Independent, The (London): My Greatest Mistake James Hipwell Editor of Inside Edge, the gambling

WHEN I worked at the Mirror, I wrote a column called City Slickers with a colleague called Anil Bhoyrul. From its launch, the column was a spectacular success because it caught the public imagination for investing in technology at the time that those stocks were soaring in value. On an average day, Anil and I would rock in at 11 o'clock, go to the editor's conference, come back at midday and call people we knew in the stock market - brokers, market makers, analysts and financial PRs. If we were speaking to our broker, he'd tell us what he was selling a lot of, and I'd say, "What's the story?". He'd tell me what the rumour was, and sometimes I'd buy a few shares.

Because our column was more or less a gossip column, I'd write about some of what I'd heard. Inevitably, there were times when I ended up writing about companies I owned shares in, and that's against Press Complaints Commission rules.

It was going really well, but that was my mistake, trading as actively as I was. I should have just reported on the market, but I got caught up with it - it was an amazing boom market. The Daily Telegraph found out that Piers Morgan had been buying shares in a company called Viglen on the day before we tipped it, and wrote a story about it. The Sun saw the Telegraph's first edition and decided to splash with it midweek. By the Saturday, it was still splashing with it, with the headline "SPIVS" in massive letters, about me, Anil and Piers.

I will always remember Piers ringing up on the Friday before the paper was coming out, because he'd seen the first edition of The Sun. All he said was, "When I told you two bozos I wanted a front-page splash, I meant in the Mirror not The Sun!". It was shortly after that, once we'd been through the disciplinary process, that we both got fired for gross misconduct for breaking the PCC rules on share dealing for journalists. It took me a couple of years to get back into publishing after that.