The 15 times Prince Harry was hacked
The Duke of Sussex on Friday held up his award of some £140,000 in damages for phone hacking by the publishers of the Daily Mirror as a moment of vindication for his unshakeable belief that he has been systematically targeted and damaged by a malign tabloid press.
Stretching across 386 pages of tightly-argued text, the judgment handed down shortly after 10.30am in London’s High Court on Friday does indeed provide much from which Prince Harry can draw satisfaction – from the affirmation that he has lived his life under “oppressive” media scrutiny to the particular finding that senior Mirror Group executives knew of the hacking and yet failed to report or stop it.
But the landmark ruling is also not without nuances and wider implications, both for the King’s youngest son and the British media.
What did the judge find and how big a victory is this for Prince Harry?
After seven-week trial in which the Duke of Sussex became the first senior royal to give evidence in court for more than a century, Mr Justice Fancourt found that 15 out of 33 articles published by the Daily Mirror and two of its sister titles – the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People – were the product of phone hacking or so-called “blagging”, the unlawful gathering of personal information by private investigators paid for by journalists.
The finding, for which the prince was awarded compensation and damages of £140,600, was based on a sample of 148 articles published between 1996 and 2011 which Harry had claimed were based at least in part on illegally-obtained information.
The judge found that hacking at the Mirror titles had begun in 1996 – becoming “widespread and habitual” from 1998 onwards and remaining extensive between 2006 and 2011. In relation to the duke, it was found that voicemails left for him had been intercepted by or on behalf of journalists between the end of 2003 and April 2009, and then “to a modest extent”.
The prince yesterday made clear his view of the import of the ruling, saying it represented a “great day for truth as well as accountability”.
To a large extent, the 39-year-old royal is justified in claiming a significant victory. His opponents in Mirror Group Newspapers had sought to deny all phone hacking in relation to the duke, describing his claims as “entirely speculative” and suggesting many of its stories were based on information already in the public domain.
Instead, the extensive ruling once more shines an uncomfortable spotlight on both the conduct of the Mirror Group titles and more broadly at “red-top” newspapers for what the judge described as the “oppressive activity of the press” aimed at Harry for much of his life.
Which particular stories resulted from hacking and blagging?
Although Harry complained that the use of illegally-obtained information dated back to a story about his mother, Princess Diana, visiting him at school on his 12th birthday in 1996, the court found the first article to feature the product of phone hacking dated back to December 2003.
The relevant Sunday People piece, in which the duke was quoted using language sharply critical of Paul Burrell, his mother’s one-time butler and confidant, was found by the judge to have been based on the hacking of voicemails of either Harry or his brother, Prince William, or their associates. Of the 15 articles found to have involved hacking or blagging, this one attracted the highest single amount of damages, £10,000.
Over the following five years, it was found that unlawfully obtained information was provided to Mirror titles ranging from details of Harry’s return flight from a holiday in Mozambique to a decision to prevent him returning to frontline duty in Afghanistan on security grounds.
But the majority of the cases in which the newspaper group was found to have deployed its so-called “dark arts” related to stories about his relationship with his former girlfriend, Chelsy Davy. Eight of the 15 stories for which Harry was awarded damages related to hacking or blagging linked to their relationship and its subsequent demise.
The judge went out of his way to recognise the “corrosive effect of the intrusion, hounding and publicity on the Duke’s relationship with Chelsy Davy”, awarding a further £20,000 for the “cumulative and to lasting damage” to Harry’s wellbeing arising from the hacking.
Was the hacking as widespread Harry believes and what did the judge find about the Duke’s own evidence?
During his testimony in June, the Duke of Sussex laid bare the extent of his hurt and anger at what he considers to be a childhood and adult life largely shaped and influenced by a caricature of his true personality – “a thicko” and “cheat” – imposed upon him by a hostile and “criminal” press.
While acknowledging sympathy for the nature of media behaviour towards him, the judge underlined that a “good deal” of that activity could not be classed as unlawful. Mr Justice Fancourt added that, as one of a number of newspaper groups competing for royal stories, the Mirror titles “only played a small part in everything that the Duke suffered”.
The judge underlined that Harry’s case had been “proved in part only” and that the hacking of his own phone had been to a “modest extent”, albeit on the likely basis that those responsible were aware that accessing the communications of a senior royal was a high-stakes enterprise. At the same time, the court found it was unlikely that Mirror Group journalists had shown the same caution with the prince’s friends and associates, suggesting that Ms Davy’s communications in particular had been widely targeted.
Separately, the court appeared to criticise the duke’s own lawyers over the nature of his testimony.
The judge said Harry’s testimony had amounted to “an argument against the vicissitudes of the Press… rather than factual evidence that he could give about the specific matters in issue”, adding that this did not “remotely comply” with rules governing the types of evidence to be provided by witnesses in a case. Mr Justice Fancourt said this was an oversight “for which [Harry’s] solicitors rather than he are culpable”.
What are the implications for Mirror Group Newspapers and Piers Morgan?
Some of the sternest words in the ruling are reserved not for the journalists behind the hacking and blagging but for two senior executives at the media company who, it was found, had turned a blind eye to the illegal activity.
The judge said: “It was not just out-of-control editors and journalists who were causing serious distress [to Prince Harry] but that this conduct and its inevitable consequences were being accepted, and profited from, by those who should have stopped it.”
The court went out of its way to name former Mirror Group chief executive Sly Bailey and its former legal director, Paul Vickers, as having known, or at least suspected, the use of phone hacking from 2007 but never reported it to the company board.
The judge said the likelihood of “extensive legal activity” had been subsequently concealed from Parliament, the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, shareholders and the public “for years”.
In the wake of the ruling, the duke called for UK authorities, including financial regulators, to “do their duty for the British public and investigate bringing charges against the company and those who have broken the law”.
For its part, Mirror Group Newspapers sought to draw a line under what it described as “historical wrongdoing” for which it apologised “unreservedly”.
Former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, however, took a more bullish view. The court found there “can be no doubt” that the broadcaster was among senior journalists and editors who had known about phone hacking other illegal information gathering.
In a combative statement, Mr Morgan yesterday rejected the ruling, saying he had “never hacked a phone or told anybody else to hack a phone”.
