Prince Harry’s crunch lawsuit against the Daily Mail is entering a pivotal phase in 2024 in which battle lines will be drawn.
The Duke of Sussex’s many lawsuits were a key part of his year in 2023 as he became the first royal to give live court testimony as a claimant.
He won his phone hacking lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers and survived an effort to get his case against Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Mail, thrown out.
However, his legal team face significant hurdles going into 2024 over a rivalry within which there is no love lost on either side.
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Next Steps in Prince Harry’s Daily Mail Lawsuit
The case is still at an early stage but has already seen a major effort to derail it by the publisher so early on that they have not yet filed their defense to the allegations.
That clapback will be one of the next steps this year and will give an indication of how strong the counter-attack from the newspaper will be.
Harry, alongside other celebrities and public figures, is accusing the newspaper of hacking into voicemail message, tapping phone lines and in some cases placing sticky microphones on house windows to eavesdrop on conversations.
In one instance, the newspaper is even accused of seeking to gather information through a burglary.
Publicly, the company has come out swinging, including in one statement in November: “As we have always made unequivocally clear, the lurid claims made by and others of phone-hacking, landline-tapping, burglary and sticky-window microphones are simply preposterous and we look forward to establishing this in court in due course.”
Particular battlegrounds will likely include the testimony of Gavin Burrows, a private investigator who provided a lengthy statement in 2021 appearing to confess phone hacking, wiretapping, bugging and other unlawful practices on behalf of Associated’s titles.
Harry’s witness statement read: “Another private investigator, Gavin Burrows, admitted to targeting me and those close to me, such as my former girlfriend Chelsy Davy and my friends Guy Pelly and Natalie Pinkham, on behalf of Associated.
“I was told that Mr Burrows had been regularly commissioned by … the Mail on Sunday to unlawfully obtain my private information by methods such as landline tapping, voicemail hacking, blagging, obtaining credit card bills and phone records, and placing a hardwire tap on, for example, Guy’s phone.
“I was astounded and also very troubled when I learned this.”
However, Adrian Beltrami, the Mail‘s lawyer, has told the court that Burrows has more recently “provided a signed witness statement denying that he was commissioned or instructed by Associated to carry out any unlawful activity.”
The two sides will have to thrash out in court which statement should be accepted and how it came to be that Burrows has given such contrasting accounts.
Additionally, Harry and other claimants were hoping to include documents submitted by the newspaper group to the Leveson Inquiry, a U.K. public inquiry into standards in journalism in 2012.
However, a judge ruled the material inadmissible in its current form, meaning Harry’s team will have to try to work out another way to get the evidence back into the case or else they may have to drop some claims.
Warnings From Recent History
For Harry, defeat would put a major dent in his finances and also leave him watching his most hated newspaper group celebrate what they would present as a glorious victory.
He will take comfort from the fact he beat another U.K. tabloid organization, the Mirror Group, in December, but he also earned a warning from the judge that not all of his assumptions in the case had been correct.
In some cases, the Mirror’s lawyers had pointed out to Harry during his testimony that information he complained about had already been printed by other news outlets before, and therefore was not likely to have come from phone hacking by its journalists.
In relation to one such example, the judge ruled: “The Duke accepted in cross-examination that the article was no more than a composite version of the Palace announcement and the Press Association report.
“There is no documentary material to suggest otherwise, in support of the claim in relation to this article, and one does wonder what kind of judgment was exercised when claims are pursued to trial in respect of articles of this kind.”
And he did not win on every point, as the judge noted in his summary: “There was a tendency for the Duke in his evidence to assume that everything published was the product of voicemail interception because phone hacking was rife within Mirror Group at the time.
“But phone hacking was not the only journalistic tool at the time, and his claims in relation to the other 18 articles did not stand up to careful analysis.”
It may well be that Harry will have to give up a chunk of his modest £140,000 ($178,000) damages in order to pay costs incurred over aspects of his claim that he lost.
In other words, he may wish to apply slightly better judgment in the Daily Mail case than the Mirror Group one when deciding which allegations to take to trial.
Victory, however, would be a major PR blow to the mid-market tabloid, which has always strenuously denied having engaged in phone hacking.
The more clean and simple the victory for Harry, the harder it will be for the newspaper to spin it any other way.
William Brown is Regalrumination.com‘s royal reporter, based in London. You can find him on X (formerly ) at and read his stories on Regalrumination.com‘s
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