Prince Harry brands government ‘rock bottom’ in statement at Mirror publisher hacking case 

Prince Harry today launched an extraordinary attack on the Government – branding it ‘rock bottom’ – and addressed rumours that Princess Diana’s lover James Hewitt was his father as he became the first British royal to testify in open court since 1891.

The Duke of Sussex lambasted No 10 as part of his historic appearance in the witness box at the High Court in London this morning, and also referred to Paul Burrell as a ‘two-face s***’.

Harry, wearing a navy suit and dark purple tie, entered the witness box and swore an oath to tell the truth on the Bible. 

In an astonishing trashing of the convention that royals avoid meddling in politics, Harry raged about the ‘state of our press and our government – both of which I believe are at rock bottom’.

The fifth in line to the throne has become the first senior royal to give evidence in one of the Monarch’s courts in 132 years, as he sues the Mirror’s publisher for alleged hacking, which it denies.

And as the world was captivated by Harry’s landmark appearance, he used his pulpit beneath the High Court coat of arms of his father the Sovereign to claim:

• Princess Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell was a ‘two-faced s***’
• Stories about James Hewitt being his ‘biological father’ made him fear ‘I might be ousted from the Royal Family’
• He worried he would be expelled from Eton for taking drugs
• Diana’s supposed paranoia mirrored his own fears of friends betraying him
• Journalists hacked his girlfriend Chelsy Davy after he dressed as a fancy-dress Nazi
• ‘Horrific personal attacks and intimidation’ on him and Meghan were allegedly made by former editor Piers Morgan
• He is exposing media ‘criminality’ for moral reasons and as ‘a soldier upholding important values’

The duke, dressed in a white shirt, purple tie, and navy blue suit, arrived in a black Range Rover at the Royal Courts of Justice’s modern wing the Rolls Building. He stepped into the Court 15 witness box at 10.28am. 

And in his most outspoken attack on the British Press yet, Harry demanded: ‘How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness.’ 

The 38-year-old prince proclaimed he was motivated by wanting to ‘save journalism as a profession’.

During cross-examination today, Andrew Green KC, for MGN, asked Harry about part of his witness statement in which he states: ‘How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness.’

Mr Green asked if the duke meant ‘blood on their hands’ in relation to a specific article, and further asked him what he meant by it.

Harry said: ‘Some of the editors and journalists that are responsible for causing a lot of pain, upset and in some cases, speaking personally, death.’

He then said his reference to ‘blood on their hands’ was ‘more broadly towards the press’ in general, adding: ‘I haven’t named the journalists in that particular paragraph.’

He later suggested that his father King Charles may have been hacked.

Harry was questioned on a Mirror article titled ‘Harry’s cocaine, ecstasy and GHB parties’ – where Charles was describe as ‘worried sick’ but then ‘hugely relieved’ when told Harry had only used cannabis.

Harry said these words were attributed to his father as quotes.

But Andrew Green, representing MGN, denied this, saying it was a ‘description of feelings’. Mr Green then asked if Harry believed Charles was a victim of phone hacking. 

He said: ‘Potentially unlawful information gathering, yes’.

Harry was then asked about whether his own drug use, an illegal act, was in the public interest when as a teenager he was then third in line to the throne. He is now fifth in line.

Suggesting it was not, he said: ‘There’s a difference between public interest – and what interests the public’. 

There was also a heated moment in court when Mr Green said the royal had failed to answer a question about when he injured his thumb at school playing football.  

The KC asked if he thought the story came from phone hacking or unlawful information gathering.

‘Both,’ he replied.

Pressed on which phone would have been hacked, the prince said he ‘can’t be sure’.

‘That’s not an answer,’ Mr Green said, asking him again.

‘The doctors? I’m not sure,’ Harry says.

Mr green then hit back: ‘Are we not, Prince Harry, in the realms of total speculation?’

 

Many of his bombshell remarks were in a written witness statement, which he had prepared in advance and swore on oath was true. It was released as he took the stand. 

An usher handed him a bible and asked him to hold it in a raised hand.

She asked him to repeat after her: ‘I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

Harry stared straight ahead and repeated the phrase word-perfect.

He was then asked by his barrister David Sherborne to confirm he would like to be referred to as Prince Harry. He asked him to view his 55-page witness statement, check his signature and confirm its truthfulness.

