Abstract
The newspaper industry was more interested in the riposte of a former editor than in the measured words of a High Court judge
If the damages award to Prince Harry in December 2023 because of illicit news-gathering by three Trinity-Mirror titles was significant then the publisher’s subsequent agreement to settle the rest of his claims two months later was truly momentous. Taken together, the award and the February 2024 settlement should offer an opportunity to re-examine the way in which executives and editors conspired to withhold the truth about phone hacking from a judicial inquiry, several judges, hundreds of victims, parliament and the public. In the Prince Harry’s words, it is time “for the authorities to uphold the rule of law”. None of those involved should escape attention, not least the former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan who – to quote the prince quoting Mr Justice Fancourt – “knew perfectly well what was going on”. But don’t hold your breath. There appears to be little appetite for a belated investigation of Mirror Group hacking.
Consider the reaction to the award of £140,600 to the prince last year. Although big enough to lead TV and radio bulletins from the moment the story broke, it vanished from the news agenda within 24 hours. Most journalists, politicians and police officers averted their gaze. A belief that it would reinvigorate official interest in the scandal of phone-hacking and the indiscriminate use of private investigators was quickly disproved. Yet the 386-page high court judgment by Mr Justice Fancourt was, by some measure, extraordinary. As one media lawyer pointed out, it was “devastating”. It showed how the publishing company had “lied to a judicial public inquiry,” deceived parliament, and bamboozled the public. Even the Leveson Inquiry report, as forthright as it was, did not identify wrong-doers with such a laser-like focus.
The swift burial of the story was a pointer to the way in which the hacking saga has become a distraction that no-one, least of all the media, wishes to revisit. So, in the absence of commentary or action following Sir Timothy Fancourt’s judgement, this analysis, with additional context and history, seeks to highlight its huge significance. In advance of detailing the judge’s findings, it’s instructive to take on board Fleet Street’s inadequate reaction to his ruling that 15 stories published by Mirror Group newspapers were the result of unlawful acts which amounted to an invasion of the prince’s privacy.
Coverage across nine national titles was fascinating, with most editors choosing to concentrate less on the hurt to Prince Harry than on the hurt to Piers Morgan. He has spent years denying any personal link to the act of phone-hacking and, although not called to give evidence during the trial, he was name-checked 79 times in Fancourt’s judgement. Within hours of it being made public, Morgan stepped out of his London home to make a trenchant statement of his innocence while castigating the prince. Similarly, when the settlement was announced in February, he appeared on his doorstep to abuse the prince. These ad hominem attacks were designed to deflect the judge’s criticism of his part in the scandal.
Given the media’s obsession with the media, the predictable result in the first instance was that Morgan’s response got top billing in almost every paper. The Daily Telegraph ran a page one picture of Morgan and the headline “Morgan: Harry is on a mission to destroy monarchy”. A similar angle dominated its article inside. The Independent said “Harry’s phone was hacked… but Morgan denies all knowledge”. The main page 5 headline in the Daily Mail, properly referring to it as “a landmark judgment”, read: “Call me a dragon slayer, says Harry as judge rules his phone was hacked ‘to a modest extent’”. Below it was a sizeable sidebar headlined “Piers Morgan’s robust response”.
The Sun, itself facing hacking allegations, thought the story deserved only a page 19 slot. It needed to pick its way through a Morgan minefield. He once worked for the paper and later edited its Sunday stablemate, the News of the World (which was shut down by its owner, Rupert Murdoch, as a result of its industrial-scale hacking). As of April 2022, Morgan was back on the Murdoch payroll as a talkTV presenter. So, The Sun reflected its corporate obedience by devoting its report to Morgan’s bitter denunciation of the prince. Its stablemate, The Times, was more straightforward and fairer. It listed the 33 articles that formed the basis of the prince’s legal action and gave the judge’s decision on each one.
