JPDoy

In December 2011 a man sat in front of a public inquiry, under oath, and told a story that proved his own paper had been inside somebody else's phone. Then he denied it. His name was Piers Morgan. He was giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry by video link from Los Angeles. Robert Jay QC was questioning him. Lord Justice Leveson was listening. Morgan told them about a voicemail. Paul McCartney, still married to Heather Mills at the time, had left a message on her mobile. Morgan called it heart breaking. McCartney begging his wife to come home, then singing We Can Work It Out down the answerphone. He had heard it. He admitted that. Then Jay asked the only question that mattered. Who played it to you. Morgan would not say. He refused to name his source. He refused to say where he was. He refused to say when. So Leveson made the point for him. The only people lawfully entitled to listen to that message were Heather Mills, or somebody authorised on her behalf. Nobody else. If Morgan heard it, and Mills did not play it to him, then somebody had been inside her phone. Days later Heather Mills issued a statement. I can categorically state that I have never ever played Piers Morgan a tape of any kind, never mind a voice message from my ex-husband. There it is. The message left her phone without her knowing and arrived in the ear of a newspaper editor in 2001. That is what phone hacking was. That is the whole thing. One voicemail, one editor, one question he would not answer. And what did he tell the inquiry about hacking at his own paper. I don't believe so. To the best of my recollection, I do not believe so. In August of that year he had gone further. I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone. Now hold the dates. Five years before Leveson, in 2006, Morgan wrote a column describing that voicemail in detail. He knew what he had heard and he knew how strange it was. It was in his own handwriting half a decade earlier. And still he sat in front of a public inquiry and said he could not say who had given it to him. He also called the suggestion he had listened to Ulrika Jonsson's voicemails to break her affair with Sven Goran Eriksson absolute nonsense. Asked whether he had once advised her to change the PIN code on her phone, he said he did not remember the specifics. The PIN code is the entire mechanism. If it is not changed, anyone can dial in and hear your messages. Morgan explained that himself in GQ in 2006. He understood exactly how it worked. He just would not admit it had been done at his paper. This is the trick, and he has never stopped using it. He never denies anything outright. He says to the best of my recollection. He says absolute nonsense and then admits he cannot remember. He keeps just enough distance from the fact to survive it, and then he moves on before anyone closes the gap. He never explained how that McCartney message got out of Heather Mills's phone. He never had to. The inquiry moved on. Nobody made him. And when reality gets too close now, he does the same thing in a different form. He blocks it. He blocked this account. So this account can read every word he writes and reply to none of it. He cannot see this post unless somebody sends it to him. And the post he keeps pinned to the top of his own profile, the first thing every visitor sees, is a clip of him telling Cristiano Ronaldo he has good abdominals. September 2019. Still there. One hundred and forty thousand likes. Eight point nine million followers. A bio that reads Media and News Company. And the masterpiece at the top of the page is a seven year old joke about a footballer's stomach. He is dodging it the way he dodged Leveson. The facts arrive anyway. THE VOICEMAIL LEFT HER PHONE. SHE NEVER PLAYED IT TO HIM. HE NEVER SAID WHO DID. AND HE HAS NEVER PAID A PRICE FOR KNOWING.