So how much, exactly, did Piers Morgan know about phone hacking when he was editor of the Daily Mirror? It depends when you ask him. And since he edited the newspaper for nine years when hacking was at its zenith, and since other people similarly accused have spent time in prison, this seems important for reasons that do not depend on your feelings about Prince Harry.
On Friday, for example, Morgan had a simple line for reporters gathered outside his house. Perhaps his thinking had been clarified by the unfortunate news that a judge ruling on claims from Harry and others had found that there had been extensive hacking going on at the Daily Mirror, and that there was no doubt Morgan knew about it. Similar evidence has been presented to the Leveson inquiry and in previous litigation, but never as extensively or with such a powerful endorsement from a judge as this. But it’s all nonsense, Morgan sputtered, who would do such a thing? “I’ve never hacked a phone, or told anybody else to hack a phone,” he said. Simple.
As he also said, this is a line he’s maintained for a long time. You would be amazed at how carefully he has maintained it. He used exactly the same words to the BBC in September. He used exactly the same words to the BBC in May. He used exactly the same words on Twitter (now X) in 2015. He used exactly the same words to the Guardian in 2014. He used exactly the same words on CNN in 2011. Ask Piers Morgan what his favourite biscuit is at any point in the last 15 years and the response is likely to have been that he never hacked a phone, and he never told anyone else to, either.
If you view the narrow precision of Morgan’s repetition as interesting, you will probably go looking for other things he’s said about phone hacking. And you will find a laundry list of public statements from a bygone era that don’t exactly contradict his later recitations, but do cast them in a different light. In 2003, he told Charlotte Church that she should change the security number on her phone to stop reporters from accessing her voicemails. In 2006, he wrote that he had been “played a tape of a message Paul [McCartney] had left for Heather [Mills] on her mobile phone”. In 2007, he told Press Gazette that hacking was “an investigative practice that everyone knows was going on”.
What are we to make of this change of emphasis? If we take him at his word, we will have to conclude that Morgan knew absolutely loads about phone hacking, but had absolutely nothing to do with commissioning it. You might wonder if there was any need to tell the voicemail interception specialists used by the Mirror to hack a phone, and reflect that when you get the plumber round because your sink is blocked, you don’t need to encourage them to bring a plunger.
The thing is, Mr Justice Fancourt didn’t take him at his word, and went to great lengths to explain why.
In rejecting the judge’s 386-page ruling, Morgan dwelled on the evidence of Omid Scobie, who was once an intern at the Mirror. Scobie said that he had heard Morgan being told that a story about Kylie Minogue was sourced from a voicemail. Morgan said Scobie was a “deluded fantasist”. As for Alastair Campbell, who, according to the judge, gave “compelling evidence” pointing to illegal techniques being used by the Mirror’s agents to obtain details of his mortgage: he is “another proven liar who spun this country into an illegal war”.
Now, you might not trust Scobie or Campbell. But what Morgan left out is that Scobie’s story fits precisely with invoices, numbers on a Mirror reporter’s phone, and a matching article about Minogue bylined to someone the judge described as “a known phone hacker”. Campbell’s claims, meanwhile, are lent considerable weight by the fact that the Mirror had just used the same private investigators to do exactly the same thing to Peter Mandelson. The corroboration for Morgan’s claim of innocence, on the other hand, is simply that he keeps making it.
Set Scobie and Campbell aside, if you think they have sold the judge a pup. Perhaps because it was cold outside, Morgan didn’t find time in his doorstep speech to critique the rest of the evidence cited in the judgment.
Melanie Cantor, an agent and publicist, said that Morgan “always seemed to be the first person to know about events that had recently happened” involving her clients, and that invoices and phone records demonstrated that she had been repeatedly hacked by the Mirror’s reporters. The judge concluded that “sensitive information … was passed to Mr Morgan, who must have known how it had been obtained”.
Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, the head of strategic communications at Downing Street under Tony Blair, said that Morgan had explained to him how hacking had been used to get a story about Ulrika Jonsson’s affair with Sven-Göran Eriksson. And David Seymour, the Mirror’s political editor, said that he had watched Morgan playing that McCartney voicemail to a group of reporters. Morgan, he added, was “unreliable and boastful [and] apt to tell untruths when it suited him”. The judge said he accepted Seymour’s evidence “without hesitation”.
Those are just the human sources. The judge also drew on mountains of invoices, emails and phone records. Still, Morgan had another card to play, another that he turns to quite a lot: an enthusiastic swing at the motivations of Prince Harry, who he said was on a mission with his wife, Meghan, to “destroy the British monarchy”.
If that is the purpose of Harry’s exhaustive legal crusade against the Mirror, the Daily Mail, and the Sun, it seems an odd way of going about it. But hacking has never just been about Harry. Even on Friday, there were three other claimants. The wider litigation involved more than 100 others.
Hacking was certainly not just about Morgan, either. But his confected outrage as the evidence against him mounts does give a sense of how we can expect the story to continue from here.
The financial consequences are instructive, too. Harry won £141,000 in damages; another claimant won £32,000; another two didn’t get a penny, because their claims were made too late. Morgan will not have to pay any of it. Meanwhile, he is under contract at Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV and the Sun, on a deal reportedly worth about £50m. Both outlets would have had ample evidence to suggest his involvement in hacking before this case even began, and neither has shown any signs of abandoning their man, who never hacked a phone, and never told anyone else to.
Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter, and writes on media, culture and technology
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