Prince Harry and other high-profile figures, including Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish, actors Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost, Labour peer Doreen Lawrence, and former Liberal Democrat leader Simon Hughes, are set to begin legal proceedings against the publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. The trial, expected to last nine weeks, will be heard at the High Court in London starting Monday.
The claimants allege that the newspapers engaged in unlawful activities such as intercepting voicemails, tapping landlines, paying corrupt police officers, blagging medical records, and bugging celebrities' homes. Associated Newspapers, the publisher, has dismissed these claims as “preposterous” and an “affront to the hard-working journalists whose reputations and integrity … are wrongly traduced”.
Prince Harry's legal battle against the press is deeply personal, rooted in the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 while being pursued by paparazzi. He has also been critical of the media's treatment of his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. In 2021, a judge ruled that the Mail on Sunday had breached the duchess's privacy by publishing a private letter.
The prince's decision to take on the tabloids has come at a personal and financial cost, potentially straining his relationship with the royal family. In his memoir, Spare, he wrote that his relationship with his father, King Charles, and brother, Prince William, became strained over their perceived failure to condemn alleged press wrongdoing.
Harry has previously found success in court: in 2023, he became the first royal to give evidence in over 130 years, winning £140,600 in damages after a judge ruled that the Mirror had hacked his phone. Last year, his privacy claim against the publisher of the Sun and the News of the World was settled for an undisclosed sum, reportedly around £10m, with an apology for phone hacking and unlawful activities.
The trial against the Daily Mail is expected to be fiercely contested, with projected legal costs of £38m. Key figures include Graham Johnson, a former journalist who pleaded guilty to phone hacking in 2014 and has been investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Mail titles since 2015. The case will also examine the credibility of a private investigator who claimed his signature on a witness statement was a forgery.
