wonder how many public figures and celebrities are aware of this little trick.

This revelation may have been what triggered Louise Mensch’s introduction of Morgan’s name during the Murdochs’ select committee appearance. She accused him of saying in The Insider that he had hacked phones and that’s how he had obtained the Sven-Goran Eriksson/Urlika Jonsson story.

This prompted a furious denial by Morgan on CNN in which he called Mensch a “liar” and challenged her to repeat what she’d said outside Parliament. “At no stage in my book or indeed outside of my book have I ever boasted of using phone hacking for any stories,” he said. “For the record, in my time at the Mirror and the News of the World I have never hacked a phone, told anybody to hack a phone or published any story based on the hacking of a phone.”

Technically speaking, Morgan had a point. He doesn’t claim that any stories he published as editor of the Mirror or the News of the World were based on phone hacking in The Insider. The mistake Louise Mensch made was to cite the wrong volume of diaries. As Guido subsequently pointed out, the smoking gun is in his third volume of diaries, God Bless America: Misadventures of a Big Mouth Brit. The relevant entry states:

Nancy Dell’Olio left a voicemail message for me.

“Piers, darling, I am in Rome and thinking of you. I hope you have recovered from our night together. Let’s get together again soon, you naughty man. Love Nancy.”

Given that it was the Daily Mirror, under my editorship, which exposed Sven’s fling with Urlika Jonsson after learning of a similar message left by the then England manager on her phone, I can only hope and pray the gutter press (ha ha) aren’t hacking into my mobile.

On the face of it, that seems like a straightforward admission of guilt, as did Morgan’s comments during his appearance on Desert Island Discs in 2009. But he mounted a subsequent defence in a flurry of late-night Twitter messages a few days ago in which he linked to two different accounts of how the Mirror obtained the story in question.

The first link was to a site called Zelo Street which had dug up a 2002 Private Eye story claiming that the Mirror had pinched the Sven-Goran Eriksson/Ulrika Jonsson story from the News of the World. The Eye credited James Scott with bringing the story in, but said it was unclear whether he had been tipped off by a disgruntled News of the World hack or been gifted the story by Ulrika Jonsson’s publicist in return for more sympathetic coverage. However, the original Eye story doesn’t entirely put Morgan in the clear even if it’s true. After all, it’s possible that Scott received a tip off from a News of the World hack that prompted him to listen to Ulrika’s voicemails in which case the illegal interception of Ulrika’s voicemail still took place on Morgan’s watch – and, as his subsequent diary entry suggests, he knew how his paper had come by the story.

The second story linked to by Morgan appeared in The Drum, an online media newsletter. This story cited a 2002 Guardian report claiming that Morgan himself, not Scott, had done a deal with Ulrika’s publicist who wanted to spoil the News of the World story. According to this account, the reason the story was credited to the 3AM girls is because one aspect of the deal was that it would be a treated as a showbiz story rather than a news story. Again, this story doesn’t preclude the possibility that a Mirror journalist hacked into Ulrika’s voicemail, but if it was done in collusion with her publicist it would make it hard to prosecute that journalist or his editor for illegally intercepting voicemails.

James Scott, as far as I can tell, has never responded to the allegation that he illegally intercepted Ulrika Jonsson’s voicemail and, at the time of going to press, he hadn’t responded to my twitter and telephone messages inviting him to do so. Whatever the exact manner in which the Mirror came by the Sven-Goran Eriksson/Ulrika Jonsson story, Morgan still isn’t in the clear. His rebuttal of the initial allegations has inevitably led to another flurry of accusations, none of which he’s yet responded to. For instance, Guido dug up a Daily Mail piece Morgan wrote in 2006 in which he claimed to have listened to a voicemail left on Heather Mills’s phone by Paul McCartney, begging her to come back to him:

[A]t one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone.


It was heartbreaking. The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang ‘We Can Work It Out’ into the answerphone.

This, too, isn’t conclusive evidence that Morgan condoned phone hacking or published any stories in the News of the World or the Mirror based on phone hacking. (Though Morgan’s Mail piece, in itself, does, technically, contain a story based on phone hacking.) Nevertheless, it doesn’t look good.

Meanwhile, James Hipwell, one of two Mirror journalists jailed over the City Slickers scandal, has given an interview in The Australian in which he claims phone hacking was rife at the Mirror under Morgan’s editorship:

I used to see it going on around me all the time when I worked at the Daily Mirror.

I sat right next to the show business desk and there were some show biz reporters who did it as a matter of course, as a basic part of their working day.

One of their bosses would wander up and instruct a reporter to ‘trawl the usual suspects’, which meant going through the voice messages of celebrities and celebrity PR agents.

For everyone to pretend that this is some isolated activity found only at the News of the World is ridiculous, it’s just a lie.

In light of this, it seems inconceivable that Hipwell won’t receive an invitation from James Whittingdale MP as well.

Morgan managed to avoid prosecution over the City Slickers scandal and his career survived the setback of being fired from the Daily Mirror after it emerged that the photographs he’d published of British servicemen and women abusing Iraqi prisoners were fake. But he’s going to have to be very fleet-footed to avoid being further embroiled in the phone hacking scandal. His problem is that he has three sets of enemies, all determined to see him fall.

First, there are those Conservative MPs, like Louise Mensch, who want to drag his name into this scandal for straightforward political reasons. Not only is the Mirror a Labour paper, but in The Insider Morgan claims to have met Tony Blair 46 times and he became close to Gordon Brown during his tenure as Prime Minister, coaxing a sympathetic interview out of him in the run-up to the General Election. He’s not quite Blair and Brown’s Andy Coulson, but he’s not far off.

Second, there are the current and ex-employees of News International, many of them quite senior, who feel it’s unjust that the News of the World should be taking all the flak for phone hacking when, as seems abundantly clear, the practice was rife among all the red-tops. Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks may feel a personal loyalty to Morgan who’s a friend of theirs and has stood by them during the scandal, but there’ll be others for whom the urge to bring Morgan down will be too powerful to resist.

Third, there are those, like Hipwell, who have a personal axe to grind. Morgan has a lot of enemies, some of whom could well be ex-employees who know where the skeletons are buried. I’d be surprised if Hipwell is the only ex-Mirror hack to come out of the woodwork in the coming weeks and months.

Morgan may yet be able to wriggle off the hook – if anyone can, he can – but he needs to take these charges more seriously. So far, his responses to both Louise Mensch and Paul Staines have been a bit scattergun, firing off over-emphatic denials, raging on Twitter at 1.00AM, etc. There’s no evidence that he’s given the matter much thought, no sign yet of a political, legal or PR strategy. He would be wise to get some proper professional advice if he hasn’t already.

His biggest mistake so far has been in underestimating Staines, whom he dismissed on Twitter as a “druggie ex-bankrupt”. Staines is, in fact, a shrewd media operator who has already claimed several political scalps. When it comes to the way in which the tit-for-tat rhythm of claim and counter-claim plays out in the frenzied, Internet-driven, 24-hour news cycle, the “druggie ex-bankrupt” is something of a master. He hasn’t yet taken down anyone as big as Morgan, but the ex-tabloid editor is going to have to tread much more carefully from now on if he’s going to avoid being another trophy on Staines’s hunting wall.