Mirror editor admits showbiz desk may have hacked phones

SHOWBUSINESS reporters at the Daily Mirror could have secretly engaged in phone hacking in the past, the tabloid’s editor and former showbiz editor Richard Wallace told a government-appointed inquiry yesterday.

Wallace, who took over in 2004 as editor of the Mirror, the main rival to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards he did not know of phone hacking on the showbiz desk but did not always know the source of stories.

Asked whether a 2002 story about an affair between then-England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson and TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson could have come from phone hacking, he answered: “It’s possible, yes.”