Prince Harry’s second round against the press kicks off today in the High Court with former Labor deputy leader Tom Watson at his side as a co-accused against the publisher of The Sun newspaper.
Judge Fancourt actually described the trial as a campaign between “two stubborn but well-resourced armies” in entrenched positions.
If it continues for a full seven weeks, there will be only one guaranteed outcome: huge legal costs for both sides.
The goal of civil litigation is to reach a settlement for the damages caused. The problem for The Sun and publisher News Group Newspapers, which also published News Of The World, is that Prince Harry is motivated not by money, but by revenge and a strong sense of injustice over past wrongs.
He wants to cause as much trouble for News UK as possible, and is also likely to use the trial as a way to find out whether his father, brother and late grandmother are cooperating with the news group. Harry sought to reveal emails sent between News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks and royal PR chiefs up to September 2019.
Harry previously had 41 defendants in his case, but The Sun has settled 39 claims.
Those pre-trial settlements include actor Hugh Grant who said he was advised to accept what he described as a “huge sum of money” to avoid potentially being liable for court costs of £10 million. If he had refused to settle but ultimately received less compensation than he was offered, he would have had to pay the difference.
About 30 articles form the basis of Harry’s invasion of privacy case dating back between 13 and 28 years.
It would be fascinating to know the extent to which The Sun was involved in illegal newsgathering, or whether stories about his private life were being obtained through legitimate means, as was often the case in Harry’s previous case against The Mirror.
In November I interviewed former Sun Royal correspondent Duncan Larcombe who was royal editor of the title in the late 2000s – the height of tabloid interest in Harry’s often outrageous antics.
Larcombe despises The Sun’s parent company for sharing confidential emails with police, which resulted in him spending more than 1,000 days on police bail before facing trial and eventually being acquitted as part of Operation Elveden.
But he believes Harry is wrong to believe that a “massive law-breaking conspiracy” was behind the tabloids’ meddling in his life.
He said: “When I was at The Sun we covered everything Harry did because the readers loved him. We would often get a call from a Sun reader at the Johannesburg airport or wherever and say ‘I’ve just seen Prince Harry.’ That’s how we get stories.” “.
The first round of Prince Harry versus the press concluded in December 2023 when Judge Fancourt concluded that Harry’s phone had been hacked to a “modest extent” by MGN, and awarded him £140,600 in damages. Some of Harry’s co-defendants in the case faced huge cost bills for taking the case to court rather than accepting previous settlement offers.
A third massive Prince Harry versus the press trial has yet to be held, with the prince and a host of celebrity accusers facing the publisher of the Daily Mail over alleged widespread illegal newsgathering dating back as much as 30 years.
The Mail’s publisher categorically denies that he hired private investigators to secretly place eavesdropping devices in cars and homes. The claimants also allege that the journalists eavesdropped on private phone calls and obtained banking and medical records by deception.
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