Last updated at 08:13 19 October 2006 
 
 Like most Mail readers, I read the McCartney divorce papers yesterday with mounting astonishment. But unlike everyone else, I also read them with a mounting sense of guilt. It was me, after all, who first introduced Paul to Heather, at the Mirror's Pride of Britain Awards in 1999. 
 
 I remember the moment well. It was Macca's first real public appearance since the death of his wife, Linda, and he turned up an hour late after agonising all morning whether to come or not. 
 
 'This is not easy for me,' he whispered tearfully in my ear, as one particularly heroic piece of child bravery was saluted. 
 
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 • The McCartneys at war 
 
 
 
 
 
 I genuinely felt for him. But Paul perked up enormously when a feisty buxom lady called Heather Mills marched on stage and delivered a speech about a young girl who had lost her legs to meningitis. 
 
 Heather was articulate, opinionated, determined, well-researched and inspiring. 
 
 I introduced her to Paul after the show, and before I knew it they'd fallen in love. It was supposed to be the happy-ever-after script that everyone wanted for the world's favourite, tragic, Beatle. 
 
 But Heather quickly began attracting unfavourable headlines. Her past, to put it mildly, was 'murky'. She'd been a party girl for wealthy Arabs, had run through boyfriends and fiancés like a bull through Pamplona, and developed an unfortunate tendency to tell endless porky pies about herself. 
 
 She was also a fiery little number, prone to rages, rows and general 'anger management' issues. 
 
 Stories soon emerged that the marriage was in trouble - at one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone. 
 
 It was heartbreaking. 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 answerphone. 
 
 But despite it all, I still rather liked and admired Heather. When I interviewed her for a TV series, I found her to be a tough cookie with a waspish sense of humour, who was rightly proud of the very effective work she does for charity. 
 
 But I also didn't believe a lot of what she said, and thought she was ludicrously obsessed with - and touchy about - the Press. I could also sense a growing - and even more ludicrous - irritation that she had to constantly play second fiddle to Paul. 
 
 Becoming 'Lady' Heather had compounded her sense of self worth to dangerously high levels, and I began hearing more and more stories of her diva behaviour. 
 
 The separation, when it came, only served to confirm what many already suspected: there had been three of them in the marriage - Paul, Heather and her Ego, and one of them had to go. It was Paul. 
 
 Since the split, she's been fighting a PR war with Macca - from being photographed locked out of his house, to hiring Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. Operation Make-Me-A-Martyr has been fought with ruthless efficiency in the pages of the popular press over the last few months. 
 
 What Heather has never understood, though, is that she can NEVER supplant a Beatle in public affection. However difficult Paul might be - and I suspect that, like most geniuses, he's not the easiest guy to live with - he's still the man who wrote Yesterday, Hey Jude and Let It Be. And the man who had one of the happiest, most loyal marriages in showbusiness, until Linda was so cruelly taken from him. 
 
 We all love Macca because he's always seemed such a nice, ordinary type, relatively untainted by fame. And that's why Heather has made such a hideous mistake in making all these horrible allegations about her husband in the divorce papers. 
 
 Even if she was not directly responsible for the leak, she must have known that the details would come out, and presumably assumed we'd all read them with horror and a sudden new sympathy for this poor, tortured, tormented soul. 
 
 But we didn't, Heather. We all read them with horror alright - horror that you could be so disgusting about our Paul. As for sympathy, that's all going to swing even further his way. Fast. 
 
 Let me be clear at this point. There is nothing remotely comical about genuine victims of domestic abuse. But the woman who emerges from these papers is no victim. 
 
 The picture the documents paint is of a self-obsessed, demanding, selfish, whining woman, apparently intent on making Paul's life as unhappy as possible. 
 
 Every two paragraphs, another incident seems to have occurred because Heather was, by her own admission, 'in a bad mood', usually because someone's said something nasty about her on TV or in a paper. 
 
 On one extraordinary occasion she even tries to get Paul to pull out of the Superbowl in America, the single biggest entertainment event in the world, because the Sunday Times is about to be bitchy about her - and Rupert Murdoch owns both the paper and Fox TV, the Superbowl's official broadcaster. 
 
 I laughed out loud when I read that. The sheer scale of her self delusion is scary. 
 
 As is her hypocrisy. Heather always used to bang on about how she didn't want people to think of her as 'disabled.' She wanted us to treat her as a perfectly normal, able-bodied person. 
 
 Yet her court papers are peppered with constant references to her disability. She's permanently either 'crawling up' stairs, or slithering on her hands and knees on to planes, or trapped wheelchair-bound and helpless. 
 
 But later we read that she's strong enough to haul a drunken Macca out of the bath, upstairs and into bed. 
 
 Make your mind up Heather, you're either Stephen Hawking or Superwoman. Which is it to be? 
 
 I felt thoroughly sickened by the time I finished raking through this self-serving rant. 
 
 Any sympathy I once had for Miss Mills has evaporated. Instead, I am filled with guilt and sorrow that, as a lifelong Beatles fan, I am at least partly responsible for the hell Paul McCartney is going through at the hands of this vengeful, shameless, ghastly woman. 
 
 Paul, it may be a bit late now, but I'm sorry. ||||| CNN star interviewer Piers Morgan refused Tuesday to disclose details about the most damning link between himself and Britain's phone hacking scandal _ his acknowledgment that he once listened to a phone message left by Paul McCartney for his then-wife Heather Mills. 
 
 FILE - This Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011 file photo shows Piers Morgan, host of CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight," posing for a portrait in Pasadena, Calif. Morgan will talk via video link Tuesday Dec 20 2011... (Associated Press) 
 
 In a 2006 article in the Daily Mail tabloid, Morgan said he was played a phone message left by the former Beatle on Mills' answering machine, describing it in detail and noting that McCartney "even sang 'We Can Work It Out' into the answerphone." 
 
 Mills has said there's no way Morgan could have obtained the message honestly. 
 
 Morgan stubbornly refused to answer almost any questions about how he came to hear the message, saying that doing so would compromise a source. 
 
 "I'm not going to start any trail that leads to the identification of a source," he said. 
 
 Asked by inquiry chief Lord Justice Brian Leveson whether he could supply any information to back the assertion that he had heard the recording legally, Morgan said he couldn't. 
 
 Earlier Morgan said he "doesn't believe" he had ever listened to hacked voicemail message _ and dismissed earlier interviews _ in which he'd discussed phone hacking at length _ as having been based on rumor and hearsay. 
 
 He refused to say who had filled him in about the practice. 
 
 "My memory's not great about this. It was a long time ago," he said. 
 
 Before his U.S. television career, Morgan ran two British tabloids _ the News of the World and the Daily Mirror. He was giving evidence to Britain's media ethics inquiry by video link Tuesday from the United States _ one of a host of tabloid newspaper executives to face the inquiry, set up in the wake of the uproar over phone hacking and other unethical newsgathering methods at the News of the World. 
 
 The atmosphere turned tense within minutes of Morgan taking his oath. He was quizzed about his relationship to private investigators and freelancers such as "Benji the Binman," who specialized in raking though celebrities' trash to look for scoops. 
 
 Morgan said he never dealt with private investigators but he did acknowledge buying information from Benji _ and said he'd had some qualms about it. 
 
 "Did I think he was doing anything illegal? No. Did I think he was doing anything on the cusp of unethical? Yes," Morgan said. 
 
 The stakes are high for Morgan. More than a dozen journalists have been arrested, senior executives with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media empire have lost their jobs, and top U.K. police officers have resigned over their failure to tackle the scandal. 
 
 Witnesses at the inquiry have exposed the seamy side of British journalism, with reporters accused of cooking up stories, blackmailing subjects, hacking phones and paying bribes to police officers to secure tips. 
 
 Separately, Rupert Murdoch's News International announced settlements with seven more prominent figures in the wake of the phone hacking scandal at the now-shuttered News of the World. 
 
