Can Piers Morgan survive? It is a question his enemies and fans on both sides of the Atlantic are asking with increasing urgency. The position of the former tabloid editor turned CNN chat show host looks vulnerable as the phone-hacking scandal continues to unfold with fresh revelations almost daily.
But unlike other senior journalists caught up in the scandal, it is not Scotland Yard that has been responsible for turning up the heat on Morgan. Rather, in what his enemies might suggest is proof that there is such a thing as divine retribution, it is Morgan's unchecked vanity. Morgan, who edited the Daily Mirror for nearly a decade until 2004, faces questions over a series of boasts that suggest he was at the very least familiar with the practice of phone hacking.
Morgan admitted in a column for the Daily Mail in 2006 that he had heard a message left by Sir Paul McCartney on the phone of Heather Mills, then his wife, in which the former Beatle sounded "lonely, miserable and desperate". The disclosure has prompted Mills to claim the message could have been heard only by hacking into her phone.
Certainly, Morgan appears to have known that there were people capable of hacking phones on behalf of journalists. When pressed about such activities on Desert Island Discs, Morgan claimed "a lot of it was done by third parties, rather than the staff themselves... that's not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work."
Former Mirror business journalist James Hipwell alleges phone hacking happened regularly under Morgan. Hipwell, who sat next to the Mirror's showbusiness desk, said he could "name 10 people" who were phone hacking on the paper. "It was a widespread practice," said Hipwell, who is in talks with literary agents about publishing a book on some of Fleet Street's murkier practices. "People saw it as a bit of a game, a wheeze. It wasn't just celebrities, it was people like PR handlers at the BBC."
Morgan consistently denies any knowledge his paper ran stories obtained by hacking, which seems unlikely to Hipwell. "He was the beating heart of the paper, nothing happened without him knowing," Hipwell said. "He spent a great deal of time with the showbiz desk, sitting with them as much as twice a day."
Hipwell describes Morgan as a "good editor" who was "very supportive". But executives on all Fleet Street titles were locked in brutal battles to bring in scoops and editors were prepared to overlook how a story was obtained if it guaranteed to make a splash. "It wasn't just about getting one over on the celebrity but your opposite number on the Sun," Hipwell said. "If one newspaper is doing it the others have to do it. If you don't get stories you lose circulation."
At the 2002 Shafta awards ceremony for showbiz reporters, Dominic Mohan of the Sun's Bizarre column, who is now the paper's editor, openly joked that "Vodafone's lack of security" was responsible for the showbusiness exclusives of his rivals on the Mirror.
Morgan seems to have revelled in the ubiquity of phone hacking, once telling BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen to start providing "better security for pin numbers for mobile phones" and urging him to tell his customers "to go and change them".
He also told in his book, God Bless America, how Nancy Dell'Olio, former partner of the ex-England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, left a message on his voicemail. He wrote: "I can only hope and pray that the gutter press (ha ha) aren't hacking into my mobile now."
That hacking was confined to the News of the World (which Morgan edited from 1994-95) seems inconceivable. A revolving door that saw journalists shuttle between the Trinity Mirror and News International titles meant knowledge of the dark arts was quickly dispersed across newspapers.
Morgan also faces questions over whether his newspaper used private detectives to help reporters obtain information. In his book, The Insider, Morgan recalled how in April 2000 "someone had got hold" of Kate Winslet's phone number, adding: "I never like to ask how." Winslet asked Morgan: "How did you get my number? I've only just changed it. You've got to tell me, please, I am so worried now."
Morgan also bragged that he saw off a potential legal challenge from Princess Diana's former lover, James Hewitt. Morgan wrote that Hewitt claimed he had not been paid for his collaboration on a book. Morgan replied: "Yes you did – I saw your bank statements". It is doubtful whether such information could have been obtained by anything other than illegal means. Hewitt is now in the process of reporting Morgan to the police, urging them to reopen an investigation into allegations surrounding the theft of his personal letters from the princess.
Trinity Mirror, meanwhile, has launched an internal review of its editorial practices and insists its reporters work within the law and the code of the Press Complaints Commission.
So far Morgan has weathered the storm. The allegations made by Mills and Hewitt have been shrugged off as both have question marks over their credibility and motivation. Hipwell was jailed for his part in a share-tipping scandal at the Mirror, which also tainted Morgan, and could be accused of having an agenda, a charge he denies.
But Morgan's chief concern now must be that a heavyweight accuser comes forward whose claims carry more weight. Certainly there is no shortage of people who have it in for him.
One MP said "nothing would give me greater pleasure" than to see Morgan humbled. Legal sources have indicated to the Observer that lawyers working for phone-hacking victims expect to launch several claims soon that will subject Morgan's editorship of the Mirror to greater scrutiny. Jonathan Rees, a private investigator whose name looms large in Scotland Yard's investigations into phone-hacking and other illegal forms of interception, was also used extensively by the Mirror.
The Observer has established that the former foreign and home secretary Jack Straw has been asked by the Yard to supply lists of all the email addresses he and his family have used since the 90s, suggesting they have seen evidence he might have been a target.
Significantly, the detectives who believe Straw may have been a target are part of Operation Tuleta – which is into computer hacking – not Operation Weeting, which is into phone hacking.
Tuleta is examining the covert use of Trojan computer viruses, which allow hackers to take control of third-party computers. It is a far more costly and sophisticated form of interception than listening to voicemail and could not have been carried out by a journalist, suggesting it would have had to be sanctioned by someone in authority on a newspaper.
Straw declined to comment. But it is believed he thinks the Yard's investigation may relate to 1997 when the Mirror ran a story about his son Will, then 17, selling a little cannabis to an undercover reporter in a sting operation that was aided by two of the teenagers' friends who had been paid thousands of pounds by the paper. Critics said the story had been obtained by entrapment and Morgan was condemned for poor judgment and practising chequebook journalism.
Despite the criticism, his career continued to flourish, faltering only momentarily when he was sacked as Mirror editor for publishing fake photographs depicting abuse by British soldiers. Even now, with MPs suggesting he return to the UK to face questions, Morgan's confidence appears impregnable as he regularly takes to Twitter to denounce his accusers and promote his show.
Last month, Piers Morgan Tonight recorded a 9% increase in viewing figures, up to 715,000. True, this was far down from the abnormally high 2.1m who tuned in when the series started, on the back of heavy promotion. But it is still more than would watch Morgan's predecessor, Larry King, during his final months anchoring the show.
In this sense Morgan is unusual: he is a successful UK media export whose brash persona antagonises the US east coast elite but plays well with main street America. But some media commentators think his days are numbered.
CNN will be acutely aware that News Corp's decision to close the News of the World came far too late to prevent immeasurable damage to Rupert Murdoch's empire. It will not want to make the same mistake.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4