Thank you.

Max does his own thing. He -- you know, he -- I wouldn't necessarily know everything that he got up to. I mean, certainly there were instances when copy approval was required. I think that's pretty common, in publicity agents' offices; it was then and I'm sure it is ...

Whilst I worked for Max?

I can -- I don't think Max personally gave information to any of his clients, including Simon Cowell, about his mobile phone. There might have been other people in the office who did. I think I did myself to some of our clients. I don't think Max did, and ...

Yes.

No. I don't spend my life thinking about Mr Morgan. It's a long time ago now, it's 12 years ago. I've had two major organ transplants since I left the Mirror, I've moved on with my life. I do not really think about my time ...

Yes.

No, I didn't. I did raise with Mr Cruddace, the Mirror's in-house lawyer, the possibility that we should put in a disclosure at the bottom of the page, like other financial publications do. Investors Chronicle does this. Our journalists sometimes own shares in companies they write about. You ...

Yes, but that was never discussed. It wasn't a consideration. It should have been, but it wasn't.

We just wanted to produce a really lively, interesting column, which reflected what was happening in the stock market at the time, and I think we did that. I didn't really think about the ethics of what we were doing. Certainly there was no ethical management from our superiors ...

Yes.

Well, we weren't regulated to give investment advice. It's true to say that initially I did not want it to be a share-tipping column. Actually, you know, in the first few months after we launched the column, my co-columnist Mr Bhoyrul went on holiday. During that week I ...

No, I don't think I did. I never saw a copy.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

I've always thought so. I mean, I can understand why people think that I have an axe to grind against him, but it has always been my contention that neither Trinity Mirror nor Mr Morgan took their responsibility for what happened, so, yes, I think I did trade on ...

Yes.

No, not in my experience. You were just paid to be a journalist on the newspaper. You were paid the same whatever.

Well, some of them undoubtedly were. It was quite common to be threatened with the sack. Frankly, if a journalist doesn't bring in enough exclusives or enough stories, then what use is he to a newspaper? This is a highly competitive industry. You can easily be replaced. It takes ...

I think he agreed with it, but said that he had some question mark over the word "menacing".

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Most -- as I have said, most people, I think, come into the profession to be a force for good. You certainly don't do it for the money. You do it because it can be highly enjoyable, can be extremely rewarding, and you ...

Yes.

They can, but in my experience that doesn't happen very often.

It's up to the editor to decide what to do with a story, and often an editor will decide what to do with it, based on the strength of the source. If it's not a particularly good source, or it's someone who is deemed unreliable, then, you ...

No. I don't think so. I mean, if it comes to getting -- if it comes to a journalist being under pressure to reveal a source, then they're not going to reveal it, but they are going to reveal it to their editor. They might not reveal it to ...

No. I mean you don't really have too many secrets with your editor. I mean, he's the editor. He's your boss. He's the one who makes the key decisions. It's so -- you know, it's not a game of -- you know, you can't try ...

But Piers was content to run the story. He asked where it came from. I told him. He thought the source was good enough. He ran the story.

Yes. Sometimes we had the splash. Very rarely. It being a tabloid newspaper, business stories rarely make the front page. We actually launched the column with a story which turned out not to be true about two large supermarket groups merging, Asda and Safeway. I wanted to run it as ...

Of course, it's the front page splash, it's the thing that's going to sell your newspaper. It's the thing that the people in the shops who are going to buy your papers see and they often make their decision on whether they are going to buy ...

Right.

You know, I've described what sort of editor Piers was, but I would often see him late at night, often maybe one of just a few people left at the paper, looking at stories on screen, changing headlines. I mean, this is -- you know, this might even be after ...

Yes. Yes, absolutely, yes.

I asked Mr Cruddace this and he said that we were getting quite a lot of solicitors' letters. I think I'm right in saying we were only successfully sued once by a Mr Victor Kiam from a company that he liked so much that he bought it. It made ...

Yes, that's right.

Yes.

Absolutely, yes.

Yes.

Well, I mean, the thing about showbusiness journalists who work on national tabloids is that they go from newspaper to newspaper. At any one time, half the members of the Mirror showbiz desk had worked on the Sun and vice versa. As I said, I can think of four people ...

Yes.

I guess it was. But I mean I clearly remember him doing it, but I don't think it elicited any information which was going to be useful or interesting. So perhaps I didn't think any more of it. I can remember it -- I remember it happening, but, again ...

Yes.

Yes.

I don't think it elicited a great deal of information, but he certainly -- he certainly tried. I mean, perhaps there was -- you know, perhaps there wasn't a message there, but he did use the technique to hack into Mr Morgan's phone in 2000, at the beginning of ...

Yes.

Yeah. Yes, he did, yes. I mean, in front of me, yes.

I remember it happening, yes.

I can't recall exactly what I said, but I remember Chris Tryhorn, who is bylined here, phoning me and we discussed it, and obviously at that stage phone hacking was in the news because of what had happened to Clive Goodman and the News of the World, and I ...

But it's based on gossip. I did not work at the newspaper at the time, so I cannot -- I'm not sure how that story was put together, but from my conversations at the time with other journalists, and at this stage I worked for Max Clifford Associates, where ...

Again, that is part of -- it was industry gossip at the time. I did not work at the Mirror at the time. I had left the Mirror by then. I do not know how that story was put together, but at the time I remember the buzz in the industry ...