Press reform campaigners threatened to “destroy” a private investigator because he refused to help their campaign against newspaper groups, it has been alleged at the high court.
Paul Hawkes, a veteran private investigator, said claims that he hacked Hugh Grant’s emails on behalf of the Daily Mirror were “fantastical” and “made-up”. After being presented with a supposed invoice for the work, Hawkes mocked the idea he would have carried out such a serious act for such a small sum, telling the court: “You’re saying I got it hacked by a third party for £150? Come on!”
Hawkes told Prince Harry’s phone-hacking trial that his company always kept on the right side of the law when targeting individuals, including the former television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, saying: “What we did was clever, legal, and costs more.”
In response to accusations he “blagged” celebrities’ personal records by impersonating them on the phone to call centres, Hawkes said: “You don’t have to pretend to be anybody to talk to somebody … sometimes there are ruses. The ruses are not illegal.”
Prince Harry and more than 100 other claimants are suing Mirror Group Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and People. Over the last week the court has heard allegations of widespread illegal behaviour at those newspapers, with witnesses now being called for the defence.
Hawkes told the court he felt pressured into turning evidence against the newspaper group when approached in 2016 by journalist Dan Evans, a former phone hacker who now reports wrongdoing in the British media for the website Byline Investigates.
The duo initially had a cordial discussion about tabloid tactics, the private investigator said: “[Evans] seemed proud that he was no longer involved with hacking and described himself and his colleague [Graham] Johnson as ‘poachers turned gamekeepers’.”
Hawkes said the conversation turned sour when he declined to assist their investigations into the British media, saying: “Mr Evans then proceeded to try and threaten me. He talked to me about getting me ‘on side’, arguing that it was in my best interests … When it became clear that I could not help him, Mr Evans told me that if I was not willing to play ball then they would destroy me [and my company] Research Associates through costly litigation. I understood ‘they’ to mean [press reform group] Hacked Off and their lawyers.”
Evans, who gave evidence against Mirror Group Newspapers earlier in the trial, disputed this recollection and said he had never worked for Hacked Off.
In a witness statement Evans said he felt “empathy” towards Hawkes and simply wanted to warn the private investigator about the “extreme stress and expense involved” of being involved in a phone-hacking trial. “There was no easy way to have this conversation and I could tell he was upset from his body language. His reaction was to threaten to conduct what he termed ‘due diligence’ into me.”
Hawkes insisted that most of his work for newspapers was based on open source intelligence. However, he later accepted that part of a witness statement describing his work had been copied and pasted from Wikipedia.
David Sherborne, the barrister for Harry and the other claimants, said this showed Hawkes’s evidence was unreliable, saying: “You’re blagging this court.”
Earlier in the day the court heard evidence from former Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey, who “categorically” denied having any knowledge of illegal behaviour at the newspapers she ran between 2003 and 2012.
Bailey told the court she was “deeply regretful” but had “never orchestrated a cover-up of anything” and only learned of the illegal behaviour by journalists at her company after she left. Mirror Group Newspapers has since paid out settlements to hundreds of victims of phone hacking, mainly relating to the period when Bailey was chief executive.
Bailey told the court that in 2007, following the first criminal prosecutions for phone hacking, she summoned newspaper editors Richard Wallace, Tina Weaver, and Mark Thomas to her office and asked them to confirm they were not involved in phone hacking.
She said: “They confirmed to me they were not involved in illegal activity.”
Sherborne, the claimants’ barrister, said this was not enough due diligence, asking Bailey: “You asked an editor saying ‘have you hacked phones’ and they say ‘no’ and that’s it?”
Sherborne mocked the idea that, as the chief executive of a company listed on the stock market, Bailey would not have read a 2003 report in the Guardian suggesting footballer Rio Ferdinand’s phone had been hacked by one of her newspapers.
Bailey said she did not recall the article, telling the court: “I wasn’t a Guardian reader.”
