The phone of Diana, Princess of Wales was allegedly hacked by Piers Morgan’s Daily Mirror in an attempt to obtain details about her secret meetings with the comedian Michael Barrymore.
The high court heard that Diana had regularly talked to Barrymore in the months before her death, at a time when they were two of the most famous people in Britain. The television presenter was “struggling with coming out as gay”, as well as dealing with an addiction to alcohol and drugs.
On Monday, a phone-hacking trial heard extracts from a letter in which Diana offered to support Barrymore, who was one of the nation’s leading television stars. In one letter, sent in early 1997, the princess provided her phone number and wrote: “Dear Michael. What joy it was to finally meet you tonight. I did want to emphasise that I’m here for you – whenever.
“It’s very easy to pop round and see you or please telephone now you have my number. You’re doing just fine and believe me, I know. So take great care and lots of love from Diana.”
Months later, Diana wrote again to say she was “devastated” that details of their supposedly secret meetings had been obtained by the Daily Mirror. She apologised to Barrymore for the leak, complained that she had endured “a nightmare time with the tabloids”, and said she did not know how the news had come out, given “nobody knew about our conversations”. The court heard that Barrymore did not reply to this letter, highlighting the “isolation” caused by press intrusion.
David Sherborne, the barrister who is acting for Diana’s younger son, Prince Harry, in the trial against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), said the simple explanation was that journalists working for the Daily Mirror had hacked Diana’s voicemails.
The lawyer also suggested that Morgan, the paper’s then editor, was disingenuous when he later wrote in his autobiography that he had “heard rumours” about a friendship between Diana and Barrymore.
Sherborne said that how Morgan had “heard” the rumours “was obvious”. The lawyer alleged the real reason the editor knew so much about Diana’s friendship with Barrymore was because “the Mirror had been listening in to her messages”.
Morgan has denied knowingly commissioning or using material from phone hacking.
The Mirror said the claim Diana’s voicemails were hacked was “total speculation without any evidential basis whatsoever”.
Its barrister, Andrew Green KC, told the court: “The letters you were shown are not evidence of voicemail interception and there is no other evidence.”
The allegation was made in the ongoing phone-hacking trial against Mirror Group Newspapers. On Monday the court started to deal with the specifics about Harry’s case against MGN.
The court has spent three weeks hearing evidence about the general culture at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People. Harry alleges he was the victim of phone hacking and other illegal information-gathering tactics by the outlets.
Sherborne began outlining the 33 Mirror articles about Harry that are being analysed as part of the case, with headlines such as “Diana so sad on Harry’s big day” – about her visiting him at school on his birthday in 1996 – arguing that many showed the “telltale signs” of illegal information-gathering.
He said there had been a “web” of unlawful activity around Prince Harry and that it was “implausible” that the Mirror’s newspapers, who regularly wrote about the young royal, did not hack his phone.
He said Harry was upset by how his relationship with Chelsy Davy, his first serious girlfriend, collapsed “because of the constant exposure” in the tabloid media, including details of their calls to each other.
“They never felt they were on their own, which placed a huge amount of stress and strain on their relationship,” said Sherborne.
The Mirror has accepted that in one instance it paid a private investigator for illegally gathering information about Harry’s visit to a nightclub in 2004. But it insists its other articles about him were obtained through legal means, such as sources providing information and royal press officers briefing stories.
Green said the Metropolitan police had investigated hacking of Harry’s voicemails in the mid-2000s. They found evidence that reporters at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had accessed the prince’s voicemails but nothing linking journalists at the Mirror group to the illegal activity.
He said the prince’s entire case against MGN was based on the fact that one Sunday Mirror reporter had Harry’s phone number in his contact book.
As such, Green argued, there was no evidence to support Harry’s core allegation that he was the victim of phone hacking by the Mirror: “Zilch, zero, nil, de nada, niente, nothing.”
The prince had been expected to appear in court on Monday but did not turn up, to the judge’s irritation, after staying in Los Angeles to attend his daughter’s second birthday party.
Harry will start giving evidence from the witness box on Tuesday morning.
