Piers Morgan Phone-Hacking Scandal Widens

From Jamie Doward, guardian.co.uk

Can Piers Morgan survive? It is a question his enemies and fans on both sides of the Atlantic are asking with increasing urgency. The position of the former tabloid editor turned CNN chat show host looks vulnerable as the phone-hacking scandal continues to unfold with fresh revelations almost daily.

But unlike other senior journalists caught up in the scandal, it is not Scotland Yard that has been responsible for turning up the heat on Morgan. Rather, in what his enemies might suggest is proof that there is such a thing as divine retribution, it is Morgan's unchecked vanity. Morgan, who edited the Daily Mirror for nearly a decade until 2004, faces questions over a series of boasts that suggest he was at the very least familiar with the practice of phone hacking.

Morgan admitted in a column for the Daily Mail in 2006 that he had heard a message left by Sir Paul McCartney on the phone of Heather Mills, then his wife, in which the former Beatle sounded "lonely, miserable and desperate". The disclosure has prompted Mills to claim the message could have been heard only by hacking into her phone.

Certainly, Morgan appears to have known that there were people capable of hacking phones on behalf of journalists. When pressed about such activities on Desert Island Discs, Morgan claimed "a lot of it was done by third parties, rather than the staff themselves... that's not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work."

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