Piers Morgan knew his journalists were using private voicemails as the basis of their stories, the royal biographer Omid Scobie has told Prince Harry’s phone-hacking trial.
Scobie, who co-wrote a sympathetic book about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, told the high court he was doing work experience at the Daily Mirror in 2002 when he overheard Morgan discussing the source of a story about Kylie Minogue with a reporter.
He said in a witness statement: “Mr Morgan was asking how confident they were in the reporting and was told that the information had come from voicemails. I recall being surprised to hear this at the time, which is why it stuck in my mind.”
Scobie told the high court that Morgan “seemed reassured” after being informed that the story about Minogue’s private life came from voicemails. The journalist said Morgan was “extremely hands-on” and would want to know how his reporters had obtained information. “That’s any editor’s question: what’s the sourcing? Who is the source?” he said.
Prince Harry and the other alleged victims claim Morgan and other Mirror executives authorised illegal behaviour to obtain exclusive stories, such as accessing celebrities’ voicemails, paying private investigators and “blagging” personal financial records.
Morgan, now the lead presenter on Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, has always insisted there is no evidence he knowingly commissioned stories based on illegal voicemail interception while editing the Daily Mirror between 1995 and 2004.
Mirror Group Newspapers is disputing much of the evidence in this trial and argues that Harry and the other claimants have waited too long to bring their cases.
Andrew Green KC, the Mirror’s barrister, suggested Scobie had invented the incident involving Morgan and it was a “false memory”.
The lawyer accused Scobie of having a “vested interest” in helping Harry because the journalist’s career had benefited from his closeness to the royal couple. The court heard that the Sussexes had “expressly authorised” their former spokesperson Jason Knauf to brief Scobie when he wrote his book Finding Freedom.
Scobie said all his contact with the royal couple was through their spokesperson. “There was no communication between myself and the Sussexes … Jason sat down and went through a number of points while we were factchecking the book.”
He told the court that he simply wanted to be “fair” to the couple in his writing, unlike other royal correspondents. He said: “I’m constantly called the couple’s friend, mouthpiece, cheerleader. What I’m doing here today is making my life more difficult.”
The journalist said he had never socialised with Harry, and he expected to be heavily criticised by tabloid newspapers for giving evidence in this trial. Scobie said he was tired of being described by the Daily Mail and other outlets as a “pal” of the couple.
Prince Harry is one of four alleged phone-hacking victims whose claims are being tested in a continuing civil trial at the high court. The prince and the other alleged victims claim they were illegally targeted by journalists working for Mirror Group Newspapers – the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and People tabloids – with the knowledge of senior executives.
Phone hacking involved calling an individual’s phone number and attempting to guess the pin code that provided remote access to voicemails. Thousands of victims were hacked by journalists working for Mirror Group Newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, leading to decades of legal proceedings that have cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
In addition to this case, Prince Harry is bringing separate phone-hacking claims against the publisher of the Sun and the publisher of the Daily Mail.
In his evidence, Scobie said he believed Morgan’s discussion of voicemails about Kylie Minogue related to an article by the Daily Mirror showbiz journalist James Scott that was published a few days later under the headline “Can’t get you out of my bed”.
The article quoted “friends” of Minogue talking about the state of her relationship and had specific details of recent discussions between the singer and her estranged boyfriend.
Scobie claims he has since seen evidence that a private investigator involved in phone hacking sent an invoice to the Mirror headlined “K Minogue” charging £170 for “extensive inquiries carried out on your behalf”.
The royal reporter said he was not shocked to hear Morgan discussing the use of voicemails because he had already encountered phone hacking while doing work experience at the People, the Mirror’s sister newspaper.
He told the court: “I recall being given by a journalist a list of mobile numbers followed by a detailed verbal description of how to listen to voicemails, as if it were a routine news-gathering technique. I was taken aback by what seemed completely immoral and I never carried out the task.”
Andrew Green KC, the Mirror’s barrister, said it was improbable that Scobie would have been asked to illegally hack phones while on work experience.
Scobie replied: “You would be surprised at what happened during internships.”
The court previously heard evidence from the former Sunday Mirror journalist Dan Evans, who told the court that illegal activity was “bog-standard” at the tabloid newspaper and that he was taught how to hack phones by its former editor Tina Weaver. “The paper did dodgy stuff on basically every story and that is how we operated,” he said.