The duke’s statement was then released to the public. It is a wide-ranging attack on the Mirror group’s newspapers, the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People, which he claims intruded into his childhood, adolescence and adulthood. He claims he and his mother Princess Diana were both hacked, along with his family, friends and royal aides.

His 25,538-word statement contains five mentions of his wife, Meghan, and 118 mentions of his first serious girlfriend Chelsy Davy. He blames the Press attention for Miss Davy dumping him, saying that ultimately she ‘made the decision that a Royal life was not for her, which was incredibly upsetting for me at the time’.

Prince Harry started giving his evidence at the High Court today for his phone hacking trial against the publisher of the Daily Mirror – becoming the first royal to testify in open court since 1891.

The Duke of Sussex jetted into the UK from California on Monday and looked relaxed and even smiled as he entered the High Court’s modern annexe – the Rolls Building – saying ‘good morning’ to the waiting press.

Yesterday he was criticised by one of Britain’s top judges and accused of wasting court time after missing the first day of his historic case – to celebrate his daughter Lilibet’s birthday in Montecito before flying to Britain.

Harry and three others are suing the Mirror group claiming the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People newspaper hacked their phones or conducted other illegal activity, which is denied.

The last royal in the witness box was Edward VII in 1891 who gave evidence when a slander action was brought by a card player accused of cheating at baccarat at a time when gambling was illegal. His appearance in the witness box left Queen Victoria unamused – but it is not known what Harry’s father, King Charles III, thinks about his son’s historic court appearance. 

Under cross examination from Andrew Green KC, for MGN, the Duke of Sussex said: ‘I’ve experienced hostility from the press since I was born.’

Harry was questioned about his attitude towards the media, and asked if had a ‘long-standing’ hostility towards it.

‘Yes, that’s correct,’ the duke said.

Mr Green asked if this hostility had pre-dated the discovery that unlawful methods had been used by some of the press.

The duke replied: ‘Yes… because the unlawful methods were hidden from me as well as everybody else.’

He added that it ‘certainly shocked me’.

His written statement reveals: 

ROCK BOTTOM

Harry proclaimed: ‘On a national level, at the moment, our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our government – both of which I believe are at rock bottom’.

He did not specify exactly why he thought the Government was at rock bottom. But he claimed it was ‘scared of alienating’ the Press and this was ‘incredibly worrying for the entire UK’, and he added: ‘Democracy fails when your press fails to scrutinise and hold the government accountable, and instead choose to get into bed with them so they can ensure the status quo.’

The duke said: ‘I may not have a role within the Institution but, as a member of the British Royal family, and as a soldier upholding important values, I feel there’s a responsibility to expose this criminal activity in the name of public interest.’

Harry said that he hoped ‘to save journalism as a profession’ and was bringing his claim ‘not because I hate the tabloid press or even necessarily a section of it, but in order to properly hold the people who have hijacked privileges which come with being a member of the press, to account for their actions’.

JAMES HEWITT 

Harry said he was a teenager when he heard cruel and hurtful stories James Hewitt was his real father – before discovering aged 30 that the timeline did not fit.

He was 18 when he first heard ‘a rumour that my biological father was James Hewitt, a man my mother had a relationship with after I was born’.

He added: ‘At the time of this article and others similar to it, I wasn’t actually aware that my mother hadn’t met Major Hewitt until after I was born. This timeline is something I only learnt of in around 2014,’ when he was around 30.

The duke added: ‘At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me. They were hurtful, mean and cruel. I was always left questioning the motives behind the stories.’

The prince said: ‘Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so I might be ousted from the Royal Family?’

 NAZI DRESS

Harry recounts the infamous time in 2005 he dressed as a Nazi – while not using the word Nazi.

He says there was ‘a lot of press coverage of me at the time, as I had attended a fancy dress party’.

Harry, who was 20 at the time, triggered a storm of outrage when a picture was published in The Sun of his him wearing the outfit complete with a swastika on his arm to a ‘native and colonial’ party. He said it was a ‘poor choice of costume’ and he was ‘very sorry if I caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone’. In his memoir Spare, he claimed that Prince William and Kate encouraged him to wear the distasteful Nazi soldier costume.

