I’m sure Prince Harry does not relish all of these court appearances on behalf of his lawsuits against the British press, but he inevitably looks amazing every single time. He has his Freedom Strut
When photographers called out to him again on Monday, as he exited the courthouse, they asked him how he thought the first day went. He replied, “Good, very good.” He’s not wrong, from the first-day coverage I’ve seen. Harry’s lawyer David Sherborne laid out the plaintiffs’ case in highly specific terms, even dealing with the issue of Gavin Burrows. This trial has turned into a high point for royalists and royal reporters as well, so much so I wonder if any of them will be on the ground in Scotland for the left-behinds’ look-busy-work. Tom Sykes is attending the trial and his Substack is suddenly full of commentary about Harry’s impressively-built case. An excerpt from one of Sykes’ pieces:
I have to say, despite having been a massive sceptic about Harry’s case, largely because of a shady private investigator called Gavin Burrows recanting his witness statement which was the only explicit admission of phone hacking, I feel after being in court for the first morning of activity that Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL, the publishers of the Daily Mail) could be in real trouble here. Of course, I should qualify that by saying that the claimants get to go first and we will have to wait and see how compelling the Mail’s rebuttals are.
David Sherborne, Harry’s barrister, leapt up at 10:30am and outlined his case by saying that Paul Dacre and other senior Mail executives gave evidence at the Leveson Enquiry and “emphatically denied unlawful information gathering (UIG).” Sherborne said that the denials on oath were “false” and there was “clear, systematic and sustained use of UIG at the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.”
Sherborne said that ANL had engaged “multiple PIs” at cost of over £3 million over two decades and said it was absurd to suggest, as the Mail did, that they paid out this amount of cash for intel they could have obtained from legitimate sources and databases. Sherborne said that ANL knew the emphatic denials they made were not true because they had carried out enquiries which revealed the truth and “destroyed” incriminating material.
Sherborne focused on a few key characters, especially journalists Katie Nicholl and Rebecca English. English, a founder of the Royal Rota press pool, is widely acknowledged as the most powerful royal journalist in the UK.
Sherborne said that a PI called Lee Harpin, who called himself “the Dauphin of Phone Hacking” provided information for 14 articles written by Nicholl and English.
Sherborne devoted considerable time to a story published by the Mail which gave details about Harry travelling to South Africa with his then-new girlfriend, Chelsy Davy. Sherborne was able to produce an email chain between a PI called Mike Behr and English in which Behr triumphantly announced that he had “got” Davy’s exact flight details including her seat number for a journey to South Africa, and the details of her connecting flight.
He included the suggestion that she could “plant someone next to her” for the journey. English claimed in pre-trial submissions not to remember the email, and that she got the information from “students at Leeds” where Chelsy was at college, but Sherborne effectively destroyed this claim in court by showing her thanking “Mike” for the intel and discussing payment for it.
The so-called “skeleton argument” of the claimants and ANL’s response was also released today. In his written submission Harry said: “I find it deeply troubling that Associated used phrases such as “sources”, “friends” and the like as a device to hide unlawful information gathering. I find it shocking to learn from disclosure that Associated were even using Mike Behr to blag my flight details as late as 2014 for work that he did not even want to put into writing.”
That last part is exactly ANL’s defense: nevermind all of these payments to PIs for years, all of the information they gathered about Harry and Chelsy Davy was simply received via leaks from friends. You know, friends who happen to know Chelsy’s flight information, friends who suggested (to Becky English, no less) that they could plant someone next to Chelsy on the flight! Just normal unnamed sources, obviously! Anyway, as much as these people want to make the case entirely about Harry, just the sheer fact that Harry is one of six plaintiffs, and their lawyers have this wealth of evidence, all of it means that the trial is going to play out in some very interesting ways.
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Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
