It appears that a settlement is imminent in Prince Harry’s legal battle with Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper after a dramatic first day of hearings at London’s High Court.
I’m going to be engaging in a bit of guesswork here, but I reckon it would be very surprising if lawyers for Prince Harry and his co-claimant, former Labour deputy leader Lord Tom Watson, didn’t walk into court tomorrow and announce they’d reached an agreement with News Group Newspapers (NGN).
It would also be very surprising if that settlement doesn’t include an astronomical sum of money, as well as an apology and some kind of admission of wrongdoing on the part of The Sun.
As I say, that’s all speculation and we can see how wrong I am in under 24 hours, but it’s the only outcome that makes sense to this observer after yesterday’s bizarre behaviour inside and outside the courtroom.
Here’s what we know happened: After proceedings finally got underway at 10.30am London time, Harry’s lawyer, David Sherborne, rose to his feet and immediately asked for a one-hour adjournment, which was granted by Justice Timothy Fancourt. An hour later, after the arrival in court of Lord Watson, Sherborne asked for a further delay until lunchtime. Again, it was granted, although through gritted teeth by the judge, who is known to get tetchy about court delays. “I am willing to provide some further time,” Fancourt said. “But it has to be the last adjournment.”
It wasn’t. When the court reconvened at 2pm Sherborne asked again for more time and stated explicitly that he and NGN’s lawyer Anthony Hudson KC were deep in talks. They both wanted the delay. “Mr Hudson and I would not be asking for more time if there was not a potentially good prospect of saving more time,” he said. Hudson revealed the issue was about “time differences.”
Immediately the speculation started. What could it mean if lawyers in London needed to consult with people in different time zones? Surely they were talking about Harry on the West Coast of the US? Or maybe they meant Lachlan or even Rupert Murdoch in whatever ocean their respective yachts were moored? Or maybe they meant all of the above? Either way, it was looking like the lawyers needed to consult because an out-of-the-ordinary settlement was being brokered and someone somewhere (else) needed to sign off on it.
Fancourt was definitely tetchy by this stage. He said the request seemed odd as they both had big legal teams and they’d had ample time to discuss their options.
Adjournment denied.
NGN’s Hudson asked to see the judge in chambers, away from the crowd in the courtroom and the overflowing press gallery. Fancourt said no, but reluctantly allowed them another 10 minutes to sort out their response.
And that’s when it got really interesting. When the parties came back they revealed they’d worked out a tactic together to further delay proceedings. Both the lawyer for Harry and Watson and the lawyer for Murdoch agreed to appeal the judge’s decision not to give them a delay and, by so doing, got the delay they both needed to keep talking.
Kind of brilliant as a strategy, but absolutely certain to piss off the judge who would be hearing the eight-week trial if their talks collapsed. Justice Fancourt saw through their little plot but had no option other than to stop proceedings for the day.
So why does all this mean an extraordinary settlement is in the offing?
Up until now, Prince Harry has made it clear that he’s not going to cave in and isn’t motivated by the money. His mission, he told an audience in New York recently, is to get closure for the 1,300 people who’ve already settled with NGN but who haven’t received an admission of wrongdoing, let alone an apology. He said he was going the whole way because he was the last person who could do it.
The incentive to settle has been overwhelming for others because, under British rules, even those who win their cases in court can be held liable for both sides’ legal fees if the value of the damages they receive from the court is less than the sum they were offered by NGN to settle out of court.
Depending on how you look at it, it’s an inbuilt incentive to settle, or a mechanism to prevent the truth from emerging in open court. Even cashed-up celebrities like Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller have had to accept the inevitability of settlement to avoid the risk of huge losses in legal fees.
Like Harry, Lord Watson has a wider agenda. He was the person who led the charge for the Labour Party against NGN way back in 2011, interrogating Rupert and James Murdoch when they appeared before the House of Commons culture committee. Yes, you remember that time when a protester attempted to shove a shaving cream pie in Rupert’s face but was thwarted by wife number three Wendi Deng. I know right? That was so many wives ago!
This is personal for Watson. He believes he was targeted because he pursued the company and sought the truth. He wants accountability.
What does accountability look like? Well, you’d have to conclude it includes at least some admissions: that The Sun newspaper did hack phones and use deceptive blagging techniques to obtain personal information unlawfully; or that it did conspire with bent coppers and use networks of ruthless and unethical private investigators to invade people’s privacy; or that senior managers did destroy masses of emails and other evidence that could have incriminated the company.
The problem is, they’re the very admissions the company has not made, certainly not in relation to The Sun. It did have to finally concede it was guilty of some of that behaviour at News of the World, but only when it was revealed in 2011 that the paper had been hacking the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. You’ll remember that Murdoch closed the 168-year-old paper that year in response. You may not recall that he conveniently opened a new streamlined Sun on Sunday a year later — reemploying some of the hacks from the News of the World — and business went on as usual.
NGN has not only denied those things occurred at The Sun but it has paid out hundreds of people to avoid facing scrutiny about them in open court. So, to admit to any of them in a settlement is a very big ask — big enough to force his lawyers to consult with Rupert or Lachlan, in some other time zone, beforehand.
NGN’s incentive to settle is that it will keep current and former executives out of court. Murdoch does not want to reopen old cases, particularly not in a civil court with a lesser burden of proof. But this time his team knows money won’t be enough. They will need to give Harry and Watson more than a standard confidential settlement because, as the last claimants, their credibility depends on exposing NGN.
Harry and Watson have an impressive team backing them. Some of them are old campaigners from the Hacked Off campaign that supported victims of phone hacking and made a big impact at the Leveson Inquiry that was established by Conservative prime minister David Cameron in response to the public’s outcry over the newspaper industry’s appallingly unethical behaviour. However, that inquiry was always meant to have a second stage, one which focused specifically on the conduct of NGN and its relationships with private investigators and the police. That stage was delayed until after the News of the World cases were resolved in court. But by 2017 it was dropped, leaving many of the questions about the industrial and organised nature of phone hacking unanswered.
The Hacked Off team has been using the courts to try and address some of those questions ever since. It did this successfully in 2023 when Prince Harry took on, and partially won, a case against the Mirror Group of newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and The People. Watching that case unfold in the same courtroom and under the same judge as the current case, I saw just how difficult it was to establish that deeply personal stories were the result of illegal newsgathering techniques. But Harry’s team managed it and Fancourt ruled in December 2023 that Harry had indeed been the victim of sustained phone hacking. He also concluded that some key executives at the Mirror Group knew it was happening.
This is exactly what News is now very keen to avoid. So, let’s see what happens tomorrow, whether a settlement is reached, and what that settlement entails. That will help determine whether a curtain can finally be drawn on what has to be one of the most depraved chapters in the history of journalism.
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