Yelland: I’ve got enough to destroy Morgan’

GQ: profiles Mirror editor Morgan

Sun editor David Yelland says he has three boxes of e-mails which could "destroy" Mirror editor Piers Morgan.

The claims appear in the current issue of GQ in an exclusive profile piece on Morgan by Independent editor Simon Kelner. Yelland, asked about the sacking of Sun showbiz columnist Marina Hyde over private e-mails she had sent to Morgan, says: "We have three boxes of e-mails. They are explosive, but I’ve never leaked them.

"They could destroy him, but I won’t leak them because they could destroy his kids."

He accuses Morgan of having a "schoolboy, lavatory sense of humour with an extremely nasty edge"

Yelland says that when he came back to the UK from the US to edit The Sun in 1998, he was "amazed" to find Morgan a national celebrity who ran stories about him from the start.

Morgan hits back in the article and claims Hyde’s sacking showed a "chronic insecurity" at The Sun. "They delighted in embarrassing me and in being quite destructive to a friend, and to my personal life. I think of Yelland sitting there with his operatives, salivating over them [the e-mails] and it makes me quite sick," he says.

Commenting on the rivalry between them, Yelland says: "What worries me is that our relationship will define us as editors. People will think of us as the bald one and the corrupt one." Morgan retorts: "He calls me corrupt. He can’t prove it. But I can prove he’s bald."

Kelner says that Morgan told him a few years ago that if he lost his job he already had the title of his autobiography in mind – The Youngest Editor Ever to Get The Sack. Finally, reflecting on journalism, Morgan says: "It is full of lying, cheating, drunken, cocaine-sniffing, unethical people. It’s a wonderful profession."

By Ruth Addicott