Morgan pressed on phone-hack questions

Two senior politicians called on Piers Morgan, the CNN presenter who used to edit the Daily Mirror, to answer questions about an article he wrote six years ago in which he said he had listened to a celebrity’s mobile phone voicemail.

As the furore over phone hacking spread to Mirror Group Newspapers, Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the Labour party and John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the Commons culture media and sport select committee, both said they believed Mr Morgan should come back to the UK from the US to answer questions.

In an article in the Daily Mail in 2006, writing about the acrimonious break-up of the marriage of the former model Heather Mills and Sir Paul McCartney, Mr Morgan wrote that he had been “played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone”.

During an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Ms Mills accused Mr Morgan and at least one other contemporary Mirror Group executive of knowing about the hacking of her phone. She said the other executive admitted it to her.

She said there was “no honest way” Mr Morgan could have come by that tape.

However, Mr Morgan described her claims as “extravagant” and pointed out that Ms Mills had been criticised by a High Court judge for being “less than candid” in evidence given when in 2008 she was claiming £125m from her husband in a divorce settlement.

He also pointed out that Sir Paul, in his evidence to the court, claimed that Ms Mills had illegally taped a phone conversation between him and his daughter Stella, and leaked it to the press to discredit him.

A person close to Mirror Group Newspapers, said that the tape in question was not from a mobile phone, but an ordinary landline answering machine and had been sent to the Daily Mirror, but never used as the basis of any story.

Separately, the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston reported details of the 230 occasions on which Mirror Group titles had paid for the services of Jonathan Rees, a private investigator jailed in 2000 for perverting the course of justice.

Mr Peston said the details would be relevant to the investigation of the Leveson panel which is looking into the standards of the UK press. He added that the information confirmed that the use of private investigators was widespread in Fleet Street, although it did not mean that newspapers had transgressed the law.

A spokesman for Trinity Mirror, which owns MGN, said: “All our journalists work within the criminal law and the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct and we have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise.”