The three Mirror Group titles – Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star – faced a delicate task, given their owner’s culpability. The Mirror, in a page 15 article, downplayed the prince’s success: “Harry is awarded ‘modest’ damages over Mirror group newspaper stories.” The headline was a semantic side-step, given that the judge had called the hacking “modest” and not the amount of damages. As for the report, it cherry-picked the judgment to avoid any mention of misbehaviour by former executives and editors. The Express ran a less biased report on page 13, but the main picture was of Morgan. The Star, in what passed for wit, ran a head-shot of the prince, eyes blacked out, over a four-paragraph article that began: “A publicity-shy man has been awarded £140,000 after his phone was ruled to have been hacked.” It did not mention Prince Harry by name.
The liberal papers take the development seriously
By far the straightest report (“‘Great day for truth’: Prince Harry wins hacking case”) appeared in The Guardian, which was the only paper to splash the story on page one and to carry two pages of detail inside. Perhaps it was unsurprising, given that the paper broke the hacking scandal in the first place. However, it did not deal in anything like enough detail with the judgment, nor did it carry a leading article. Only The Independent thought it worthy of an editorial, seeing the judge’s ruling as “a total vindication for those who claimed that many tabloid newspapers used criminal methods to secure what was mostly celebrity gossip and tittle-tattle”. Noting the difficulty faced by most hacking victims in trying to force newspapers to own up to their crimes, it praised the prince’s stand. “He has been a figure of ridicule for many reasons, but on this issue he has fought the good fight for the principle of decent journalism and accountability. Wise heads called him foolhardy when they should have saluted his courage.”
And that was that. With the notable exception of an excellent piece two days later by The Guardian’s Archie Bland, in which he lampooned Morgan’s increasingly hysterical protests of innocence, the story died. The public was left with the impression that a High Court judge’s considered opinion after weighing up months of contentious evidence was little more than an episode in the ongoing squabble between a runaway prince and a mouthy TV presenter. It meant that the bulk of Fancourt’s forensic, excoriating judgment on executives and editors who worked at Mirror Group from the late 1990s until 2012 went unreported. They were being held to account for the first time after years of denials, stonewalling and a cover-up, which, whatever the legal consequences, amounted to a deplorable ethical travesty. Moreover, by giving pride of place to Morgan’s bluster, the judge’s measured assessment of his behaviour, in particular, escaped proper scrutiny.
Before we consider the references to Morgan, some of the most compelling parts of Fancourt’s judgment relate to what he called a “dysfunctional company”, with a “dysfunctional” board overseeing (or, more appositely, failing to oversee) a management that “was also dysfunctional”. This triple indictment of Trinity-Mirror (since renamed Reach) centred on three key figures: Sly Bailey, who spent nine years from February 2003 as its chief executive until she left in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry in June 2012; Paul Vickers, the company secretary and legal director from December 1992 until January 2015; and Marcus Partington, an in-house lawyer at the People from 1997, at the Daily Mirror from 2002, and, from 2014 to 2021, the company’s legal director.
Fancourt’s indictment of their part in the debacle is unequivocal. Despite their protestations that they knew nothing about the illicit interception of voicemails, he said Vickers “certainly knew about phone hacking from about the end of 2003”. As for Bailey, she “turned a blind eye”. Moreover, she and other executives “positively concealed” the illegal activity that was going on at their newspapers. That quote did get reported, but what was entirely overlooked was the judge’s criticism of Bailey’s courtroom performance. He referred to her as “a reluctant witness” who was “evasive” as she “sheltered far too frequently behind a claimed inability to remember events”. He remarked: “Some of the answers that Ms Bailey gave to questions were literally incredible.”
His condemnation of Vickers was just as candid. “I regret,” he said, “that I am unable to accept the truth of Mr Vickers’s denials of awareness of illegality and his explanation for not investigating VMI [voicemail interceptions] at a much earlier time than actually occurred. My suspicion is that Mr Vickers knew what was happening all along.” Fancourt was convinced that Vickers must have been informed about illegal acts by Partington because he was responsible for legalling reporters’ stories, which would have entailed knowing how they were obtained. The judge accepted “the essential truth” of an anecdote about Partington in which he showed his inside knowledge of phone hacking.
