SMOKE AND MIRRORS
"For the record, at my time at the Mirror and the News of the World I have never hacked a phone, told anybody to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone," declared Piers Moron last week.
He was referring to MP Louise Mensch’s spectacular cock-up when she claimed at the culture select committee hearing that he had ’fessed up in his book The Insider to having obtained the Sven ’n’ Ulrika scoop credited to the 3am girls (Eyes passim) from phone hacking. His actual literary account of the scoop’s provenance featured in the last Eye, which Mensch should perhaps have purchased: to grant Moron the moral high ground in any argument is quite a spectacular achievement.
The paper’s “Sven Sational!” double-page spread of Friday 19 April 2002 contains no reference to phone messages at all: it speaks merely of “quiet tête-à-têtes” between the pair (it was left to the News of the World two days later to give details of the couple’s “sexy phone chats in Swedish”). But the following Tuesday’s Mirror did reveal that “Sven Goran Eriksson told new love Ulrika Jonsson in an emotional phone call yesterday he had decided to put his personal life on hold until after the World Cup… He told Ulrika, 34: ‘I still love you, but please give me time – my priority is to sort out the finals.”
Eyes and ears
Many staff were convinced at the time that the Mirror had simply swiped the Screws’s scoop, several weeks in the planning – but that can hardly be the case, because it would mean the story may well, after all, have been “based on the hacking of a phone”. And Moron is an honourable man. Admittedly, as his desperation increased last week, he was pointing his Twitter followers in the direction of a story in Eye 1053, which noted: “Internal investigations failed to establish whether the Mirror was tipped off by a disgruntled Screws hack or whether the story was leaked by Ulrika’s publicity agent, Melanie Cantor, in return for more ‘sympathetic’ coverage.” But he has yet to make reference to our subsequent stories pointing out that Eriksson himself has requested that Scotland Yard tell him if his mobile phone details appear in Glenn Mulcaire’s notebooks (Eye 1283), that Moron told colleagues “you should hear the tape” of phone messages from Paul McCartney to Heather Mills (Eye 1281) or that “Trinity Mirror journalists, like those on other tabloids, certainly made great use of private detectives” (Eye 1287).
Nor has he directly addressed the fact, dug up by bloggers last week, that he wrote in his Mail on Sunday column in 2009 that he had been amused to receive a voicemail from Nancy Dell’Olio because “the Daily Mirror, under my editorship, exposed Sven’s fling with Ulrika Jonsson after learning of a similar message left by the then England manager on her phone. I can only hope and pray the gutter press (ha ha) aren't hacking into my mobile now.”
BT-baiting
He may also hope and pray that no one who attended it still remembers a lunch held in September 2002 in a private room at the swanky new Four Seasons Hotel in Canary Wharf, just by the offices of the Daily Mirror. The occasion was one of the monthly bunfights hosted for Moron by convivial Trinity Mirror chairman Sir Victor Blank. The dozen or so guests at this one included Ulrika Jonsson, Jeremy Paxman and the then chief executive of BT, Ben Verwaayen.
Moron’s feeble attempts to master a Scandinavian accent in front of Jonsson – he was trying to wind her up by mimicking conversations with Eriksson – were received with embarrassed titters. Then he started to hector Verwaayen, roaring that BT “should start providing better security for pin numbers for mobile phones! You should tell your customers to go and change them!”
At which point one might have expected the Trinity Mirror chairman to ask how his editor seemed to know the intimate details of Jonsson and Eriksson’s phone calls. But nothing was heard from the man who had so famously protected Moron in the “City Slickers” scandal, ignoring chief executive Philip Graf’s pleas to have him fired.
Having mocked Ulrika and hectored Verwaayen, Moron then launched into his party piece – a re-enactment of Heather Mills arguing on the phone with Paul McCartney and the ex-Beatle winning her round by singing “We Can Work it Out”.
Whispering grass
“Sometimes reporters made what was known as blagging phone calls,” admitted former Mirror hack Jessica Callan of her time at the paper in her 2007 book Wicked Whispers. “This was when they rang a doctor/hospital/credit card company/estate agent/hotel to obtain information by pretending to be a celeb or an aide or family member of the star. Either a reporter would do it themselves or they’d pay a private detective who was used to this line of work to do it.”
Blagging medical or financial records is, of course, illegal. Moron – who employed Callan in 2000 – would no doubt point out that there is a legal defence when such subterfuge is in the public interest. Which it presumably always was in Callan’s job – after all, she headed the 3am girls team of showbiz gossip columnists.
A numbers game
On the orders of her line manager Kevin O’Sullivan (now TV reviewer on the Sunday Mirror), Callan obtained DJ Chris Moyles’s home phone number so they could print it in the paper. “Kevin announced to us, ‘I want someone to get me Lard Boy’s home phone number.’ With the help of an agency I used to track down information on people, I soon got hold of Chris Moyles’s home number and emailed it to Kevin … As Kevin had predicted, Moylesy had been inundated at home with calls from our readers taking the piss out of him. He’d taken the phone off the hook and had arranged for his number to be changed. ‘You just tell Moyles,’ Kevin snapped down the phone to the Radio 1 PR, ‘if he says one more thing about the girls, then we’ll print his parents’ home phone number.’”
The rest of the time, of course, the 3am column specialised in hot showbiz scoops such as this one from February 2004: “Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding has a rival for her boyfriend Mikey Green from Phixx – in the shape of Keira Knightley… Keira, 18, made a beeline for Mikey – who’s been dating Sarah for just over a year – and they swapped phone numbers. We can’t imagine Sarah will be pleased when she learns that Keira – who recently dated Oscar-winning star of The Pianist, Adrien Brody – has already left a message on Mikey’s phone.”