Piers Morgan launched a defiant rant against Omid Scobie after a High Court judge accepted evidence that the former newspaper editor knew journalists were involved in phone hacking.
He described Mr Scobie, an alleged friend of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle who recently penned a book viciously attacking the Royal Family, as a “deluded fantasist”. The TV presenter also took aim at Prince Harry, saying he “wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped him around his California-tanned face.”
In the High Court ruling Mr Justice Fancourt concluded “there can be no doubt” that editors of Mirror Group Newspaper (MGN) titles knew about phone hacking but did not tell the company’s board or chief executive about it. Mr Morgan, who was The Daily Mirror’s editor between 1995 and 2004, said he had “never hacked a phone or told anybody else to hack a phone,” adding: “And nobody has produced any actual evidence to prove that I did.”
Mr Morgan directly criticised the testimony of both Mr Scobie and former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell in his statement, made outside Piers’ home this afternoon.
He said: “I note the judge appears to have believed the evidence of Omid Scobie, who lied about me in his new book, and he lied about me in court, and the whole world now knows him to be a deluded fantasist. And he believed the evidence of Alastair Campbell, another proven liar who spun this country into an illegal war.”
Mr Morgan accused Mr Scobie of lying after he wrote that the TalkTV host has phone calls with Queen Camilla, saying: “Never had one phone call with Queen Camilla”.
In the passage in Scobie’s book, he claimed that Queen Camilla thanked the broadcaster for “quietly defending the Firm” in the aftermath of Harry and Meghan’s estrangement from the Royal Family.
Mr Scobie shrugged off the comments during Thursday’s episode of ITV’s This Morning, saying: “I don’t know what he says, I only go by the reporting I have. He’s spoken a lot about his friendship with Camilla [so] I don’t know what to make of that.”
During the trial, the judge said he found Mr Scobie to be a “straight-forward and reliable witness and I accept what he said about Mr Morgan’s involvement in the Minogue/Gooding story,” adding: “No evidence was called by MGN to contradict it.”
Mr Morgan also blasted Prince Harry’s criticism of the media at large in his statement today, saying: “Prince Harry’s outrage at media intrusion into the private lives of the Royal Family is only matched by his own ruthless, greedy, and hypocritical enthusiasm for doing it himself.
“He talked today about the appalling behaviour of the press but this is a guy who’s repeatedly trashed his family in public for hundreds of millions of dollars, even as two of its most senior and respected members were dying – his grandparents.
“It’s hard to imagine, frankly, more appalling behaviour than that.”
Referring to his involvement in the case, Mr Morgan said: “The judgment finds there is just one article relating to the prince published in The Daily Mirror during my entire nine-year tenure as editor that he thinks may have involved some unlawful information gathering. To be clear I had then, and still have, zero knowledge of how that particular story was gathered. All his other claims against the Daily Mirror under my leadership were rejected.”
The presenter added that he was not called by a witness by either side in the court case or asked to provide a statement – although said he would have “very happily” done so. Responding to Mr Morgan’s remark via X, formerly Twitter, Mr Campbell said he “seems to have forgotten about the several inquiries, including with evidence given on oath, which cleared me of lying or any other wrongdoing in relation to Iraq.”
Following the ruling, an MGN spokesperson said: “We welcome today’s judgment that gives the business the necessary clarity to move forward from events that took place many years ago. Where historical wrongdoing took place, we apologise unreservedly, have taken full responsibility and paid appropriate compensation.”
