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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Verdict reaction: Prince Harry, Dacre and more | The 53 Mail articles vindicated by judgment
Plus Sunday Times revelations on Nigel Farage's finances prompt the Reform UK leader to resign
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 8 July.
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👎 Prince Harry may be fifth in line to the British throne – but he showed a distinct lack of class in his response to yesterday’s comprehensive High Court privacy defeat.
After digesting the painstakingly fair and sober 436-page judgment surprisingly quickly he said (in a joint statement issued with Baroness Lawrence at around 6pm last night) it was “a complete and obvious whitewash” – adding Mr Justice Nicklin to the long list of people whose reputations he has publicly trashed on the basis of zero evidence.
The judge found that the 97 claims of illegal newsgathering were entirely based on hearsay, inference and paid-for testimony from highly dubious sources.
Harry’s response to this seemingly inevitable outcome was to attack the legal system that served him so well in his previous claims against the publishers of the Mirror and Sun titles and which displays his dad’s coat of arms in every courtroom.
Meanwhile, the response of former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre highlights the real dodginess at the heart of this case: “This was a conspiracy, supported by Hacked Off, to destroy a paper”.
Those payments to witnesses, orchestrated by legal researcher and journalist Graham Johnson, were ultimately funded by, ahem, Nazi gold (Max Mosley, whose family fortune was seeded with big cash injections from Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s).
Read Prince Harry and Dacre’s responses here, as well as other fascinating reaction to the case.
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⚖️ Here is our report setting out the allegations against the Mail – the most serious ever levelled against a UK newspaper – and Mr Justice Nicklin’s reasons for rejecting them.
Prince Harry’s case was based on 14 stories published between 2001 and 2013. The reason for the judge rejecting an illegal newsgathering claim about one story relating to Harry’s then girlfriend Chelsy Davy was fairly typical: “No explanation was given as to whose voicemail was supposedly intercepted, by whom, or how such a message would have contained the detail that appeared in the article.”
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🤓 And for the completists, Charlotte Tobitt has l