Fancourt conceded Bailey knew less of the intimate details of unlawful newsgathering than Vickers and Partington, but, he said, “she knew enough to realise that there was unlawful activity being conducted at all three newspapers”. And this led Fancourt to one of his most shocking conclusions: that the absence of internal discipline meant that editors and journalists on the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People “were enabled to carry on with their unlawful and illegal activities until the end of 2011”. In other words, while the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics was sitting.
Then there is the matter of the three Trinity-Mirror chairmen. What did they know? Fancourt records that the first of them, Sir Victor Blank (1999-2006), hosted a lunch attended by the then-BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman and TV personality Ulrika Jonsson, at which Morgan explained the mechanics of voicemail interception. He was succeeded by Sir Ian Gibson (2006-12). Like Blank, he accepted assurances from Bailey and Vickers that there was no evidence of hacking, so he did not think an investigation was necessary. Fancourt absolves both Blank and Gibson of any knowledge of hacking. But he is much more critical of Gibson’s successor, David Grigson (2012-18). Throughout his years at the company, he dismissed claims of hacking as gossip. Described by Fancourt as “a very defensive witness” who was “in denial” about hacking, the judge considered Grigson “was in a weak position” at Trinity-Mirror and “naïve about what was required”.
The editors surely knew just what was going on
At editorial level, Fancourt believes there was “compelling evidence” that Mirror Group editors knew very well that illegal practices, such as hacking, were “being used extensively and habitually”. Similarly, they knew all about the use of private investigators to “blag” information on behalf of reporters. One of them was Richard Wallace, who became Daily Mirror editor in 2004 following the dismissal of Piers Morgan. He was fired in 2012, five months after telling the Leveson Inquiry he had no knowledge of phone hacking among his staff. He moved into a TV career and, in June 2022, was appointed head of Murdoch’s broadcasting outlet talkTV, and therefore Morgan’s boss. The black ironies of Britain’s post-hacking media world never fail to amaze.
And so we come to Fancourt’s specific and illuminating references to Morgan, which relate to evidence from a range of witnesses: David Seymour and Alastair Campbell, two former Mirror political editors; James Hipwell, a former Mirror financial reporter; Omid Scobie, a one-time Mirror intern; Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, a lobbyist and former Downing Street communications director; and Melanie Cantor, an agent and publicist.
For example, Fancourt cites Cantor’s statement that Morgan “was able to contact her remarkably quickly” whenever stories broke about her client Ulrika Jonsson, “and was already aware of private information that only she and Ms Jonsson knew about”. One such story revealed a relationship between Jonsson and the then-England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson. The provenance of the story intrigued Wegg-Prosser, who shared a meal with Morgan at the Labour Party conference in September 2002. He asked Morgan how he had landed the scoop. Wegg-Prosser said: “Mr Morgan responded to my question by initially asking me which network provider I used for my mobile phone. I told him… and Mr Morgan told me the default PIN for that network. He then explained that the default PIN numbers were well known and rarely changed, which is how mobile phone messages could be accessed remotely using the default PIN number. He said to me ‘That was how we got the story on Sven and Ulrika’, with a smile, or words to that effect.”
This dovetails with Jeremy Paxman’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry about the lunch hosted by Victor Blank, also in September 2002. Paxman said Morgan admitted it was easy to access people’s voicemail messages and teased Jonsson, also at the lunch, about messages of hers he had heard. This occurred in what we should properly call Morgan’s voicemail boasting period – prior to 2006 – when the hacking issue had not become a matter of public knowledge and concern. It further chimes with David Seymour’s March 2001 memory of walking into the newsroom to find Morgan, surrounded by reporters, holding up a tape machine. According to Seymour, after Morgan said “listen to this”, he played a recording of a voicemail message in which Paul McCartney could be heard singing to Heather Mills. The recording, Morgan explained, had been “lent” to him by Neil Wallis, then editor of the People. Morgan, writing in October 2006 in the Daily Mail, was happy to admit he had listened to McCartney’s message. He wrote: “I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone. It was heartbreaking. The couple had clearly had a tiff.”
