Piers Morgan knew of phone hacking when at the Mirror, high court hears

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Piers Morgan knew about illegal phone hacking when he was editor of the Daily Mirror, it has been alleged at the high court.

The first day of the phone-hacking trial initiated by Prince Harry and other well-known figures heard claims that illegal activity, including voicemail interception, was “carried out on an industrial scale” by staff at Mirror newspapers.

David Sherborne, the barrister acting for Harry and the other alleged victims, told the court that Morgan “must have known” about illegal behaviour at the newspaper he edited between 1995 and 2004.

According to legal filings:

In one alleged incident, Morgan asked a journalist to name the source of a celebrity story and was told “the information had come from voicemails”.

In another, a witness described how Morgan was “laughing mockingly” as he entertained the Daily Mirror newsroom by repeatedly playing staff a private voicemail left by Paul McCartney for his then girlfriend, Heather Mills.

In another, a witness claimed Morgan knew the default pin codes that could be used to illegally access voicemails on different mobile phone networks.

Morgan, now a presenter on Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, has always denied knowingly commissioning or publishing stories based on illegally obtained voicemails.

The former Daily Mirror political editor David Seymour told the court that staff at the newspaper heard Morgan openly discussing how phone hacking operated when at a dinner with executives. Having worked closely with the editor for a decade, he alleged Morgan was “unreliable and boastful, and apt to tell untruths when it suited him”.

The veteran political journalist recalled an incident in which Morgan obtained a voicemail left by McCartney, in which the singer sang a Beatles song to Mills as part of an attempt to patch up their relationship.

According to the legal filings: “Mr Seymour recalls that he was walking through the newsroom one day, likely in March 2001, and Mr Morgan was standing in the middle with a group of reporters around him holding a tape machine, and played the message to all present a number of times, laughing mockingly. Mr Seymour recalls that the Beatles song played by Mr McCartney was actually And I Love Her.”

Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, a former Downing Street official, recalled going for dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Morgan during the Labour party conference in September 2002.

During the meal, Wegg-Prosser asked Morgan how the Daily Mirror had obtained a story about an affair between the then England football manager Sven-G?ran Eriksson and the television presenter Ulrika Jonsson, according to the court filings.

The legal filings say: “Mr Morgan asked Mr Prosser which network provider he used for his mobile phone and then told him the default pin for that network, and then explained that the default pin numbers were well known and rarely changed, which is how mobile phone messages could be accessed remotely. He then said, with a smile, that the story on Mr Eriksson and Ms Jonsson was obtained through that method.”

The journalist Omid Scobie claims he heard Morgan discussing the use of voicemails when he was a journalism student doing work experience on the Mirror’s entertainment desk in 2002. “[Scobie] recalls during one of those days in the office the editor, Piers Morgan, came over to talk to someone about a story relating to Kylie Minogue and her boyfriend James Gooding. Mr Morgan asked how confident they were in the reporting, and was told that the information had come from voicemails,” legal filings state.

The journalist told the court that he had since found an article that appeared in the Mirror and appeared to relate to that encounter. “The article quotes ‘friends’ and refers to contact between Ms Minogue and Mr Gooding,” he said.

Scobie is now best known as the biographer of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, and is seen as being close to the couple. Harry is one of the individuals whose claim is being tested in the seven-week trial that began on Wednesday, and the prince is expected to give evidence next month.

Asked by ITV News if he had any comment on the allegations, Morgan said: “I’m not going to take lectures on privacy invasion from Prince Harry, somebody who has spent the last three years ruthlessly and cynically invading the royal family’s privacy for vast commercial gain and told a pack of lies about them.

“So I suggest he gets out of court and apologises to his family for the disgraceful invasion of privacy that he’s been perpetrating.”

Prince Harry is one of one four individuals whose claims against Mirror Group Newspapers – which publishes the Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People – are being tested at this trial. In written submissions, he has described how the company’s intrusive reporting destroyed his relationships.

He said his former girlfriend Chelsy Davy decided that “a royal life was not for her” as a result of alleged unlawful information gathering by journalists working for Mirror Group Newspapers.

In addition to phone hacking, many of the claims relate to the millions of pounds spent by Mirror newspapers on private investigators who allegedly carried out illegal acts on behalf of the newspaper group.

Mirror Group Newspapers has accepted that phone hacking took place at its titles and has already paid out more than ?100m in settlements and legal costs. It is fighting this trial on the basis that many of the claims were brought too late.

In the case of Prince Harry, the company apologised for a single instance of illegal information gathering on the royal. But it insisted there was no evidence that its journalists hacked his mobile phone and said many of the stories about his private life came from other sources.