Piers Morgan will keep his £50m newspaper and TV contract with Murdoch-owned News UK despite a High Court ruling that he knew about, and was involved in, phone hacking when editor of the Daily Mirror, insiders have said.
Mr Morgan insisted he had “never hacked a phone or told anybody else to hack a phone” as he rejected Friday’s judgement in favour of the Duke of Sussex, which found “no doubt” that the former editor knew about the practice.
In a typically punchy statement delivered outside his front door, Mr Morgan dismissed the allegations that have dogged him for years, blaming claims made “by old foes of mine with an axe to grind”, singling out royal author Omid Scobie.
The TalkTV presenter and Sun columnist is not due to return to the airwaves until next week, with TalkTV airing a highlights compilation in his slot on Friday night.
News UK sources indicated that the ruling would not affect his contract with News UK. Morgan is expected to return to the airwaves next week.
But the verdict is particularly sensitive for the business. The judge said other key Mirror Group figures were aware of illegal activity, including Richard Wallace, another former Mirror editor who is now the head of TV at News UK.
Wallace, who replaced Morgan as the tabloid’s editor in 2004, has said hacking might have taken place in the newsroom without his knowledge.
The Duke of Sussex’s £140,000 award was reported in stories on The Sun and TalkTV websites which did not mention the judge’s verdict on Morgan and other MGM figures.
Harry is bringing a separate phone-hacking case against the publisher of The Sun, due to begin in January.
Denying any involvement in hacking, Morgan said: “I wasn’t called as a witness by either side in the case, nor was I asked to provide any statement. I would have very happily agreed to do either or both of those things had I been asked.
“Nor did I have a single conversation with any of the Mirror Group lawyers throughout the entire legal process.
“So I wasn’t able to respond to the many false allegations that were spewed about me in court by old foes of mine with an axe to grind, most of which, inexplicably, were not even challenged in my absence by the Mirror Group counsel.”
Morgan has engaged in a war of words with Mr Scobie, the royal biographer who was called a “reliable witness” by Mr Justice Fancourt, after giving evidence that the then editor would have been aware of hacking at the Mirror.
Mr Scobie, who worked as an intern at Mirror Group, said he overheard Morgan being told that the source of a story about Kylie Minogue was the singer’s voicemail.
Mr Morgan has said claims in the biographer’s book Endgame, concerning his alleged friendship with Queen Camilla, were untrue, calling him a “liar” on his TalkTV show. Mr Scobie said his book was based on reliable sources.
Speaking before the ruling, the author told i: “I was witness to a conversation about a story that involved the retrieval of Kylie Minogue’s voicemail and remember being surprised at the time. There was no such word as phone hacking then.
“I worked across a few publications at the group and the more time I spent at the publisher’s office, the more I realised how rampant this culture of phone hacking was.”
Mr Morgan showed no sign of abandoning his feud with the Sussexes, accusing Prince Harry of having a “ruthless, greedy, and hypocritical enthusiasm” for intruding on the lives of his own family.
The TalkTV presenter has previously been questioned under caution by police investigating phone-hacking claims at the Mirror Group in 2013.
He denied any involvement in hacking then, and has stuck to a form of words he repeated when last challenged over the practice, by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg earlier this year.
Asked specifically about whether he had “ever listened to a voicemail without the consent of one of the participants”, Mr Morgan replied: “No, I have made it very clear. My position on hacking is: I have never hacked a phone, I have never told anyone to hack a phone, no one has produced any evidence.”
In another interview with the BBC’s Amol Rajan in May, he said: “I’ve never hacked a phone, I wouldn’t even know how to.”
However in 2006, Mr Morgan wrote an article in the Daily Mail in which he claimed to have been played the tape of a message that Paul McCartney had left for his wife, Heather Mills, on her mobile phone.
Questioned over the voicemail at the Leveson Inquiry in 2011, Mr Morgan refused to identify the person who played him the message.
He told the inquiry he “had no reason or knowledge to believe it (hacking was going on” during his editorship of the Mirror, which ran from 1995 to 2004.
Giving evidence to the inquiry, former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman told of a lunch at Mirror headquarters in 2002 at which he said Mr Morgan described to him how to hack into a mobile phone.
In 2007, Mr Morgan told Press Gazette that phone hacking was an “investigative practice that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years”.