The BBC’s Newsnight current affairs flagship show will tonight broadcast confirmation from Heather Mills of Guido’s story from July 27 re-posted below:

Yet another Piers Morgan phone-hacking implication has surfaced from his own misguided boasts. Writing in the Daily Mail in 2006 when Sir Paul McCartney split from Heather Mills, Morgan went into some extremely voyeuristic detail about their relationship:

“Stories soon emerged that the marriage was in trouble – at one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone. It was heartbreaking. The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang ‘We Can Work It Out’…”

Who played it to Piers? How did they get it? Did he procure the illegal interception of an electronic communication – an imprisonable offence - with a maximum two-year stretch on conviction?  Looks like it to Guido.

How can Piers say he never authorised phone-hacking when he admits to listening to recordings of the voicemail of a distressed old man and his soon to be ex-wife? How can Piers say he never published anything on the back of phone hacking when he regaled this very story to the world in print under his own byline? Where was the public interest here?

It gets worse, Guido has been told Morgan played the recording out loud to the newsroom for fun. Laughing and mocking Macca’s misery.

In fact this is prima facie evidence of criminality on the part of Piers Morgan. We’re taking our dossier to the Metropolitan Police. Time for Piers Morgan to get a lawyer…

Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights says…

“Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.”

The Sun reports on the launch of our campaign to get a vote on restoring the death penalty. Thousands have already signed up online to support the campaign which we aim to officially launch next week.

Tory MP Philip Davies said: “It’s something where once again the public are a long way ahead of the politicians. I’d go further and restore it for all murderers.”

Fellow Conservative MP Priti Patel, backs the death penalty ”It’s about time the public had a greater say on the issues that we debate. I’m not surprised that this issue has been raised. We need strong deterrents to make people think twice about the crimes they commit.”

Isle of Wight MP Andrew Turner says “Congratulations on your campaign. If there is anything else a humble back-bencher can do to help…”  There is, sign-up to support the campaign which launches next week:

UPDATE: David Nuttall, MP for Bury North and Chris Kelly, MP for Dudley South are the latest MPs to come out for restoring the death penalty.

Guido has  - completely legally - obtained the raw data from the British Information Commissioner’s ‘Operation Motorman’ investigation.  A number crunching analysis of the data shows that between 1997 and 2003 Mirror Group newspapers were invoiced 948 times by “JJ Services”, run by Steve Whittamore, a notorious blagger who specialised in illegally obtaining personal information. For that six year period the total value of the invoices amounted to £442,878.73.

Many of these invoices are addressed to MGN Ltd, publishers of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror.  Nevertheless Guido has identified at least 65 invoices, totalling £20,333.31 which are directly to the Daily Mirror. These invoices are dated between 2001 and 2002. Piers Morgan was the Editor of the Mirror throughout this period.

On Desert Island Discs Morgan told Kirsty Young that, “Not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done by third parties, rather than the staff themselves,” adding, “That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work.” Almost half-a-million quid suggests that quite a lot of that went on.

The “blagging” invoices are for phone records, vehicle registration records, ex-directory numbers, to monitor mobile calls, obtain phone bills and get numbers called as well as paying off bent police officers to provide information. It could be medical records, criminal records or tax records. Blagging is a criminal offence punishable with up to two years jail time. Kate Winslet was blagged and the information was used by Piers Morgan, as he admits in his 10 April 2000 diary entry in The Insider:

“I got back to the office to learn that Kate Winslet, having indicated she would come to our Pride of Britain awards tomorrow, is now saying she can’t. Someone had got hold of her mobile number — I never like to ask how — so I rang her …. ‘Hello,’ she said, sounding a bit taken aback. ‘How did you get my number? I’ve only just changed it. You’ve got to tell me, please, I am so worried now’ ”

“Never liking to ask” is what is known legally as “willful blindness” which is when an individual seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting himself in a position where he will be unaware of facts which would render him liable. Or contrives to pretend such. It doesn’t work in Court because the law takes the view that it is criminally reckless to fail to find out. That in a nutshell is what Piers is, criminally reckless…

John Stuart Mill on the humane liberal case for capital punishment…

“..the most that human laws can do to anyone in the matter of death is to hasten it; the man would have died at any rate; not so very much later, and on the average, I fear, with a considerably greater amount of bodily suffering. Society is asked, then, to denude itself of an instrument of punishment which, in the grave cases to which alone it is suitable, effects its purposes at a less cost of human suffering than any other; which, while it inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than any punishment that we should think of substituting for it.”

As promised:

We petition the government to review all treaties and international commitments which may inhibit the ability of Parliament to restore capital punishment. Following this review, the Ministry of Justice should map out the necessary legislative steps which will be required to restore the death penalty for the murder of children and police officers when killed in the line of duty.

