One of Britain’s most respected journalists said yesterday that former London tabloid newspaper editor Piers Morgan showed him how to hack into phones 10 years ago, the latest twist in the UK phone scandal.
Now a CNN talk-show host, Morgan has consistently denied authorizing phone hacking during his time as editor of the Daily Mirror.
The BBC’s Jeremy Paxman told a British judicial inquiry into media standards 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’.”
Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Daily Mirror, has denied that any of its journalists hacked phones.