Never did a stranger Magnificent Seven ride into town. It includes a royal prince, an ageing pop star, two B-movie film stars and a former Lib Dem MP. All were chosen as wounded heroes by the champions of privacy against the mighty Daily Mail. Heaven knows what this grievance-fest is costing but someone can afford it.
We all know tabloid newspapers in the 1990s and 2000s could behave outrageously, notably in their coverage of celebrity. Intrusive photography and phone hacking were rife. Technology was always ahead of policing. Intrusion was called the “price of celebrity” and only the lucky escaped paying it. No one familiar with the press at the time would be surprised at the charges now levied against Associated Newspapers, which owns the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. These include the commissioning of external investigators to tap landlines and intercept voicemails, and the blagging of medical records. The publisher strongly denies the allegations.
Newspaper scandals from the time include The Sun’s “Squidgygate” and People magazine’s “Camillagate” , both involving recordings of the royals’ private phone calls. They were days of mysterious vans and surreptitious antennae. In Diana’s case allegations against lone-wolf hackers dissolved into rumours of Sandringham security taps and leaks. These were followed by a flurry of carefully worded ministerial denials of MI5 involvement. Diana’s personal protection officer Ken Wharfe later declared that he was convinced the taps lent credence to the idea that the establishment was out to get her.
For some two decades every Fleet Street news desk was besieged with freelance electronic nerds hawking their services. Royalty, film stars and footballers seemed unable to stay off their phones or quieten their answering machines. Any snippet of gossip had its price in the tabloid market, aided by corrupt police and complacent lawyers. A regular source of sex stories was the celebrities’ own publicity agents.
There followed police investigations, privacy settlements and committees of inquiries. From the 1993 Calcutt review to the Leveson inquiry of the early 2010s, attempts were made to curb press behaviour. A press council was disbanded and a complaints commission set up. Both failed to deliver. A second Leveson inquiry was cancelled by a media-fearing Tory party and a 2013 law forcing newspapers to pay the legal fees of all who sue them is being abolished this year. By 2011 the hacking bubble had burst. In 2012 the Met said it had 185 officers and civilian staff working on phone-hacking investigations, with scores of arrests made and almost 5,000 potential or likely victims of News of the World hacking identified.
Following the jailing of staff at the News of the World and its closure, at least by name, millions were paid out by newspapers in privacy settlements. These are still continuing. As phone-tapping suits began to rain down on the press, past demeneanours at other tabloids including the Daily Mirror came to light. But soon the entire industry was transformed by the Great Intruder, the tidal wave of social media.
In such a context, this week’s resuscitated details of Prince Harry’s love life and Elton John’s health records seem hardly exceptional. The seven celebrities have a right to publicise their grievances. They presumably have some hope of compensation and their public staging is clearly meant to exploit fame in the cause of public sympathy. If Harry’s phone was indeed hacked, he is certainly entitled to protest at Buckingham Palace for allegedly never telling him it knew of it because any trial would, in his words, “open a can of worms”.
On the other hand, this week’s hearing is purely preliminary and Associated Newspapers can argue that the case is now “stale”. Some of the complaints date back to the 1990s and are hopelessly delayed, six years being the normal time limit in civil suits such as this. The publisher also says that the claims are largely based on material provided to the Leveson inquiry that were meant to be confidential.
In any case, public interest in these cases should be forward-looking. It should lie in finding some new strengthening of privacy law in the light of ever more intrusive surveillance and data-gathering by social media. It is clearly no good expecting victims to sue multitudinous persecutors. The scandal of trolling and other harms has gone on long enough, against a storm of lobbying from social media companies. These platforms must be treated as publishers, and their proprietors as accessories to the intrusion. The task of regulating the internet looms as a giant cloud on the horizon of modern government. No one – except perhaps the Chinese – has begun to tackle it.
As for Prince Harry, he is the victim of a quite different intrusion. This was the promotion of the “royal family” as a celebrity institution by his late grandmother in the 1960s. This had no constitutional status and was designed as an image tactic to win good publicity, in contrast to the low profile favoured by monarchies across Europe. This status was always an accident waiting to happen, with a dissident royal as the eagerly sought victim. The time has come to send the family into institutional obscurity. Its members should have no need of courts of law.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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