Phone hacking: Piers Morgan in on-air hacking row with Louise Mensch

Piers Morgan, the broadcaster and former tabloid journalist, has furiously denied an allegation by Louise Mensch, a Conservative MP, that he hacked celebrities' mobile phones while editing the Daily Mirror.

The pair engaged in an extraordinary nine-minute row live on CNN on Tuesday evening, during which Mr Morgan repeatedly demanded an apology and Mrs Mensch threatened to walk off set.

The MP for Corby claimed during a culture, media and sport select committee hearing earlier on Tuesday that Mr Morgan had admitted to phone hacking and had even bragged that it won him an award.

To back this up, however, she misquoted an entry from 'The Insider', the 2005 diaries of Mr Morgan, who edited the Mirror from 1995 to 2004 and the News of the World from 1994 to 1995.

Mrs Mensch pointed out that Mr Morgan referred in the book to the “little trick” whereby a caller who reached one's voicemail and entered a “standard four-digit code” could “hear all your messages”.

Yet she added incorrectly: “In that book he boasted that using that 'little trick' enabled him to win scoop of the year on a story about Sven Goran Eriksson. So there is a former editor of the Daily Mirror being very open about his personal use of phone hacking”.