Prince Harry was subject to unlawful activity “from when he was a young boy”, London’s High Court heard on Monday, after the judge presiding over his civil case against the publisher of the Daily Mirror expressed surprise at the prince’s absence on its first day.
The prince and three other claimants allege that Mirror Group Newspapers unlawfully gathered information at its three titles for almost 20 years, including through phone hacking and use of private investigators. MGN denies their claims.
David Sherborne, barrister for Prince Harry, who will on Tuesday become the first British royal to give evidence under oath since the 19th century, said the prince had been the target of unlawful information gathering activities from childhood through to early adulthood.
“Right from when he was a young boy at school . . . there was no time in his life when he was safe from this,” Sherborne told the High Court. “There was no area, no aspect especially in relation to relationships he sought to form . . . Nothing was sacrosanct and out of bounds.”
His comments came after Mr Justice Timothy Fancourt said he was “a little surprised” that the Duke of Sussex was not in court, noting that he had directed the first witness to be available on the trial’s first day.
Sherborne defended the prince’s absence, arguing that he had recently arrived from California after celebrating his daughter’s second birthday and was “in a different category to the three other claimants”.
“He has travel arrangements and security arrangements so it’s trickier . . . It was never anticipated that the opening [statements] would not take the full day given,” he said.
But Andrew Green KC, barrister for MGN, said it was “absolutely extraordinary” that the company had been told only last week that the prince was “not available for day one of his own trial”.
The High Court is this week assessing the prince’s claim that about 33 articles published across the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People newspapers between 1996 and 2009 were the result of unlawful information gathering.
Sherborne told the court that Diana, Princess of Wales, the prince’s mother, was in 1996 a “huge target” for the Daily Mirror, and that part of his case is that journalists “would have obtained information about the young prince” by intercepting her voicemail messages.
Sherborne read out three letters from the princess to TV entertainer Michael Barrymore; in one, she wrote that the Daily Mirror had contacted her office asking about secret meetings she had held with Barrymore.
“No one around me knew of our conversations/phone call. I am deeply sorry that a private and precious matter has become public property,” she said.
“We say it is plainly the Daily Mirror has been listening in to voicemail messages about secret and highly sensitive meetings between Princess Diana and Michael Barrymore,” Sherborne said.
He added that Fancourt should draw “adverse inferences” from the fact that the majority of MGN journalists who wrote the 33 articles were not due to give evidence on how their stories had been obtained. Some Mirror journalists had commissioned dozens of private investigators, Sherborne claimed.
While denying hacking Prince Harry’s phone, MGN has admitted that a private investigator was engaged by a People journalist to unlawfully monitor him at the Chinawhite nightclub in London in February 2004.
MGN either denies or does not admit the 33 articles were the result of unlawful information gathering, and claims that the prince’s lawsuit has been brought too late.
Green said there was “simply no evidence” that the prince’s phone had been hacked and that payment records from MGN to private investigators “simply do not demonstrate unlawful conduct”.
He added that the claims regarding Princess Diana’s phone were “total speculation without any evidence” and that her letter to Barrymore was “not evidence of voicemail interception”.
The case continues.
