Piers Morgan told reporters to hack into Alastair Campbell’s bank account in the hope of finding incriminating transactions, it has been claimed at the high court.
Morgan, then editor of the Daily Mirror, allegedly told reporter Gary Jones to obtain details of Campbell’s mortgage payments in 1999. The court heard that Jones then subcontracted the work to private investigator Jonathan Rees.
Campbell, who at that time was Downing Street’s director of communications, said he believed the newspaper editor was “two-faced”. He said Morgan pretended to be a friend while secretly authorising Jones – now the editor of the Daily Express – to target his bank accounts.
Campbell said he had first-hand knowledge of how the Daily Mirror operated, having previously served as the newspaper’s political editor: “I find it very hard to believe that any editor, especially one as hands-on as Mr Morgan, would not have known and demanded to know where the big stories were coming from.
“Nor do I believe that people in senior positions in government with access to highly sensitive information and with obvious security concerns would have been targeted in this way without the editor knowing and sanctioning such methods.”
The allegations were made at the ongoing phone hacking trial, where more than 100 individuals – including Prince Harry – are suing Mirror Group Newspapers over claims of illegal behaviour at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and People.
Campbell, who now presents the Rest is Politics podcast, told the court: “Mr Morgan’s two-faced conduct, in purporting to be a real ally of the prime minister and the Labour government, while all the time he and his senior team were using illegal means to find stories designed to destabilise that government, compounds the anger I feel about this, as does the fact that this conduct has been emphatically denied, by Mr Morgan and his colleagues, for so long.”
Campbell suggested that the Daily Mirror targeted his bank accounts while trying to follow up on a story about Peter Mandelson, who had been forced to resign as a cabinet minister in late 1998 after taking an undisclosed loan to buy a house.
He said: “I believe that the Daily Mirror decided, at the time of the Mandelson story, to fish into my bank and mortgage affairs in the hope that they too would reveal something they considered newsworthy.”
Campbell alleged that Jonathan Rees’s Southern Investigations obtained the correct account numbers for a mortgage held by him and his partner Fiona Miller. Jonathan Rees then sent invoices for inquiries into Campbell to the Daily Mirror.
Campbell said he believed that the Daily Mirror also employed Jonathan Rees to “blag” details of Peter Mandelson’s mortgage application. This then formed the basis of a story co-written by Gary Jones.
Campbell said he was particularly annoyed to learn that Morgan’s biography told a different version of the events surrounding Mandelson’s mortgage scandal: “At the same time that I now know he was commissioning/approving Southern Investigations (through Mr Jones) to break in to my bank account, his book shows that he was seeking to ingratiate himself with the prime minister and myself at Downing Street, and pretending to sympathise about what had happened to Peter Mandelson.”
