On Monday morning, Prince Harry’s legal war with the Daily Mail, one of the British media’s most formidable forces, will finally come to trial in court 76 of the high court in London.
The prince is joined in his action by some of the most recognisable figures in British life: the singer and songwriter Elton John and his husband, David Furnish; actors Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost; Doreen Lawrence, a Labour peer whose son Stephen was murdered in a racist attack; and former politician Simon Hughes, who once ran to lead the Liberal Democrats.
Their opponent is the publisher of Britain’s bestselling newspaper, with its long-serving editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, expected to give evidence.
The allegations against the Daily Mail and its stablemate, the Mail on Sunday, are grave.
Harry and his fellow claimants allege that, as well as intercepting voicemails, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday also tapped landlines, paid corrupt police officers, blagged medical records and even bugged celebrities’ homes.
The titles’ publisher, Associated Newspapers, has described the claims as “preposterous” and an “affront to the hard-working journalists whose reputations and integrity … are wrongly traduced”.
The prince against the press
Harry’s anger at the press is deep-rooted: his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car crash in 1997 while she was being pursued by paparazzi in Paris. More recently, he has been critical of its treatment of his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
In 2021, a judge ruled that the Mail on Sunday had breached the duchess’s privacy by publishing an extract of a letter she had written to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
The prince’s decision to take on the tabloids has not been without personal and financial cost.
For him, it is a point of principle, one that may have contributed to the fracturing of his relationship with the royal family.
In Harry’s memoir, Spare, he recalled that his relationship with his father, King Charles, and brother, Prince William, became strained by what he considered to be their failure to call out alleged wrongdoing by journalists.
In 2019, the prince became convinced that newspapers should answer for their past treatment of him in court, after a conversation with the barrister David Sherborne as they holidayed at Elton John’s villa in France.
So far, the prince has been vindicated by his decision to take on the press.
In 2023, Harry became the first royal to give evidence in court in more than 130 years, when he testified in a privacy case he and others brought against the publisher of the Mirror. The judge ruled that the newspaper had hacked his phone “to a modest extent”, from the end of 2003 to 2009, and awarded him £140,600 in damages.
Last year, his privacy claim against the publisher of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World was settled on the court steps for an undisclosed sum, reportedly about £10m.
The publisher apologised to Harry for phone hacking at the News of the World and serious intrusion into his private life by the Sun, including “incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for the Sun”.
However, the prince’s showdown with the Daily Mail – projected to cost £38m when both sides’ legal fees have been taken into account – is expected to be fiercely contested in court.
The case, which will be heard in court over the next nine weeks, is likely to throw under the spotlight a cast of characters with complicated pasts.
For instance, one of the central figures for Harry and his co-claimants is Graham Johnson, a former journalist who has been investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Mail titles since 2015 as part of a project once called “Operation Bluebird”.
But Johnson is a controversial figure, to say the least.
In 2014, he pleaded guilty to phone hacking while working at the Sunday Mirror in 2001, for which he received a suspended sentence. In his memoir, Hack, published in 2012, he recalled that while he was working on the tabloids, he was a “professional liar” and regularly fabricated stories. However, he added that, in 2007, after reading a book about philosophy, he realised “how important it was to tell the truth” and decided to change his ways.
Last year, a private investigator thought to be central to the legal action by the claimants said that his signature on an earlier witness statement was a “forgery”. Gavin Burrows, linked to serious allegations of unlawful information gathering in the case, retracted his alleged confession, saying it was “completely false”.
The case of Lady Lawrence
In 1997, the Daily Mail produced one of the most memorable front pages in British newspaper history when it pictured the five men suspected of killing Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old student who had been murdered in a racist attack four years earlier in Eltham, south London. Its headline read: “Murderers: The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us.” Two, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were later convicted.
Stephen’s mother, Lady Lawrence, later wrote a piece for the newspaper saying she was “indebted” to it for throwing its considerable weight behind her quest for justice. However, in a BBC interview broadcast last year, she said she was “floored” when, in 2022, Prince Harry contacted her to tell her of suspicions that she had been subject to phone hacking and other unlawful information gathering by Daily Mail journalists.
“Why would anybody want to be listening to my calls, hacking into my phone?” she said. “All I’m trying to do over the years, is to try to get justice for my son.”
Lawrence’s particulars of claim contain perhaps the most incendiary allegation of all: that the Daily Mail instructed the private investigator Jonathan Rees to carry out bugging and covert surveillance on her.
Rees often worked for the News of the World before its closure. His credibility has always been the subject of debate – he was convicted of perverting the course of justice in 1999 for planting drugs in the car of the estranged wife of a client.
The Daily Mail, for its part, has said in defences filed in the claim that it has never used the services of Rees.
Rees himself, in an episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches, broadcast in December, claimed that he was aware of the alleged surveillance, but he wasn’t involved.
“They’re going to have to rethink that, and their legal team is going to have to rethink that,” Rees said.
Asked by reporter Cathy Newman if his comments “blow a hole” in the case against Associated Newspapers, Rees responded: “Not really, because it was done. All I can say to support that woman is: yes I did hear about it, yes I was invited to be a part of the team, yes I saw, I did see, factual transcripts, I know it was going on, I know that the surveillance teams were being used against her and her family. But I can’t provide any documentary evidence for that.”
Rees said in the interview that he thought the Daily Mail would have been “foolish” to ask private investigators to bug Lawrence and are likely to have made an “open request for information” on her family’s background. Asked by Newman if he thought the Daily Mail did anything illegal, Rees replied: “No.” Rees is not expected to give evidence in the trial.
Lawrence told ITV last week that she was “more determined than ever” to hold the Daily Mail to account for its alleged wrongdoing.
It is understood she will now rely on documents that appear to outline payments made by the Daily Mail to other private investigators around the time some articles about her were published in the newspaper. Some of these private investigators have been found to have unlawfully obtained information about public figures in cases brought against other newspapers. Lawyers for the Daily Mail have denied the allegations, including that these payments relate to Lawrence.
Who wins?
As proceedings get under way this week, some of the protagonists are shocked it has got this far. Lawrence said she had hoped the Daily Mail would settle her case so she would be spared the “stress of litigation”.
The claimants will now have to persuade the judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, that the evidence on which they rely is reliable for the purposes of their case.
If they lose, they could face paying the Mail’s enormous legal bill and have been warned by the judge that their insurance might not cover the full amount.
The Mail, on the other hand, still faces the unedifying prospect of having 30 years of its journalistic practices examined in court. Although it says it banned the use of private investigators in 2007, it will have to explain its historic relationship with them under oath. In 2012, Dacre admitted that there is a prima facie case that one, Steve Whittamore, could have broken the law in his work for the newspapers.
One other factor in the action is timing. The case was brought in October 2022, in civil litigation; claimants have six years to bring a privacy claim, after the point at which they discovered they could have been a victim of unlawful activity. The Mail is expected to argue that the case should be time barred. But this could be seen by some as a hollow victory and is unlikely to play well in the court of public opinion.
For now, all parties are standing firm. For the prince, pursuing the press for what he considers to be a campaign against him and his family is worth the risks. The trial will put him, his co-claimants, and senior editors under the spotlight.
But with the investigative practices of Prince Harry’s team and the Daily Mail about to be dragged out in open court, regardless of the result, the question is whether there really can be any winners.
