Piers Morgan in TV row with Tory accuser

12 April 2012

Piers Morgan was involved in an extraordinary TV row with a Conservative MP who had accused him of phone-hacking while protected from legal action by parliamentary privilege.

Louise Mensch said the former Britain's Got Talent judge had admitted that he intercepted voicemails when he was editor of the Daily Mirror.

The MP claimed during a Commons select committee hearing that Morgan boasted in his 2005 bestseller based on his diaries that it won him Scoop of the Year for exposing an affair between Sven-Goran Eriksson and Ulrika Jonsson.

Morgan confronted Ms Mensch on CNN last night and demanded she correct what he called "an absolute blatant lie" and "an outrageous attempt to smear my name". He added: "At no stage in my book or indeed outside of my book have I ever boasted of phone hacking for any stories."

During a nine-minute row live on the American news network, Morgan repeatedly demanded Ms Mensch withdraw her allegation. The MP declined to discuss her claims and referred all questions to her statement in the Commons made under privilege.

"I said what I said in the committee," she said. "To repeat something outside parliament does not give me that cloak of privilege. Morgan is a very rich man."

She added: "I'm sure that the ferocious investigative journalists at CNN and across the news media in the United States will take careful note at what was said in the committee, and look into it." Morgan, who works for the American network, replied: "Show some balls, repeat what you said about me. What she did today was a deliberate attempt to smear my name, CNN's name and the Mirror's name.

"For the record, in my time I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone."
Ms Mensch's position weakened when it emerged she had wrongly quoted from Morgan's diaries during her cross-questioning of Rebekah Brooks yesterday.

She said incorrectly that he boasted of using a "little trick" to hack into a voicemail and get a scoop. In fact, Morgan referred to "little trick" with regards to suspicions that his own phone had been hacked.

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