It was at 10.16am – just 14 minutes before the trial was due to start in court 30 of the Rolls building of the Royal Courts of Justice – that the deal was struck.
After a frenetic 24 hours of legal wrangling, it was agreed that Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) would issue an apology to Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, and admit for the first time that beyond the well-chronicled criminality at the now defunct News of the World, there had been “incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for the Sun”.
The costs and damages paid to Harry and his fellow claimant, Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, are in excess of £10m. But it was not merely the bartering over the astronomical sum and legalese that took the settlement talks to the wire.
When asking for a further adjournment of the trial to allow the deal talks to progress, NGN’s barrister Anthony Hudson KC had suggested to Mr Justice Fancourt that “time difference” was proving to be a logistical barrier.
“The judge assumed it was because Harry was in California,” a source close to the case said. “But there was also a hotline to New York and Lachlan Murdoch was at the end of the phone dealing with it hour by hour, and it was Lachlan Murdoch who signed off on the unlawful information bit.” A spokesperson for NGN declined to comment.
A payout of £10m is chicken feed to News Corp, whose revenues topped $9bn in 2023. The involvement of Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, the chair of News Corp, is to many instead indicative of the importance to the company of bringing to an end a saga which has posed a risk of further police interest in its current and former executives.
The Crown Prosecution Service concluded its involvement in the hacking of voicemail messages by journalists or private investigators working on their behalf in 2015. There were nine convictions in total, including that of Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor and former Downing Street spokesperson, who was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
Rebekah Brooks, the NGN chief executive who was previously editor of the Sun and the News of the World, was cleared in 2014 of charges of conspiracy to hack voicemails, conspiracy to pay public officials and perverting the course of justice.
Yet calls for further police action have stubbornly continued to be aired, most powerfully perhaps by the former prime minister Gordon Brown after recent disclosures in the high court of a minute of a 2011 meeting between the police and Will Lewis, now chief executive of the Washington Post but then a senior NGN executive.
Detectives had been inquiring into a complaint by Brown of the mass deletion of emails belonging to senior executives at Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper company at the time of police investigations into illegality at the company. Lewis justified some deletions by accusing Brown of “controlling” a plot with Lord Watson, then a Labour MP, to obtain the emails of Brooks through a third party. Lewis was the company’s general manager at the time.
As part of the settlement on Wednesday, NGN confirmed that it now accepted “this information was false, and Lord Watson was not in receipt of any such confidential information. NGN apologises fully and unequivocally for this.”
The Metropolitan police said in the summer that a special inquiry team was examining the allegations of a cover-up in light of the minute. But a full trial in the high court would have tested the evidence and – if successful for Harry and Watson – it would surely have made a further criminal inquiry inevitable. Instead, could this be the moment that Murdoch draws a line under the scandal?
An NGN spokesperson said: “These allegations [of destruction of evidence] were and continue to be strongly denied. Extensive evidence would have been called in trial to rebut these allegations from senior staff from technology and legal.”
Sources close to Harry and Watson recognise that the Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, will not be “widely enthusiastic” about reopening this can of worms. The Guardian nevertheless understands that the Met has requested transcripts of the pre-trial hearings.
Watson used his moment on the steps of the court to disclose that he would be sending a dossier of evidence disclosed to the claimants to the Met to act upon. It is understood that the peer’s lawyers are working on the file and it will be submitted within weeks.
For those looking for clues as to what might be in it, Fancourt helpfully pointed to the scale of the claims in a judgment related to similar case brought by the Hollywood star Hugh Grant, who also settled earlier this year. They would, if proven, establish “very serious, deliberate wrongdoing at NGN, conducted on an institutional basis on a huge scale”, he said.
“They would also establish a concerted effort to conceal the wrongdoing by hiding and destroying relevant documentary evidence, repeated public denials, lies to regulators and authorities, and unwarranted threats to those who dared to make allegations or notify intended claims against the Sun.”
Harry had, of course, indicated that he was determined to air the evidence in court despite the mounting costs and antipathy of his own family. But the odds were always stacked against him.
In civil cases, if the damages awarded to a successful claimant are less than the settlement amount offered by a defendant, the claimant may have to pay the legal costs for all sides.
The legal teams for Harry and Watson had wanted an admission of destruction of evidence in the settlement, which they did not get. They do believe, however, that in NGN’s apology and the admission of unlawful behaviour by private investigators working for the Sun, there is a confession that the company lied, worthy of further police investigation.
“There were basically two things we were trying to prove,” a source said. “One or the other would be enough to show that they lied. It was either evidence destruction or unlawful behaviour, and as soon as the unlawful behaviour went in the statement, we could settle.”
As a result, and to much indignation at NGN’s London Bridge headquarters, the claimants’ barrister David Sherborne, outside the Rolls building, felt able to point the finger directly at the company’s chief executive.
Sherborne said: “At her trial in 2014, Rebekah Brooks said: ‘When I was editor of the Sun we ran a clean ship.’”
“Now, 10 years later when she is CEO of the company, they now admit, when she was editor of the Sun, they ran a criminal enterprise.”
NGN said the admission of unlawful behaviour did not relate to its journalists and should be seen in the context of a time when newspapers across Fleet Street were using private investigators to carry out work for which they might have a defence of “public interest”.
As for the suggestion that NGN’s chief executive had perjured herself by claiming to run a “clean ship”, a spokesperson for NGN said Sherborne had misquoted Brooks. She had been referring in her evidence in court to an absence of phone hacking and not the use of private investigators, they said.
They added of Sherborne’s comments: “This is a misrepresentation by the claimant group of the outcome of the proceedings and the nature of the apology. Having re-examined those remarks, Rebekah is misquoted and quoted out of context. She has not misled anyone.”
