Paxman recalls Piers Morgan hacking conversation

Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman has claimed former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan once showed him how to hack a phone.

Speaking at the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon, Paxman recalled a September 2002 lunch at Mirror headquarters during which  Morgan was “teasing” Ulrika Jonsson, former partner of ex-England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, telling her “he knew what had happened in the conversations between her and Sven-Göran Eriksson”.

He added that Morgan asked him if he had a mobile phone, explaining: “the way to get access to people’s messages was go to the factory default setting and press either 0000 or 1234, and that if you didn’t put on your own code — his words — ‘you’re a fool’.”

“It was clearly something that he was familiar with and I wasn’t”, Paxman said, adding he “didn’t know that this went on.”

He said he did not know if Morgan was “repeating a conversation he had heard or he was imagining this conversation”, but suggested accepting both possibilities because Morgan “probably was imagining it.”

The Newsnight anchor added that he felt the atmosphere of the lunch was “bullying”.

“I didn’t like it,” he said.

Morgan has said several times that he has “no reason to believe” that any phone hacking occurred at the Daily Mirror under his editorship from 1995-2004.

Also appearing this afternoon was former Home Secretary John Reid, who said he was not briefed on Operation Caryatid — the original phone-hacking investigation — until 8 August 2006, around the time of the arrests of the News of the World’s royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

“When I say that throughout this I wasn’t receiving briefings, it’s not a complaint,” Reid said, stressing that he knew “what the counter-terrorist unit had on its plate.”

Reid said the country was facing up to 70 terrorist plots when he took office in May 2006, and the timing of the Mulcaire-Goodman arrests coincided almost exactly with the arrest of the ringleader in a plot to bring down 10 trans-Atlantic airliners.

He added that it was “completely untrue” that he knew other reporters at the now-defunct tabloid might have been involved in phone hacking in 2006.

The Inquiry continues tomorrow.

Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson

Tessa Jowell says family "destroyed" by press

The former secretary for culture media and sport told the Leveson Inquiry today that her family had “been destroyed” by intense media harassment.

Tessa Jowell, culture secretary from 2001 to 2007, became emotional as she described the “total” invasion of privacy she and her family had suffered.

Detailing what she called “obsessive curiosity” about her family and private life, Jowell said: “In the months to years after I’d find people sitting outside my house with cameras.”

“Only in the last 18 months do I find myself not looking in cars to see if there is somebody waiting,” she added.

In May 2006 she was told by Operation Caryatid, the original phone hacking investigation, that her voicemail had been intercepted 28 times, and subsequently discovered the activity was more extensive. In December 2011 Jowell settled a civil case for breach of privacy with News International.

“There is no evidence yet shown to me that the hacking of my phone was undertaken for commercial motives, but rather in pursuance of an obsessive interest in my troubled family circumstances at that time,” Jowell wrote in her witness statement.

She added that she was “deeply shocked” when she read Metropolitan police’s DCS Keith Surtees’s evidence, in which he said Jowell had declined to sign a statement to be used in the prosecutions of former News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire when she was first informed of phone hacking in August 2006.

“It is untrue,” she told the Inquiry. “Had I been asked at that time to provide a witness statement I would have.”

She said she “sought clarification” from the police over how she could contribute but was assured there was nothing further to do, writing in her witness statement that her “offers of further help were declined”.

She also said she did not approach the News of the World over the matter because she believed the perpetrators had been imprisoned, and did not complain to the Press Complaints Commission about the press intrusion she suffered.

During her evidence, Jowell and Lord Justice Leveson collided over whether or not the Press Complaints Commission was in fact a regulator. “Regulatory may be the wrong term,” Jowell said, noting that the Commission oversaw media conduct and provided redress for those who felt they had been wronged by the press.

Asked if the DCMS should have taken a more hands-on role in media monitoring, Jowell said such manoeuvres would have “been seen as a step to undermine self-regulation”.

“There’s no halfway house in this,” she said. “Either the media is regulated on statutory basis or it’s self-regulated.”

The Inquiry continues this afternoon with evidence from Lord Mandelson.

Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson