Sir Paul McCartney calls for privacy law after learning his phone was hacked

 

Paul McCartney said he knew his phone had been hacked because details would emerge that he had not told anyone. Photograph: Peter Wafzig/Getty Images

Sir Paul McCartney has called for a privacy law after the police showed him evidence that his phone was hacked.

The Beatles star believes that journalists from several newspapers were listening to his phone calls and messages around the time of his divorce from his second wife, Heather Mills, in 2008.

He said the invasion of his privacy had had a lasting effect: "I tend not to say much on the phone now. If I leave a message, it's benign.

"You edit yourself according to the new circumstances of the new world. I think it would be quite good to get some sort of laws."

McCartney, who married his third wife, Nancy Shevell, in October, told the Times he knew his phone had been hacked because stories would emerge about personal details he had not told anyone.

"So I used to talk on the phone and say: 'If you're taking this down get a life.' It's a pity not to be able to talk freely on a private call."

McCartney had a meeting with the Metropolitan police after he expressed on US radio his intention to raise the matter with them.

In August, Mills accused the Daily Mirror of intercepting a voicemail message left by McCartney on her phone following a row in 2001.

The paper's former editor, Piers Morgan, hit back at her claim and suggested that Mills herself had hacked McCartney's phone.

But a spokesman for McCartney told the Times that the singer-songwriter did not mean to imply that Mills had been involved in hacking him.

McCartney is the latest in a series of high-profile victims of hacking. The Leveson inquiry into press regulation and media standards has been hearing evidence from a range of people, including the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and actors Sienna Miller and Hugh Grant.

A spokeswoman for News International said: "We are not able to comment on individual cases."

A Met spokesman said: "We are not providing a running commentary on this investigation."