One of Britain’s most respected journalists said that former tabloid newspaper editor Piers Morgan showed him how to hack into phones 10 years ago, the latest twist in a scandal that has so far centred on Rupert Murdoch.
Morgan, now a CNN talk-show host in the US, has consistently denied authorising phone hacking during his time as editor of the Daily Mirror. Yesterday the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman told the inquiry that Morgan had boasted to him at a lunch in 2002 about how easy it was to access the voicemail messages of mobile phones. “He turned to me and said: ‘Have you got a mobile phone?’ I said yes and he said: ‘Have you got a security setting on the message bit of it?’,” Paxman said. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. He then explained that the way to get access to people’s messages was to go to the factory default setting and press either 0000 and 1234, and if you didn’t put your own code in, his words, ‘you are a fool’.”