PRESS ASSOCIATION -- Piers Morgan has been urged to return to the UK to help police with their hacking investigation after Heather Mills claimed a reporter had listened in on messages left on her phone by then partner Sir Paul McCartney.
Ms Mills claimed on the BBC's Newsnight programme that a senior Mirror Group journalist admitted hacking her voicemails in 2001. She said the journalist had rung her and quoted parts of the recording and then admitted how he had heard it.
The BBC, who declined to name the journalist allegedly involved, said it was not Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror at the time.
Ms Mills told the programme that the conciliatory message was left by Sir Paul after the couple had had a row. She was in India at the time.
The message in question appeared to be the same as one which Morgan later admitted listening to, said a spokesman for the programme.
In a 2006 article in the Daily Mail, Morgan referred to hearing a recorded message which Sir Paul had left for Ms Mills, and said: "The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang We Can Work It Out into the answer phone."
Morgan issued a statement describing Ms Mills's claims as "unsubstantiated".
But Tory MP Therese Coffey - a member of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee which is investigating phone hacking - called on Morgan to return to the UK to help the police with their inquiries in the light of the "very strong" new evidence.
"I just hope that the police take the evidence and go with it and if Mr Morgan wants to come back to the UK and help them with their inquiries - and I don't mean being arrested in any way - I'm sure he can add more light," she told Newsnight. "I think it would help everybody, including himself and this investigation, if he was able to say more about why he wrote what he did in 2006."
Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman said: "It's not good enough for Piers Morgan just to say he's always stayed within the law. There are questions about what happened with Heather Mills's phone messages that he needs to answer."