 The company said in a statement Tuesday it had settled claims brought by Princess Diana's former lover James Hewitt, ex-Liberal Democrat lawmaker Mark Oaten, TV presenter Ukrika Jonsson, model Abi Titmuss, and Paul Dadge, who helped rescue victims of the 2005 London transit bombings. Theatrical agent Michelle Milburn and Calum Best, the son of soccer legend George Best, rounded out the settlement list. 
 
 At least one more settlement _ with former England soccer player Paul Gascoigne _ appeared imminent, according to lawyer Jeremy Reed. 
 
 The terms of the new payments announced Tuesday were not disclosed but they are likely to be substantial. Sienna Miller received 100,000 pounds (nearly $157,000) in damages when she settled with News International; the family of murdered British schoolgirl Milly Dowler were awarded 2 million pounds ($3.1 million) plus 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) from Murdoch himself, which was earmarked for charity. 
 
 Murdoch shut down the 168-year-old News of the World in July after the full hacking scandal broke. 
 
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 Online: 
 
 Leveson Inquiry: http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/ ||||| For instance, Robert Jay, a lawyer for the inquiry, confronted Mr. Morgan with an interview he gave to The Press Gazette in 2007. In the interview, Mr. Morgan said that Clive Goodman, the News of the World royal reporter jailed for phone hacking, was “a convenient fall guy” for a practice “that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years.” 
 
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 In another interview that year, Mr. Morgan was quoted as saying that “it was pretty well known” that reporters could hack phones by using standard access codes. 
 
 Explaining these away, Mr. Morgan said that he was merely repeating widespread tales from the “Fleet Street rumor mill” that hacking “went a lot further” than Mr. Goodman’s case. “I wasn’t aware it was widely prevalent in any specific form,” he said. 
 
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 Mr. Morgan is not a universally popular figure among British journalists, some of whom resent his success in surmounting his tabloid roots to find media stardom in the United States. Here in Britain, he was known for being cheeky, outrageous, not always very serious, willing to try any stunt to get a story, sparring with celebrities, strong-arming politicians to give him better access — all qualities he lays out in “The Insider,” whose subtitle is “The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade.” His testimony was important because so far, no documentary evidence has come into the public domain linking newspapers other than those owned by Rupert Murdoch with phone hacking. 
 
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 In a separate development, News International, the British newspaper arm of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, announced on Tuesday that it had settled seven more legal claims brought by people whose voice mail was illegally intercepted by The News of the World. These included James Hewitt, a former army officer who had an affair with Diana, Princess of Wales, and Paul Dadge, a man caught up in the 2005 terrorist bombings in London. 
 
 But the main focus of the day was on Mr. Morgan. In other testimony, he said that printing articles based on material from garbage cans was no more unethical than the practice by nontabloid newspapers of “taking the discarded remains” from stories the tabloids paid for and using them “without having to pay.” Nor does he believe that relying on garbage-based documents for articles is necessarily so terrible, he said. 
 
 “If you throw rubbish into the street, I wonder how unethical it is if that appears in the newspaper,” he said. “I mean, it’s rubbish, isn’t it?”
– Piers Morgan was in the hot seat today in Britain's phone hacking inquiry, but the CNN host refused to play along. He got grilled via video from the US on one point in particular, notes AP: If he didn't engage in phone hacking, how did he manage to hear a voicemail left by Paul McCartney on Heather Mills' answering machine? Morgan, who wrote about the voicemail in detail in 2006, refused to say how he came to hear the tape. "I'm not going to start any trail that leads to the identification of a source." Morgan served as editor of two British tabloids years ago, the News of the World and the Daily Mirror after that. It's his stint at the Daily Mirror that seems to be drawing the most attention, notable because that tab is not owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International, reports the New York Times. The scandal to date has largely been confined to Murdoch-owned papers. Morgan has steadfastly denied hacking a phone, asking anyone to do so, or knowingly publishing any story based on hacking.