In the statement to the court, he said: ‘It was a challenging period for me. I had been immature, I hadn’t really thought about my actions and I had made a stupid decision.’ But he complained about the Press: ‘My mistakes were being played out publicly.’

Harry alleges the Mirror, which had followed up the Sun’s story, must have used hacking because it reported his girlfriend Chelsy Davy ‘was furious and had given me a ‘tongue-lashing down the phone’ following allegations that I had been flirting with a brunette at the party’. The duke said: ‘How could the Defendant’s journalists know about this?’

PAUL BURRELL

Harry admitted he would have referred to Paul Burrell as a ‘two-face s***’, as was reported in a newspaper article which he said ‘accurately sets out the position’.

His mother’s former butler had recently been on trial for allegedly selling Diana’s possessions, and after the case collapsed Prince William had wanted to meet with Burrell, according to the 2003 article in the People, as ‘the only way to stop him selling more Diana secrets’. But Harry feared the former servant would simply use it as an opportunity to make money.

Harry said: ‘The article accurately sets out the position that my brother was open to fixing a meeting with Paul to discuss his ongoing exposés about our mother. However I had made up my mind about the kind of person I thought Paul was, and was firmly against meeting him.

‘Both my brother and I had very strong feelings about how indiscrete Paul had proven to be with the way he had sold our mother’s possessions and how he had given numerous interviews about her.’

Harry claimed the People article – which claimed Harry had condemned Burrell – must have been sourced from interception of voicemails, admitting: ‘I would have used the phrase ‘two-face s***’, as is reported, and believe this could have been lifted directly from a voicemail I had left.’

Barrister Mr Sherborne told the court on Monday: ‘Even at this very early formative stage the seeds of discord between these two brothers are starting to be sown. Brothers can sometimes disagree but once it is made public in this way and their inside feelings revealed in the way that they are, trust begins to be eroded and paranoia sets in.’

ETON

The prince was ‘extremely worried I was going to be expelled’ from Eton after a Daily Mirror article was published with the headline: ‘Harry’s cocaine ecstasy and GHB parties’ in 2002. He said: ‘Eton had a zero drugs policy in place’. The headline was misleading, he claimed, because he ‘only smoked cannabis’, he was quoted as telling his father, and it made it sound like he was hosting the parties.

The duke said it was ‘not clear to me’ where the journalists had got their quotes from, so it made him ‘wonder with hindsight’ if they had heard something they were not intended to, and as there was ‘no explanation of how they learnt the information’ he was ‘at a loss as to who would have said’ it.

DIANA’S ‘PARANOIA’

Harry suffered the same gnawing fears as Princess Diana. He said: ‘I’ve always heard people refer to my mother as paranoid, but she wasn’t. She was fearful of what was actually happening to her and now I know that I was the same.’

He claimed articles about him as a teenager made him feel constantly suspicious of those close to him, including former nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke and his friend Mark Dyer. The duke said: ‘I doubted the loyalty of Tiggy and even Marko, who I really looked up to. My brother and I even stopped talking to Marko for a long period of time. I can see how much of my life was wasted on this paranoia.’

PIERS MORGAN

The former editor Piers Morgan has unleashed ‘a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation’ against Harry and his wife, the duke claimed. Harry added this was ‘as a consequence of me bringing my Mirror Group claim’ and was ‘presumably in retaliation and in the hope that I will back down, before being able to hold him properly accountable for his unlawful activity towards both me and my mother during his editorship’. Mr Morgan was editor of the Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004 and has always denied phone hacking, saying he will not take lectures on privacy invasion from ‘somebody who has spent the last three years ruthlessly and cynically invading the Royal Family’s privacy for vast commercial gain’.

LAP DANCING CLUB

When Harry visited a Spearmint Rhino club with fellow Sandhurst cadets, an article in The People claimed Chelsy Davy ‘blew her top’ and had ‘let rip in a string of phone calls’. The duke said the story must have come from phone hacking, adding: ‘I don’t think Chelsy did go mad about me going there. We did speak about it over the phone, but I promised her that I hadn’t had a lap dance and stayed with the three other cadets that had girlfriends.’

The Duke of Sussex will be in the High Court witness box for two days this week – twice as long as he spent when he came for the Coronation. It is not clear if he will see his father or brother this week – or meet his cousin Princess Eugenie’s new son Ernest, who was born last Tuesday.

