Daily Mirror editor
As editor of the Daily Mirror, Morgan apologised on television for the headline (rendered in upper case) "ACHTUNG! SURRENDER; For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over" on 25 June 1996, a day before England met Germany in a semi-final of the UEFA Euro 1996 football championships. The headline was accompanied by an open letter from Morgan parodying Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war on Germany in 1939. "It was intended as a joke, but anyone who was offended by it must have taken it seriously, and to those people I say sorry," he said. Germany won the match and went on to win the championship final at Wembley Stadium, London.
Under Morgan's leadership, the Daily Mirror spent £16 million on a rebranding project, including the dropping of "Daily" from the masthead in February 1997, which was later reversed. Roy Greenslade wrote in August 1999 that Morgan's editorship "has made a huge difference: his enormous enthusiasm, determination and focus is a major plus".
Morgan was the subject of an investigation in 2000 after Suzy Jagger wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph revealing that he had bought £20,000 worth of shares in the computer company Viglen soon before the Mirror's "City Slickers" column tipped Viglen as a good buy. Morgan was found by the Press Complaints Commission to have breached the Code of Conduct on financial journalism, but kept his job. The "City Slickers" columnists, Anil Bhoyrul and James Hipwell, were both found to have committed further breaches of the Code and were sacked before the inquiry concluded. Further enquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry in 2004 cleared Morgan of any charges. On 7 December 2005, Bhoyrul and Hipwell were convicted of conspiracy to breach the Financial Services Act. During the trial it emerged that Morgan had bought £67,000 worth of Viglen shares, emptying his bank account and investing under his (first) wife's name as well.
The Mirror attempted to move mid-market in 2002, eschewing the more trivial stories of show-business and gossip, and appointed Christopher Hitchens as a columnist, but sales declined. In October 2003, journalist and television personality Jeremy Clarkson emptied a glass of water over Morgan during the last flight of Concorde in response to some photographs published in the Mirror. In March 2004, at the British Press Awards, Clarkson punched Morgan three times during another argument. In Campbell v MGN Ltd, the Law Lords in May 2004 found in favour of model Naomi Campbell on privacy grounds after the Mirror had published a photograph of her entering a Narcotics Anonymous clinic. Morgan was critical of the judgement saying it was "a good day for lying, drug-abusing prima donnas who want to have their cake with the media and the right to then shamelessly guzzle with their Cristal champagne."
In the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, Morgan was sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror "with immediate effect" on 14 May 2004, after refusing to apologise to Sly Bailey, then head of Trinity Mirror, for authorising the newspaper's publication of fake photographs. The photos were alleged to show Iraqi prisoners being abused by British Army soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Within days the photographs were shown to be crude fakes. According to official British sources, the photographs were apparently taken in North-West England. Under the headline "SORRY..WE WERE HOAXED", the Mirror responded that it had fallen victim to a "calculated and malicious hoax" and apologised for the publication of the photographs. However, Morgan refused to admit that the photographs were faked, and stated that the abuse shown in the photographs is similar to the sort of abuse that was happening in the British Army in Iraq at the time.
During Morgan's tenure as editor, the Daily Mirror was advised by Steven Nott that voicemail interception was possible by means of a standard PIN code. Despite staff initially expressing enthusiasm for the story it did not appear in the paper, although it did subsequently feature in a South Wales Argus article and on BBC Radio 5 Live in October 1999. On 18 July 2011, Nott was visited by officers of Operation Weeting.
He came under criticism for his "boasting" about phone hacking from Conservative MP Louise Mensch, who has since apologised for these accusations.
In July 2011, in a sequence of articles, political blogger Paul Staines alleged that while editor of the Daily Mirror in 2002 Morgan published a story concerning the affair of Sven-Göran Eriksson and Ulrika Jonsson while knowing it to have been obtained by phone hacking.
On 20 December 2011, Morgan appeared as a witness by satellite link from the United States at the Leveson Inquiry. While he said he had no reason to believe that phone hacking had occurred at the Mirror while he was in charge there, he admitted to hearing a recording of an answerphone message left by Paul McCartney for Heather Mills, but refused to "discuss where that tape was played or who made [it] – it would compromise a source." Appearing as a witness at the same Inquiry on 9 February 2012, Mills was asked under oath if she had ever made a recording of McCartney's phone call or had played it to Morgan; she replied: "Never". She said that she had never authorised Morgan, or anybody, to access or listen to her voicemails. Mills told the inquiry that Morgan, "a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years", would have relished telling the inquiry if she had played a personal voicemail message to him.
On 23 May 2012, the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman was a witness at the Leveson Inquiry. He recalled a lunch with the Mirror editor in September 2002 at which Morgan outlined the means of hacking [or accessing] a mobile phone voicemail, using the SIM card network's default security code.
On 28 November 2012, the Channel 4 documentary Taking on the Tabloids, fronted by the actor and phone hacking victim Hugh Grant, showed footage from a 2003 interview with Morgan by the singer and phone hacking victim Charlotte Church, during which he explained to her how to avoid answerphone messages being listened to by journalists. He said: "You can access ... voicemails by typing in a number. Now, are you really telling me that journalists aren't going to do that?"
On 29 November 2012 the official findings of the Leveson Inquiry were released, in which Lord Justice Leveson said that Morgan's testimony under oath on phone hacking was "utterly unpersuasive". He stated: "[The] evidence does not establish that [Morgan] authorised the hacking of voicemails or that journalists employed by TMG [Trinity Mirror Group] were indulging in this practice ... What it does, however, clearly prove is that he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it."
On 6 December 2013, Morgan was interviewed, under caution, by police officers from Operation Weeting investigating phone hacking allegations at Mirror Group Newspapers during his tenure as editor.
On 24 September 2014, the Trinity Mirror publishing group admitted for the first time that some of its journalists had been involved in phone hacking and agreed to pay compensation to four people who sued for the alleged hacking of voicemails. Six other phone-hacking claims had already been settled. The BBC reported that it had seen legal papers showing that although the alleged hacking could have taken place as early as 1998, the bulk of the alleged wrongdoing took place in the early 2000s when Morgan was the Daily Mirror editor. The admissions by Trinity Mirror came whilst the Metropolitan Police were investigating into the phone hacking allegations. Morgan has always denied any involvement in the practice.
In June 2023, during his case against Morgan's former employer, Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), Prince Harry accused Morgan of attacking himself and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to dissuade him from his legal action and of hacking his phone and that of his mother Diana, Princess of Wales. On 15 December 2023 Harry was awarded £140,600 by the High Court in damages against MGN, after 15 out of 33 sample articles about him in his claim were ruled as being the product of phone hacking or other unlawful information gathering. In the ruling, Mr Justice Fancourt said Morgan and other editors knew about the phone hacking at their publications and were involved in it. In a statement made in response to the ruling, Morgan denied that he was involved in any phone hacking and reviled Harry. His statement was met with widespread criticism including from the former chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation Alan Moses.
As a result of the judge's ruling, the pressure group Hacked Off called for the police to open an investigation into possible perjury committed by senior staff members at The Mirror, during the Leveson Inquiry.
