Piers Morgan: MP’s Hacking Claims Against Me Are ‘Nonsense’

CNN host Piers Morgan was brought up in Rupert and James Murdoch’s testimony before the U.K. Parliament Tuesday, when MP Louise Mensch asked Rupert toward the end of the hearing about Morgan boasting in his book The Insider of using phone hacking to obtain scoops (Morgan was editor of tabloids the Daily Mirror from 1995-2004 and News of the World from 1994-95, the latter of which is the defunct News Corp.-owned paper at the center of the scandal).

Morgan was quick to deny the allegation on Twitter, saying, “I’ve never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone.” He went on to say that he only spoke of the practice in general terms, not of doing so himself: “I wrote in my book that someone warned me phones could be hacked, so I changed my pin number. That’s it.”

The British host had yet to address the questions surrounding his time as a tabloid editor on his program, Piers Morgan Tonight, until Monday night. “When I worked for him [Rupert], he wanted his editors to be tough, to be ruthless, be aggressive… but always to operate within the law,” he said on the show.

In Tuesday’s testimony Rupert and James both denied knowledge of phone hacking at any of their papers before such allegations were uncovered in the press. In a statement Rupert read at the end of Tuesday’s testimony, he said, “Invading people’s privacy by listening to their voicemail is wrong. Paying police officers for information is wrong.  They are inconsistent with our codes of conduct and neither has any place, in any part of the company I run.”