He made a flying visit for the momentous day his father King Charles was crowned, spending around 28 hours in Britain before dashing back to California.

But the duke seems to have more time to devote to his legal crusade against the Mirror newspapers’ publisher.

He is expected to spend a full day in the witness box at the High Court today and at least half a day tomorrow. 

Cross-examining Prince Harry, Andrew Green KC, for MGN, questioned the duke about a Daily Mirror article publisher in September 1996 entitled ‘Diana so sad on Harry’s big day’.

The court heard that Harry has complained about the article containing details of his feelings regarding the divorce of his parents and the ill health of a family friend.

The MGN barrister said the duke was first issued with a mobile phone when he went to Eton in 1998, putting it to Harry that the 1996 article could not have involved phone hacking.

Harry replied: ‘That’s incorrect. My security at school had a separate room with a land line.’

He said ‘most Sunday nights’, after being dropped off by his mother ‘the first thing we would do is to use the phone to ring her… in floods of tears’.

Harry also said it could have been his mother who was hacked, but Mr Green replied ‘that’s just speculation you’ve come up with now’.

Mr Green said the article reported that Harry at the time was ‘believed to be taking the royal divorced badly’, with the duke replying: ‘Like most children I think, yes’.

The barrister said such information was not saying anything that was not ‘pretty obvious’.

The duke said there was ‘no legitimacy’ in putting such information in the newspaper, adding that ‘the methods in which it was obtained seem incredibly suspicious’.

The Duke of Sussex faced questions from Mr Green about claims in his witness statement that MGN’s alleged intrusion into his life contributed to ‘a huge amount of paranoia’.

Mr Green asked Harry how he had such feelings if he was not aware of articles published in relation to him at the time.

The Duke said he would be ‘speculating’ if he said which articles he had read and which he had not.

Harry added: ‘In my experience, the vast majority of the quotes were attributed to a pal, a friend, a source, an onlooker, which actually creates more suspicion’.

The duke said he started to re-examine articles when he ‘realised information had been unlawfully obtained’.

Andrew Green KC, for MGN, asked Harry about part of his case that alleges articles ’caused him to be paranoid and to distrust those around him’, and whether he was referring to specific MGN articles or ‘the general effect of all of the articles’ about him.

Harry said: ‘Yes, because … it is 20 years ago and I simply can’t other than speculate whether I saw these articles at the time.

‘I certainly saw a lot of articles at the time and was made aware … unfortunately, by the behaviour and reaction of my inner circle.’

The duke added that when information he had only told to a few members of his inner circle was made public, ‘your circle of friends starts to shrink’.

Andrew Green KC, for MGN, then asked the duke: ‘Is it realistic, when you have been the subject of so much press intrusion by so many press, both domestic and international, to attribute specific distress to a particular article from 20 years ago, which you may not have seen at the time?’

Harry replied: ‘As I said earlier, it isn’t a specific article, it is all of the articles.’

He added: ‘Every single article has caused me distress,’ to which Mr Green then asked if each individual article had caused him distress.

Harry replied: ‘Yes, without question.’

Mr Green then asked Harry about part of his case which states that he was caused particular distress ‘because he is a very private person’ and was in the public eye at a young age.

Harry said: ‘I believe that as a child, every single one of these articles played an important role in my growing up.’

However, he added that he could not confirm whether he remembered reading specific articles at the time they were published, adding that there were ‘millions’ of articles ‘that have been written about me since age 12’.

In fact, he could have begun giving his evidence yesterday, but he did not fly to the UK until Sunday evening so that he could help celebrate his two-year-old daughter’s birthday.

An exasperated judge rebuked the duke’s barrister when it became clear the royal witness was ‘unavailable’ for the opening day of his own case suing the publisher of the Mirror newspaper.

David Sherborne explained that his client was in a ‘different category’ because of his ‘travel and security arrangements’. Those arrangements involved Harry flying from California on Sunday night after celebrating Princess Lilibet of Sussex’s second birthday, the court heard.

The Mirror’s KC Andrew Green said it was ‘absolutely extraordinary’ that Harry was ‘not available for day one of his trial’. Mr Justice Fancourt said he was ‘a little surprised’ that Harry was not there, and admonished Mr Sherborne for causing ‘timetable chaos’.