Prince Harry has been awarded £140,600 in damages after winning a substantial part of his phone-hacking case against the British newspaper group Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN). We look at what was decided and why the case is significant.
What did the judge find?
Using the civil standard of proof, which requires a decision on the balance of probabilities, Mr Justice Fancourt found that out of a representative sample of 33 articles about the Duke of Sussex examined during the trial – out of a total of 148 cited by Harry – 15 were the product of hacking of his mobile phone or unlawful information gathering. The high court judge concluded that there was “extensive” phone hacking by the company – which publishes the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People – from 2006 to 2011.
In a 386-page judgment, he said: “The duke has been one of the most important storylines in town for much of his life, and remains so. The idea that MGN carefully eschewed in his case what had become a primary journalistic tool – which it otherwise used on a widespread and habitual basis – is unconvincing.”
Which stories were found to have been obtained through unlawful means?
The stories which Harry successfully complained about included those about him smoking cannabis at a country pub near the royal residence Highgrove and his father’s reaction to learning about that; a disagreement with his brother, William, about whether they should meet Paul Burrell, the former butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, to seek to stop him selling secrets relating to their late mother; and several articles about his relationship with his then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.
Harry was aged 17 at the time of the cannabis stories and 19 at the time of the Burrell one. With respect to the latter, the judge found that “it is probable that this private information was obtained by VMI [voicemail interception] of messages between the duke and his brother or other associates. The [Sunday] People therefore probably had the duke’s mobile phone number by this time, at the latest.”
With respect to a 2007 story about rows between Harry and Davy, Fancourt said: “In the absence of some plausible explanation, this article was obtained by VMI of the duke’s or Ms Davy’s or their associates’ telephones, and by obtaining telephone call data. It seems likely that whoever was charged with obtaining information about the duke and Ms Davy at each of the three newspapers will have been active following this publication, to see how the storyline developed over the following days and weeks.”
Why is the judgment so significant?
Since the Guardian broke the UK’s phone-hacking scandal, which led to the closure of the tabloid newspaper the News of the World in 2011, there have been a number of payouts by media companies to victims of the unlawful practice but few cases have come to court. This has meant the perpetrators have largely managed to avoid a public dressing-down of the type handed out by Fancourt.
After a seven-week trial, when Harry became the first royal in 130 years to appear in a witness box, the judge said: “It was not just out-of-control editors and journalists who were causing serious distress by invading his privacy, but that this conduct and its inevitable consequences were being accepted, and profited from, by those who should have stopped it. As a result, the conduct was encouraged to continue and did continue, for years longer than it should have done.”
Damningly, the judge also found that there was “hacking even to some extent” during the Leveson inquiry into media standards, which was supposed to draw a line under past practices and herald a new dawn.
On the Mirror’s use of private investigators, he said MGN had concealed the extent of its use of them “not just from parliament and the Leveson inquiry but then from the court too [in a previous phone-hacking case]”.
Which individuals at MGN came in for criticism?
Fancourt was clear that this was not a case of a few journalists who were bad apples and that those culpable included senior executives.
“A significant amount of the duke’s claim relates to the period after 2006, by when Mr [Paul] Vickers [MGN’s then group legal director] and Ms [Sly] Bailey [its then chief executive] both knew that there was at least a strong likelihood of illegal activity at MGN,” he said.
Among others who will be sweating are the talkshow host and former Mirror editor Piers Morgan, given that the judge said he accepted an account by the journalist Omid Scobie that when Morgan asked a journalist how they were sure about a story about Kylie Minogue, Scobie heard the journalist tell Morgan the information had come from voicemails. Fancourt said: “I found Mr Scobie to be a straightforward and reliable witness and I accept what he said about Mr Morgan’s involvement in the Minogue/Gooding story. No evidence was called by MGN to contradict it.”
Harry also named Morgan in his statement after the ruling.
