Lady Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, has told the High Court that she feels she has been “taken for a fool” by Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), publisher of the Daily Mail. She is one of seven claimants bringing legal action against ANL over alleged unlawful information gathering, including phone hacking and “blagging”.
Giving evidence, Lady Lawrence said she felt angry and betrayed because she had trusted the Daily Mail due to its long-running campaign for justice for her son. She accused the publisher of using her and Stephen’s case “to give them credibility of supporting a black family”. The Daily Mail’s former editor, Paul Dacre, has previously highlighted the newspaper’s campaign as one of its most significant.
In a written statement, Lady Lawrence alleged that ANL engaged in “landline tapping me, blagging me and hacking into my voicemails, monitoring my bank account and phone bills, targeting me with hidden electronic surveillance, and making corrupt payments to serving police officers to steal information about the murder investigations into Stephen’s death whilst pretending to be my friend”.
She said she learned of potentially troubling information after being contacted by Prince Harry, another claimant. She later met the claimants’ lawyers, who told her the information had “accidentally surfaced” in 2021 through a conversation between two private investigators who had worked for the Mail. A key part of her case is a recording of a private investigator allegedly admitting to “blagging” information by pretending to be a journalist from the Guardian.
ANL denies all allegations, describing them as “lurid” and “preposterous”. The company’s barrister, Antony White KC, said the Mail ran a “sustained campaign” on Stephen Lawrence’s case for 15 years and that the five articles complained about were not challenged at the time of publication. ANL’s lawyers argued the claims were unsupported by evidence and based on “spurious and/or discredited information”.
