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Prince Harry, who has ginger hair and a beard, wears a dark suit and tie with a white shirt as he is seen walking into the High Court building in London
The royal editor of the Daily Mail has denied she asked a freelance journalist in South Africa to get “sensitive” flight details for the Duke of Sussex’s trips abroad with girlfriends.
The High Court trial considering allegations of unlawful information gathering by the newspaper was shown emails between Rebecca English and Mike Behr, a freelance reporter in South Africa who sold stories and provided information to British newspapers.
Prince Harry alleges Behr “blagged” information about his flights from airlines.
English said a December 2007 story about the prince taking Chelsy Davy on a “make or break holiday” came from students at Leeds University where Davy was studying.
The Duke of Sussex is one of a number of high-profile figures, including Sir Elton John and Baroness Lawrence, who are suing the Mail’s publisher, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), for “grave breaches of privacy”.
ANL has strongly denied the claims.
English told the court on Monday: “I was told by my contact that as soon as term ended at Leeds, she would be going away.”
She also pointed out that several other newspapers appeared to have received the information and written similar stories.
But David Sherborne, representing Prince Harry, said the difference was that “you were able to say with certainty that Davy is flying out the same weekend.”
“You knew perfectly well Prince Harry’s flight details,” he said, adding that this was because she was sent emails by Behr which he claimed detailed the couple’s flight booking.
English said she did not remember receiving the email, and it was “uncharacteristic” of conversations she had had with Behr. She denied asking him to get flight details, or using them in stories.
She claimed she did not have a good relationship with Behr, and had “been on the receiving end of some not very pleasant behaviour”.
“You don’t understand the lived experience of a woman working in this business and the men who are difficult to deal with,” she told Sherborne.
English, who joined the Mail in 1999 and became the newspaper’s royal editor in 2020, also said information for a story about Prince Harry giving details about Davy around a campfire in Botswana came from someone who was there.
In a witness statement, English said the details for the 2004 Daily Mail story, headlined “How Harry fell in love”, were shared by colleague Sam Greenhill.
“Sam told me that one of the people that Prince Harry had spoken with round the campfire got in touch with the newspaper when news of the relationship broke and gave this information to us,” she told the court.
“Prince Harry hadn’t told them who his girlfriend was but had described her so that, when the stories about Chelsy Davy broke, they realised the significance of what they had been told.
“I thought at the time that the tip was from a contact of Sam’s, but now understand it just came in to the news desk.”
Prince Harry pictured with his ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy in 2007
Giving evidence to the trial last month, Prince Harry said those at the campfire would not have shared information to journalists.
Antony White KC, representing ANL, suggested to the court that Mail journalists could only have known about the duke’s apparent comments about being in love with Davy if someone had told them.
But the duke said it was more likely the information had been obtained when he “talked about it on a voicemail” or other communication.
English also told the court she wrote a 2013 story revealing that Prince Harry faced a “lonely new year’s eve” away from his then girlfriend Cressida Bonas because she had been told by the palace that reports in rival newspapers that Bonas would be coming to Sandringham were not true.
The court was shown emails from Behr detailing when Prince Harry would be arriving in Cape Town from a charity walk and flying to London for Christmas, and Sherborne claimed this was again evidence she was getting flight information from unlawful sources.
“He was providing information you couldn’t get elsewhere,” Sherborne challenged her, suggesting this was the result of “blagging” information from an airline, and producing evidence of phone calls between them at the time.
“That’s absolutely untrue,” she said.
She said she had information about the duke’s movements from the charity which was organising the Walking for the Wounded trek he had been taking part in before flying home.
Asked about a story which gave intimate details of the actor Elizabeth Hurley’s pregnancy in 2002, she at that stage of her career she was a more junior reporter, and was simply writing up information which would have been provided by other reporters.
The trial continues.
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