Prince Harry’s case against the owner of the Daily Mail depends on an alleged confession from an unreliable private investigator who has recanted his evidence, according to the publisher’s lawyers.
The royal alleges that Associated Newspapers, the parent company of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, made widespread use of illegal information-gathering tactics including phone hacking, landline interception and the blagging of personal information.
Harry’s accusations rely partly on evidence from a lengthy witness statement signed in 2021 by a private investigator, Gavin Burrows, and released to journalists on Wednesday.
In that statement, Burrows claims that he and his team obtained information, hacked voicemails, tapped landline phones and bugged cars on behalf of journalists. He also goes into detail about how he allegedly tapped Elton John’s domestic landline, bugged cars belonging to Hugh Grant and Carole Middleton, the mother of the Princess of Wales, and targeted Harry’s girlfriends. Burrows described how he engaged in illegal activities on behalf of the Mail on Sunday, describing it as “one of my biggest and most regular clients”.
In the witness statement, which continues over more than 20 pages, Burrows apparently admits to a wide variety of crimes and states that he targeted “thousands” of people on behalf of the Mail on Sunday.
But Adrian Beltrami KC, representing Associated Newspapers, told the high court on Wednesday that these claims were now “directly contradicted” by a second witness statement from Burrows.
In this new statement, signed three weeks ago and provided to Associated Newspapers, the private investigator recants his previous confession. He now says he was never asked to “conduct unlawful information gathering” by the Daily Mail or Mail on Sunday, and denies being paid in cash for work on behalf of the newspaper.
Beltrami, who is attempting to have the case thrown out of court before it goes to a trial, said that raises serious questions about the “credibility and reliability” of Burrows’ original accusations.
Harry, who had been in court for the first two days of legal argument, did not appear at the central London venue on Wednesday. He is bringing his case as part of a group of seven prominent individuals allegedly targeted by Associated Newspapers, which also includes Doreen Lawrence, Elton John, David Furnish, Elizabeth Hurley, Sadie Frost and Simon Hughes.
Their cases rely on evidence from other private investigators, but Burrows’ original witness statement makes some of the more lurid claims.
The judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, observed that Harry and his fellow claimants “may need to adjust their expectations” regarding the use of Burrows’ evidence.
However, in a boost for Harry and the other claimants, the judge hinted that he may be inclined to allow the case to proceed to the next stage, observing that the quality of evidence is a matter for legal debate. “There is a trial point if ever I have seen one,” said Nicklin.
Associated Newspapers denies the allegations and is trying to stop the cases going to a full trial. The company’s lawyers spent Wednesday arguing at the high court that Harry and his fellow claimants missed a legal deadline to file the paperwork so the cases should be stopped from proceeding any further.
The company’s lawyers said the group of individuals should have suspected they were the potential victims of illegal behaviour at a much earlier stage, when phone hacking was first in the news more than a decade ago or they first saw suspicious articles.
Lawyers acting for Harry and the other claimants argue that it was not possible to bring the cases earlier because they had not seen any evidence that suggested they were potential victims of illegal behaviour.
They also argued that leading executives at the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, including the former editor Paul Dacre, had repeatedly denied any illegality took place at their newspapers, which they claimed was tantamount to concealing the alleged wrongdoing.
