A former Daily Mirror journalist has claimed that phone hacking was a “bog-standard journalistic tool” when Piers Morgan was editor of the paper.

James Hipwell, who was dismissed from the paper for his part in a market manipulation scandal, even alleged that a fellow journalist had hacked Morgan’s phone on Hipwell’s behalf.

Before being fired in 2000, Hipwell said a showbusiness journalist “who felt I was being treated unfairly by management” offered to hack Morgan’s phone to see if it would help his case against disciplinary proceedings.

Hipwell said the colleague did it “in front of me … I don’t think it elicited a great deal of information. But he certainly tried. Perhaps there wasn’t a message there. But he did use the technique to hack into Mr Morgan’s phone, at the beginning of 2000.”

Sitting at “close hand” to the showbiz desk at the Mirror, his statement to the inquiry said: “I witnessed journalists carrying out repeated privacy infringements, using what has now become a well-known technique to hack in to voicemail systems… The openness and frequency of their hacking activities gave me the impression that hacking was considered a bog-standard journalistic tool for gathering information.”

He said journalists discussed it openly, but never witnessed them doing so in front of Morgan, who yesterday denied having any knowledge of hacking at the Mirror.

Hipwell said on one occassion, “I heard members of the Mirror team joking about having deleted a message from a celebrity’s voicemail in order to ensure that no journalists from The Sun would get the same scoop by hacking in and hearing it themselves”.

Hipwell worked on the Mirror‘s City Slickers business pages before being dismissed for his involvement in a “buy, tip, sell” share fraud. He was given a six-month jail-term in 2005, half of which was suspended.

(Source: MediaGuardian)

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