Er, prison game
Piers is going down, still clutching at straws
The blank rebuttals being offered by Piers Morgan this afternoon – in the wake of growing evidence of his involvement with phone-hackers while at MGN newspapers – are beginning to have the credibility of Andy Coulson’s last December, and the contradictory flavour of Rebekah Brooks’ ‘misspeaking’ in front of the 2003 CM&S Committee. Consider what Morgan gave as his blanket denial after Louise Mensch’s half-baked accusation last week (my highlighting):
“I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone.“
Now read what he said on Desert Island Discs – in the light of the red type above – about phone hackers:
“obviously you were running the results of their work”
So what you mean Piers, is, obviously but without your knowledge? How can something be obviously unknown? It’s bollocks. Here’s a further assortment of knobbly testicles from the same broadcast:
“I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner as tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do…”
Er…very happy to be a beast in 2009, when it all seemed like harmless fun – but Snow White in 2011 now it might involve a spell in the slammer. “All these things I used to get up to”: what does that mean – worse than hacking phones? Blagging emails, Piers? “The stuff we used to do”. What was that, Piers? Hacking coffins?
One of my sources for this morning’s damning Slog piece about the hacking of Amanda Holden’s phone while Morgan was at MGN strenuously maintains that it would have been “so unlikely as to have been beyond belief” that the Mirror editor didn’t know what was going on under his studious, highly-involved stewardship. Rewind to the Independent’s piece earlier this week by James Moore and Ian Burrell. They quote Morgan colleague James Hipwell as saying:
‘”Piers was extremely hands-on as an editor. He was on the [newsroom] floor every day, walking up and down behind journalists, looking over their shoulders. I can’t say 100 per cent that he knew about it. But it was inconceivable he didn’t.”
This is pure Newscorp double-think at its most mendacious. Those of us who’ve been writing about these low-life for what seems like centuries now are fed up to the back teeth of watching people’s intelligence being insulted by their ilk.
But then, as I’ve always maintained, those who worked at Newscorp for Murdoch tabloids found themselves corrupted beyond recovery. Once a Wapping liar, always a Wapping liar.
But in the meantime, o Romping Arse, what about the Amanda Holden story? Or should we dig deeper into the Paul McCartney restaurant-tiff-with-Heather history, eh? Whaddya think, Piers? I mean, it’s your call….
The Slog 