Morgan told how to hack, says Paxman

FORMER DAILY Mirror editor Piers Morgan once told Jeremy Paxman how to access voicemail messages, the Leveson Inquiry heard yesterday.

Newsnight anchorman Mr Paxman said he attended a lunch at Mirror headquarters in Canary Wharf in September 2002, when Mr Morgan teased Ulrika Jonsson about her relationship with former England football manager Sven-goran Eriksson, saying he knew about a conversation they had.

Mr Paxman said Mr Morgan explained to him how to access people’s phone messages after teasing the Swedish television presenter about the conversation.

Mr Paxman told the inquiry: “He turned to me and said ‘Have you got a mobile phone?’

“I said yes and he asked if there was a security setting on the message bit of it. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“He then explained the way to get access to people’s messages was to 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’.”

Paxman said he remembered the lunch for two reasons: he wondered why he had been invited and because of what Morgan said.

“Mr Morgan was teasing Ulrika that he knew what had happened in a conversation between her and Sven-goran Eriksson,” he told the inquiry, “I don’t know if he was repeating a conversation he had heard or he was imagining this conversation.

“To be fair to him I should imagine both possibly because he probably was imagining it.”

Paxman said Morgan put on a funny Swedish voice in “a rather bad parody”.

He added: “I don’t know if he was making this up, making up the conversation, but it was clearly something he was familiar with and I wasn’t. “I didn’t know that this went on.” The veteran presenter said Morgan’s treatment of Jonsson was close to bullying. “I didn’t like it,” he said. Morgan, who now has his own chat show for CNN in America, appeared by video link at the hearing in December last year.

At the time details from the lunch had not emerged but he told the inquiry he was “still very proud of a lot of the very good stuff that both the Mirror and the News of the World did during my tenure as editor”.

Yesterday Lord Reid, who was Home Secretary when the investigation into phone hacking at the News of theworld bore fruit, was asked why more was not made of it after the arrests of royal editor Clive Goodman and private eye Glenn Mulcaire in 2006.

Lord Reid told the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice that at the time of Mulcaire and Goodman’s arrests the Government’s and Metropolitan Police’s focus was on Operation Overt, to foil a liquid bomb plot.