Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has never attempted to conceal one of the main missions that he has set himself in life. In his glib, ghostwritten memoir Spare, he described discussing with his father, then Prince Charles, and his brother Prince William, his legal actions against the British tabloids:
“I’d soon prove that the press were more than liars, I said. That they were lawbreakers. I was going to see some of them thrown into jail…It wasn’t about me, it was a matter of public interest.”
That conversation took place in April 2021, just hours after the funeral of Harry’s grandfather, Prince Philip.
Now Harry’s mission is nearing conclusion. It will be resolved either by taking the last of his adversaries in the London press, the Rupert Murdoch–owned papers, to a public trial in January—or by following the example of more than 1,300 other victims of tabloid hacking, and, more specifically Hugh Grant, who settled for a very large sum.
Whichever way it goes, Harry’s obdurate effort to expose the truth about the most egregious scandal ever to envelop British journalism has already inflicted serious collateral damage on the reputations of a cluster of top newspaper executives, prominent among them Will Lewis, now the CEO and publisher of The Washington Post.
For their part, the Murdoch lawyers do not see this as a truth-telling mission. To them, in their boilerplate response to all the allegations, Harry’s and other claimants’ prolonged litigation has resulted in “a scurrilous and cynical attack on their integrity.”
And it must be borne in mind that, in civil actions of this kind in London’s High Court, the allegations are “untested” until the defendants get to make their defense in a public trial. Nonetheless, it has been said that the allegations made by more than 40 claimants in the case led by Prince Harry that have so far surfaced through court documents are presented in often gripping forensic detail.
And the pressure of these allegations has now been heightened by the intervention of a former British prime minister, Gordon Brown. His move underlines the fact that the most damning allegations are not about the scale of the newsroom-directed hacking itself, but about measures allegedly taken by Murdoch executives in 2010 and 2011 to destroy a trove of incriminating emails and computer hard drives.
As Brown himself put it, writing in The Guardian: “While Lewis has always claimed he was Mr Clean Up, these new allegations point to a cover-up. The destroyed emails were likely to have revealed much more of News Group’s intrusion into the private lives of thousands of innocent people.” (Lewis has consistently denied any wrongdoing and has a stated policy of not commenting on the matter. He was appointed general manager of the Murdoch newspapers in London in September 2010. Per The Guardian, the Murdoch group claims the emails were deleted “for commercial, IT and practical reasons.” The company has denied this was part of a cover-up.)
Brown claimed that hackers had reverse-engineered his phone number, faked his voice to secure personal information from his lawyer, paid an investigator to break into the police national computer searching for personal information about him, and accessed his medical records.
In his Guardian column, Brown wrote that after he passed to police new evidence to support these allegations, Scotland Yard assigned a special inquiry team, part of its central specialist crime command, to review the material to determine if there are grounds for criminal prosecution.
A spokesperson for News UK, the current corporate entity for the Murdoch papers, said, “The evidence Mr. Brown refers to is not new and has already been the subject of considerable scrutiny including a lengthy and extensive police investigation from 2011–2015 and at a criminal trial. His assertion is highly partial and quite simply wrong.”
In fact, Brown’s move was spurred by new revelations about the scale and duration of operations allegedly carried out on behalf of the Murdoch organization by a swarm of private investigators. The most intrusive hacking by the tabloids was outsourced to PIs, and the new allegations go beyond anything previously known. Crucially, they detail PI operations continuing until 2012—three years after the exposure of industrialized hacking by Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, the News of the World.