The findings of the review and the necessary substantive legislation to be presented to House of Commons for debate no later than 12 months after this petition passes the acceptance threshold.

One of the problems with our modern unrepresentative democracy is that it is disconnected from the voters. Despite focus groups, polling and intense marketing to voters, politicians are still unable to engage successfully with voters.

There are a number of issues where the political class refuses to carry out the wishes of the people. All polls show that there is majority support for capital punishment, yet there is no majority for it in parliament. It is not even an issue for parliamentarians even though the incidence of homicide is higher now than it was before the abolition of hanging. Now that the government has launched an e-petitions site, Guido will put all the resources at his command into a campaign for a vote on the restoration of capital punishment for child and cop killers. Even if we don’t win the vote on the floor of the House, we shall at least see which MPs believe salus populi suprema est lex, and those that put the welfare of child killers above the wider community. Let them be counted.

Guido intends to launch a campaign website at the end of next week, if you want to help the campaign, in any way, use the contact form below. If 100,000 voters sign the petition we have a chance of getting real justice for the next Baby P…

Yet another Piers Morgan phone-hacking implication has surfaced from his own misguided boasts. Writing in the Daily Mail in 2006 when Sir Paul McCartney split from Heather Mills, Morgan went into some extremely voyeuristic detail about their relationship:

“Stories soon emerged that the marriage was in trouble – at one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone. It was heartbreaking. The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang ‘We Can Work It Out’…”

Who played it to Piers? How did they get it? Did he procure the illegal interception of an electronic communication – an imprisonable offence - with a maximum two-year stretch on conviction?  Looks like it to Guido.

How can Piers say he never authorised phone-hacking when he admits to listening to recordings of the voicemail of a distressed old man and his soon to be ex-wife? How can Piers say he never published anything on the back of phone hacking when he regaled this very story to the world in print under his own byline? Where was the public interest here?

It gets worse, Guido has been told Morgan played the recording out loud to the newsroom for fun. Laughing and mocking Macca’s misery.

In fact this is prima facie evidence of criminality on the part of Piers Morgan. We’re taking our dossier to the Metropolitan Police. Time for Piers Morgan to get a lawyer…

Last night Piers Morgan claimed that his 2009 interview with Kirsty Young where he talked about phone-hacking was about generalities, not anything he himself had done. He repeated his bare-faced lie that he had never published anything knowingly based on “hacking”, which in this context is illegally listening in to mobile phone voicemails. So he denies what he said was what he said, relying on a slight ambiguity in Kirsty’s “money quote” question.

It has become, according to some US commentators, a question of Guido’s credibility versus Morgan’s credibility. That isn’t a contest Guido is ever going to lose. Guido has staked his reputation on his story that the Ulrika/Sven affair story that won Scoop of the Year in 2002 for his Daily Mirror paper was based on illegal voicemail interception. Guido has written testimony from a witness that Piers can’t dispute in any way. Himself.*
Piers is as he himself admits, cocky, that cocky quip is the nail in his coffin on hacking. His admission that

“it was the Daily Mirror, under my editorship, which exposed Sven’s fling with Ulrika Jonsson after learning of a similar message left by the then England manager on her phone”

leaves him no wriggle room. He admits publishing a prize winning story derived from a hacked voicemail intercept. Which is what Guido first claimed and Piers has lied about for weeks. He also aggressively called Louise Mensch MP a liar live on CNN, he owes her a massive apology or risks a defamation suit from her. It is over Piers, ‘fess up son. It is time for that live on CNN mea culpa…

*Source: Serialisation, by the Daily Mail, of God Bless America: Misadventures of a Big Mouth Brit: Diaries of an Englishman in the Land of the Free, bylined by Piers Morgan.

Piers Morgan ‘Desert Island Discs’ interview with Kirsty Young

First broadcast: BBC Radio 4, Sun, 7 Jun 2009

KY: And what about this nice middle class boy who would have to be dealing with I mean essentially people who rake through people’s bins for a living…

PM: Well I…

KY: People who tap peoples phones , people who take secret photographs…

PM: I know but…

KY: …who do all that very nasty down in the gutter stuff, how did you feel about that?

PM: Well to be honest lets put that in to perspective as well, not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done…

KY: Really?

PM: 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. I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here and defend all the things I used to get up to and I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do. I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide and a certainly encompassed the high and the low end of the supposed newspaper market.

Morgan of course is claiming this morning that he was speaking in generalities, clearly he wasn’t, he was talking about the things which in his words “I used to get up to”. In a very changed climate post the revelations of the Milly Dowler hacking, with criminal investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, he is now pretending otherwise…

More over at The Daily Beast.