Leveson Inquiry: Heather Mills denies allowing access to voicemail

Chat show host Morgan previously told the inquiry he listened to a voicemail message left for Heather Mills by Sir Paul, but refused to say when or where he heard it because he wanted to protect a “source”.

Ms Mills said she had never authorised Morgan, or anybody, to access or listen to her voicemails, and neither had she ever played a recording to him.

“I couldn’t quite believe that he would even try to insinuate, a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years, would relish in telling the court if I had played a voicemail message to him,” she said.

Ms Mills told the inquiry that in early 2001 she and Sir Paul had argued about a trip she was planning to Gujurat, India, and while she stayed with a friend he left her a series of voicemails.

“In the morning, there were many messages, but they were saved messages which I did not understand, because normally they wouldn’t be but I didn’t think too much of it,” she said.

“I thought I must have pressed a wrong button. There were about 25 messages.

“One of them said, ‘Please forgive me’ and sang one of his songs on the voicemail.”

She told the hearing she never recorded the messages and deleted them straight away.

She was then called by a former Trinity Mirror employee – not a Daily Mirror journalist, nor anybody working under Morgan – saying they had heard the message.

“I said, ‘There’s no way that you could know that unless you have been listening to my messages’,” she told the inquiry.

She said she threatened to take legal action if the story was published, and it was not at the time.

But in 2006, in a piece in the Daily Mail, Morgan referred to having listened to the message.

Giving evidence in December, Morgan told the inquiry he would not disclose the source who played him a tape of the message.

He said: “I am not going to discuss where I heard it or who played it to me. I don’t think it’s right.”

Detectives from Operation Weeting contacted Ms Mills saying they had evidence her voicemails had been hacked, she added.

Also yesterday, the editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers refused to withdraw an allegation that Hugh Grant made “mendacious smears”, unless the actor withdrew his own suggestions that the group had been involved in phone hacking.

Paul Dacre told the inquiry that Grant was “obsessed with trying to drag the Daily Mail into another newspaper’s scandal”.

He said he had had to issue the statement in November in order to “fight fire with fire”.

The editor of the Daily Mail was recalled to the inquiry to answer questions about Mr Grant’s claims that a story about his relationship with socialite Jemima Khan was likely to have come from illicit eavesdropping.

The story, published in the Mail on Sunday in February 2007, claimed Mr Grant’s relationship with Miss Khan was being affected by telephone conversations he was having with a “plummy-voiced executive”.