Prince Harry is facing two major life events in the next week. On Saturday, he will sit in Westminster Abbey to watch his father formally be crowned as King Charles III. Then on Wednesday he begins the real business, when his phone-hacking case against the Mirror gets under way at the high court – setting up a showdown with his old enemy Piers Morgan.
Harry will become the first senior royal since the 19th century to give evidence in a courtroom, where he will be cross-examined on his allegations that he was the victim of illegal activity by the Daily Mirror – including when Morgan was editing the tabloid newspaper.
The prince alleges that his family and friends, ranging from the now King Charles to the now-deceased television presenter Caroline Flack, were also illegally targeted by Mirror journalists seeking stories between 1996 and 2010, destroying his relationships and leaving him suffering from “general paranoia”. He lists 148 articles published in the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People that he claims must have come from illegal sources.
This is the first of Harry’s three phone-hacking cases against British newspaper groups to go to trial, with the royal waiting to hear whether the courts will allow him to proceed with two separate cases against the parent companies of the Sun and the Daily Mail. The prince is expected to use next week’s trial to criticise Morgan, who has always denied knowingly publishing stories based on phone hacking when he was editor of the Mirror between 1995 and 2004.
The Mirror’s publisher has already accepted that phone hacking took place at its titles and has paid out tens of millions of pounds to hundreds of victims. But it is arguing that the prince has missed a deadline for making some of the claims.
Mirror Group Newspapers also insists many of the articles Harry believes were obtained via phone hacking or other illegal means in reality came through legal methods. This includes information being sold by the prince’s acquaintances, lifted from rival newspapers or briefed to the media by royal courtiers who went behind the young prince’s back.
In one instance, Harry alleges an article published when Morgan was Daily Mirror editor about the then 17-year-old prince catching glandular fever, entitled “Harry’s sick with kissing disease”, must have been obtained through illegal methods.
The Mirror’s lawyers state that the real source of the story was probably Charles’s former press chief Mark Bolland, who had a strong personal relationship with Morgan “involving regular calls, meals and drinking sessions together”. The newspaper group, which has deployed senior staff to reinvestigate the sources of many of the decades-old stories, implies that Harry should blame his father’s aides for intruding upon his privacy rather than journalists.
Other Mirror executives mentioned in the case include the former Sunday Mirror editor Richard Wallace, who now runs the talkTV channel for Rupert Murdoch – where he is the boss of the lead presenter, Piers Morgan. Gary Jones, now the editor of the Daily Express, is also alleged to have employed private investigator Jonathan Rees for the purposes of “obtaining unlawful telephone and financial information” while a reporter at the Mirror.
Despite Morgan’s strong denials that he commissioned phone hacking, he made references to the existence of voicemail interception as a tactic in interviews and in his own published diaries. The former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman told the Leveson inquiry that Morgan had explained the practice to him at a lunch in 2002, with Morgan joking he knew about private conversations Ulrika Jonsson had with the then England football team manager Sven-Göran Eriksson. He also talked in a 2006 Daily Mail article about hearing Paul McCartney leave a voicemail for his then wife, Heather Mills.
Last month, Harry alleged that Morgan oversaw the illegal targeting of his mother, Princess Diana, when editing the News of the World in the mid-1990s.
If Harry is victorious against Mirror Group Newspapers, it could have wider implications for the British newspaper industry. The company is part of the publisher Reach, which also owns the Daily Express, Daily Star, and dozens of local newspapers including the Manchester Evening News and the Liverpool Echo. Journalists at those titles will be watching court proceedings nervously, as any substantial payout to Harry would hit the company’s already-shaky finances, which have led to it making redundancies.
Further details of Harry’s case will be revealed when the case begins on Wednesday, with the prince expected to give evidence in June, alongside three other potential phone-hacking victims: the former Coronation Street star Nikki Sanderson, the actor Michael Turner and Fiona Wightman, the ex-wife of the actor Paul Whitehouse.
The Mirror’s lawyers have suggested Morgan’s diaries cannot be relied upon as a source, given that many factual details in them have been disputed by third parties.
They said: “Mr Morgan’s evidence and stance has always been that he has never hacked a phone, or ordered the hacking of a phone, or knowingly published a story based on evidence obtained through phone hacking.”
