Harry takes on the Mail in high…

In a court of law in London this week, the irresistible force of Prince Harry’s “crusade” against the newspapers he blames for killing his mother will meet the immovable object of “the greatest newspaperman of his generation”, the former editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre.

The details of the case are these: the Duke of Sussex is one of seven claimants bringing a civil claim for damages against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), publisher of the Mail and Mail on Sunday, where Dacre is editor-in-chief. Harry’s co-claimants are Doreen Lawrence (mother of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in 1993), Elton John and his husband David Furnish, the actors Sadie Frost and Elizabeth Hurley, and the former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes.

Together, they claim to be victims of unlawful acts carried out or commissioned by ANL, including phone (voicemail) hacking, illegally accessing medical and financial records, tapping live phone calls and bugging a house. ANL denies any wrongdoing. The interior life of the case has been heated, driven on both sides by a sense of moral conviction. Harry has been indefatigable in attack; the propulsive force in this case and past cases against Mirror Group, and News Group Newspapers (NGN), which publishes the Sun and used to print the News of the World. Both claims were settled, Harry won damages, and the other side had to pay his costs.

Dacre remains implacable in his own defence. He is said to have done little else for the past year except prepare for this trial, and he has not budged an inch on the fundamentals since he told the Leveson inquiry into the standards and practices of the British press under oath in 2012, “let me say as clearly and as slowly as I can: I have never placed a story in the Daily Mail as a result of phone hacking that I knew came from phone hacking. I know of no cases of phone hacking. Having conducted a major internal inquiry, I’m as confident as I can be that there’s no phone hacking on the Daily Mail.”

When the allegations of intercepting live phone calls and planting bugs are included on the charge sheet, this is arguably the most serious set of allegations yet levelled against a British newspaper. They will meet the most absolute of denials (ANL calls them “utterly unfounded”). And the two principals, Prince Harry and Dacre, will take the stand.

Frost is expected to tell the court that news of an ectopic pregnancy was published before she had told even her mother about it.

Lawrence will claim that information in five articles in the Daily Mail between 1997 and 2007 was obtained illegally, including by phone tapping and corrupt payments to police officers – information about sensitive matters such as the closing of the police investigation into her son’s murder, giving her no chance to prepare her other children for the news before the world found out.

Part of Prince Harry’s claim is that the Mail paid to discover which aeroplane seat his then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, would be sitting in, and discussed whether they could “plant someone next to her”. Hurley will claim that a private investigator put a phone tap on her landline and a listening device on the window of her house. All of this is denied by ANL.

Before the trial begins in earnest, the judge has raised an eyebrow about the strength and clarity of some of the underlying evidence, and the claimants themselves acknowledge that often they cannot produce a single piece of direct evidence. Instead, they will try to build an argument by weaving together different strands: the propensity, as they see it, of certain journalists at the Mail and Mail on Sunday to use private investigators; invoices for work by investigators that seem to tally with published articles; and, frequently, a belief that information in those articles simply could only have been obtained illegally.

But for the claimants’ legal team, the path to the steps of the high court has been unusually treacherous. They have been accused of colluding with claimants to avoid their claims being timed out, and not revealing documents which should have been disclosed, all of which they have denied. And then, one of their star witnesses turned on them. Gavin Burrows is a former private investigator whose testimony was part of the backbone of the case. In sworn statements in 2021, he gave evidence of his involvement in phone hacking and illegal surveillance, but a couple of years later dramatically changed his tune. In a fresh witness statement last September he said: “I do not recognise the earlier witness statement… and I believe that my signature on that document is a forgery. A lot of it is not written in my type of language. “Further, the contents of the statement are substantially untrue.” He went on to say that when he gave the statement in 2021, he was recovering from a serious assault, taking strong painkillers and drinking heavily. After his volte-face, Burrows was served with a summons to appear in court last week. He did not show up, and then applied through his barrister for permission to give evidence by video link from abroad. The judge seems to have ignored that request.