Following a dramatic last-minute settlement in court, Prince Harry has again been victorious in his mission to take on the UK’s tabloid press.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) – publishers of the Sun as well as the now defunct News of the World – offered the Duke of Sussex a “full and unequivocal apology … for the serious intrusion by the Sun between 1996 and 2011 into his private life, including incidents of unlawful activities”.
They have also agreed to pay him “substantial damages” as well as legal costs. The total is likely to amount to at least £10 million.
This was a humiliating climbdown for the Murdoch press, which has denied for years that the Sun was ever involved in unlawful activity. Over the last 15 years News Group has settled over 1 300 claims, costing the company around £1.2 billion.
Vindication for Prince Harry
It also raises a number of important questions about the future of any further litigation about coverup allegations that remain unresolved and about the prospect for further police and government action to protect the public interest.
For Prince Harry, it was further vindication of his longstanding campaign to hold the British press accountable for years of intrusion – not just into his own, but also his mother’s private life.
In 2023, a court judgment found that Mirror Group newspapers had committed “widespread and habitual” phone hacking from 1998 (which had also been strenuously denied, and for which Harry received over £400,000 in damages).
For Harry, the apology from News Group is a welcome admission from another major tabloid publisher.
Want more politics coverage from academic experts? Every week, we bring you informed analysis of developments in government and fact check the claims being made.
Sign up for our weekly politics newsletter, delivered every Friday.
Questions remain about serious allegations of a cover-up at the highest levels of NGN that were due to be tested in court.
Reading a statement on behalf of Prince Harry and his fellow claimant, former Labour Party deputy leader Lord Watson, their lawyer David Sherborne alleged that “senior executives deliberately obstructed justice by deleting over 30 million emails, destroying backup tapes, and making false denials [and] repeatedly lied under oath to cover their tracks”.
These allegations have been strenuously denied by News Group, but it is now very unlikely that we will ever hear the evidence.
The bigger story
This settlement raises questions both about accountability for malpractice and about access to justice for those who don’t have the deep pockets of a celebrity or a royal.
When ordinary people suffer from corruption or incompetence, there are strident calls for those responsible to be held to account – think of the Post Office and infected blood scandals. Public inquiries are invariably followed by some kind of government action.
The second half of the Leveson inquiry – set up by the Cameron government in 2011 in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal – was designed precisely to investigate the nature and extent of corporate wrongdoing. But it was cancelled by the Conservative government in 2018 after intense lobbying by the press.
Police investigation?
With the settlement of the Prince Harry/Lord Watson cases, it is very unlikely that there will be further opportunities for scrutiny of the Murdoch papers. Any further phone hacking claimants will almost certainly be deemed out of time. And anyway, the UK’s litigation system is not designed for those with limited resources trying to take on wealthy and powerful corporations.
A potential threat might be further investigations by the Metropolitan Police. Sherborne finished his statement by calling on the police to investigate “not only the unlawful activity now finally admitted, but the perjury and coverups throughout this painful process”.
The police would have to satisfy themselves that any evidence they receive reaches the threshold for a criminal inquiry, and may themselves be fearful of a press backlash should they launch one.
What happens next?
The broader question is what repercussions these admissions may have for the future of press regulation in Britain. While the press maintains that any bad behaviour is now confined to history, there is little public confidence in its own complaints handler, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso).
Ipso was established in defiance of the independent system recommended by the Leveson report. But that framework, first agreed with cross-party support in 2013, has never been properly implemented.
And a crucial component, which would have provided an incentive for publishers to join a regulator that was part of the Leveson system, was repealed as one of the last acts of the previous Conservative administration.
The question for Keir Starmer and culture secretary Lisa Nandy is whether this court settlement will prompt meaningful political action to shore up public protection from press misconduct.
Interviewed on BBC radio following the court settlement, Nandy spoke encouragingly about the need to ensure that there were “robust processes” in place. She made it clear that the government would be looking at options but did not clarify what they might be.
Serious allegation against Daily Mail
Any government action will be bitterly resisted by the press but may be given a further boost by the final act of Prince Harry’s campaign for accountability. He is one of seven claimants – including Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, and actresses Sadie Frost and Liz Hurley – making serious allegations against the publishers of the Daily Mail.
They have accused Associated Newspapers of illegal activities, including the recording of private phone conversations, placing listening devices in cars and obtaining private records by deceit. All those allegations are vehemently denied, and their case is much more likely to result in extended court proceedings around 12 months from now.
While the phone-hacking saga may be all but over, the legacy of Britain’s tabloid culture and its unlawful information gathering practices – whether actual or alleged – will rumble on for some time. And Prince Harry should take a great deal of credit for pursuing the truth, even in the face of ferocious press attacks.
Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications, University of Westminster
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