To add to the picture drawn by Fancourt of Morgan’s cavalier attitude towards hacking at the time, we should remind ourselves of just how often he bragged about his awareness of the voicemail interception technique. In a filmed interview in 2003 with Charlotte Church, Morgan told her: “There was a spate of stories that came out because of mobile phones… journalists found out that if the celebrity hadn’t changed their pin code… you can access their voicemails by tapping a number. Now, are you telling me that journalists aren’t going to do that?”
In his 2005 book The Insider – a purported diary of his life as an editor – his entry for January 26, 2001, read: “Someone suggested today that people might be listening to my mobile phone messages. Apparently, if you don’t change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don’t answer, tap in the standard four-digit code to hear all your messages. I’ll change mine just in case, but it makes me wonder how many public figures and celebrities are aware of this little trick.” In a GQ magazine interview with Naomi Campbell in April 2007, Morgan explained once again how voicemail interception worked: “It was pretty well known that if you didn’t change your pin code when you were a celebrity who bought a new phone, then reporters could ring your mobile, tap in a standard factory setting number, and hear your messages.” Indeed, when the News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed earlier that year for phone hacking, Morgan had commented: “I feel a lot of sympathy for a man who has been the convenient fall guy for an investigative practice that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years.”
The joke’s over and now the story changes
By the time he appeared before the Leveson Inquiry in 2011, however, phone hacking was no longer a laughing matter, certainly not a subject for braggadocio. Morgan was so keen to distance himself from it that, in his first witness statement to the inquiry, he didn’t even mention the accessing of voicemail messages, choosing instead to deny something about which he had never been accused: “computer hacking”. But he was unable to avoid mention of voicemails in his second statement because of claims by a former Mirror staffer, James Hipwell, that phone hacking had been common in the paper’s office. His bland response was that he had “no knowledge” of it. When he appeared at the inquiry, he was asked by Robert Jay QC whether he had ever listened to recordings of what he knew to be illegally obtained voicemail messages.
His odd response – “I do not believe so, no” – prompted Jay to ask: “You either did or you didn’t. I don’t think it’s a question of belief.”
Morgan replied: “No, I did not.”
Jay persisted: “Have you listened to recordings of what you knew to be illegally obtained voicemail messages?”
Again, Morgan’s answer was ambiguous: “I do not believe so. To the best of my recollection, I do not believe so.”
Really? If so, then he expects us to accept that he was unaware of the provenance of the tape-recording of McCartney singing to his wife. His best recollections do tend to be hazy on occasion. For instance, in an interview with Amol Rajan in May 2023, he said: “I never hacked a phone; I wouldn’t know how.” Yet, as we have seen, on numerous occasions, he had explained exactly how to do it. In recent years, he has honed his voicemail denial into a 13-word mantra: “I’ve never hacked a phone, or told anybody else to hack a phone.” He repeated it in response to the Fancourt judgment. In other words, his knowledge of phone hacking should not be taken to mean he used that knowledge, nor that he passed on his knowledge to staff in the expectation that they would act on it. Again, really? Look back to what he said to Charlotte Church: “Are you telling me that journalists aren’t going to do that?”
Now, in Morgan’s defence, it is reasonable to point out that the Prince Harry action was a civil case in which he and his fellow plaintiffs did not need to confirm that there was hacking beyond all reasonable doubt. They were required only to provide sufficient evidence to show it was likely. Morgan is, therefore, entirely correct in stating that there was no proof. “Nobody,” he has said, “has produced any actual evidence to prove that I did.” The allegations against him are fragmentary. So, in the absence of proof, we are left with inference. On the balance of probabilities, given his own public statements, given the evidence of former Mirror colleagues, and given Fancourt’s references to Morgan in his judgment, what conclusion should a reasonable person reach about his relationship to phone hacking?
