An extraordinary personal legal battle which has been years in preparation is to pit one of the most famous members of the British royal family against the world’s best-known media baron this week. On Tuesday Prince Harry’s lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group, owners of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World, will officially begin at the High Court in London.
Fifth in line to the throne, King Charles’s younger son lives in self-imposed exile in California, but is due to appear in court in person once the case gets fully under way next month. The Duke of Sussex, 40, is suing News Group Newspapers (NGN), over claims that journalists on his popular titles worked unlawfully with private investigators, delving into his private life, between 1996 and 2011. He sees himself as the last man standing in a struggle to get the newspapers to take legal responsibility for the crimes he and others have alleged. Another surviving case brought by Lord Watson, the former Labour deputy leader, will be heard alongside the Prince’s.
About 40 other claimants, many of them celebrities such as Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller, have already settled claims against Murdoch’s group. Most were deterred from going to trial by the huge legal bills that could be imposed on them, even after a win in court. If they had previously rejected a financial offer from NGN to pursue their grievance, they could have been found liable for millions. After accepting a settlement last year, Hugh Grant said he did so after finding out he could be liable for £10m in costs.
“They have settled because they’ve had to settle,” Prince Harry told the New York Times before Christmas. “One of the main reasons for seeing this through is accountability, because I’m the last person that can actually achieve that.”
However, the civil trial, scheduled to run until mid-March, is likely to draw in other famous witnesses, including Grant, Miller, and Lily Allen, as well as testimony from eminent figures such as former prime minister Gordon Brown and the justice minister, Shabana Mahmood. It will also involve public statements from whistleblowing journalists.
Defending their reputations from allegations that they were aware of unlawful activities and even attempted to conceal them, will be many of the most powerful names in British media, including Murdoch and his son, James, Rebekah Brooks, now CEO of News UK, Victoria Newton, editor of the Sun, and the British journalist Will Lewis, who is today controversially in charge at the Washington Post, as its publisher and CEO. Lawyers for the Prince claim Lewis was implicated in a ruse to conceal evidence of hacking by removing computer files. Lewis told the the Times last summer: “Any allegations of wrongdoing are untrue.”
A spokesperson for NGN said: “Both [Watson and the Duke of Sussex] allege unlawful destruction of emails by News International between 2010-2011. This allegation is wrong, unsustainable, and is strongly denied. NGN will be calling a number of witnesses including technologists, lawyers and senior staff to defeat the claim.”
A source close to the Prince’s legal team told the Observer: “People concentrate on the allegations of phone hacking, but that is actually a small part of it. In fact, the unlawful activities we will provide evidence of were much broader, including phone tapping, blagging – or gaining information through trickery – and going through bins for paperwork.” The extent of payments to private investigators will also be considered.
The newspaper group’s bosses have previously suggested that many of their stories about the private lives of well-known or powerful people were legitimately sourced through anonymous tip-offs or by people ringing the newsroom in return for money.
The Prince launched his legal action against NGN in 2019, the same week that his wife, Meghan Markle, launched her own case against the Mail on Sunday for alleged breach of privacy and copyright infringement, over its publishing of a private letter she had sent to her father.
Harry is believed to want to hold key people accountable for the damage that he alleges was done to himself and his wider family as a result of intrusion and harassment from the press. Murdoch and his organisation have so far avoided public discussion about a document trail that the claimants argue reveals criminal activityand a concerted cover-up.
Early weeks in court will cover what are termed “generic issues”, such as examining how widespread any unlawful practices were and who knew of them. Worryingly for the defendants, broad legal proofs that unlawful information gathering was routine could be established here just by “inference”, rather than with explicit documentation. Signs of concealment, use of coded language, or that the destruction of paperwork was rife would also be damaging to the defence. This first phase will also examine allegations that NGN misled police and provided false statements to the Leveson public inquiry into media ethics between 2011 and 2012.
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Those presenting the Prince’s lawsuit, it is understood, do not expect to lose any of more than 30 individual allegations of unlawful activity, but the bigger prize is the final hearing of the evidence in open court. “This will be about witnesses speaking their truth in front of the police and in public,” the source said. Most significant may be any evidence supporting the claims that newspaper staff committed perjury or perverted the course of justice.
Tom Watson’s case, which will allege the hacking of the parliamentary committee he formerly chaired while it sat to consider the hacking allegations themselves, will be heard from 10 February 10th, before the Prince’s case.
The Prince wants to attend the Invictus Games, of which he is founder and patron, and which begins on 8 February, before appearing in court. He is also thought to be planning to call on only a few witnesses, to spare others from being thrust into the spotlight. One witness may be the mother of the late television presenter Caroline Flack.
Harry has testified before in a hacking case brought against Mirror Group Newspapers, in the summer of 2023. The judge in the upcoming case, Timothy Fancourt, also heard that case and ruled the Prince had been a victim of “widespread and habitual hacking”. He was awarded £140,600 and then settled the rest of his privacy claims against the Mirror Group for at least £400,000.
A spokesperson for NGN said: “In 2011 an apology was published by NGN to victims of voicemail interception by the News of the World. The company publicly committed to paying financial compensation and since then has paid settlements to those with claims. In some cases, particularly those relating to The Sun, it has made commercial sense (and in accordance with common litigation practice) for the parties to come to a financial settlement without NGN accepting liability.
“NGN strongly denies that any of its titles hacked Mr Watson or acted unlawfully and will also argue his claim is brought out of time … [The Duke of Sussex’s] allegations of mobile phone hacking have been struck out by the court so will not be part of the trial. His claim focuses now on allegations of unlawful information gathering … His claim will be fully defended, including on the grounds that it is brought out of time.”
