Paul Dacre says claims Mail broke law to target Doreen Lawrence ‘bitterly wounding’

Paul Dacre outside the high court in London on Tuesday. Under his editorship the Daily Mail spent 15 years trying to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice. Photograph: Carlos Jasso/Reuters

Paul Dacre, the longtime editor of the Daily Mail, has said it was “bitterly wounding” to face allegations that his journalists used criminal tactics to target the mother of a murdered teenager whose case he had championed.

Giving evidence in the high court, Dacre, who edited the paper from 1992 to 2018, said the “grave and sometimes preposterous” claims from Doreen Lawrence and six other claimants had “astonished, appalled and – in the small hours of the night – reduced me to rage”.