‘This isn't a public inquiry,' judge warns Prince Harry

Telegraph

06-05-2025

A High Court judge has warned the Duke of Sussex's lawyer that a claim against the publisher of the Daily Mail will not be allowed to turn into a public inquiry.
Mr Justice Nicklin reproached David Sherborne, the barrister, at a preliminary hearing on Tuesday over his approach to the case.
The judge said the claim must be 'focused on the things we know about' and that the court would not be examining every single article published by any one journalist.
'This isn't a public inquiry', he said, adding that he could not 'open the parameters of this case without limit'.
Mr Sherborne argued that Associated's legal team had been 'excessive' when redacting documents, hiding information necessary to understand the 'true extent of the unlawful information gathering'.
But the judge told him: 'I presume there was some evidential premises to the statement that there was widespread habitual use of unlawful information gathering. It's your case.'
The Duke and several other high-profile individuals; Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, his husband David Furnish, actresses Sadie Frost and Liz Hurley, and Sir Simon Hughes, the former Liberal Democrat politician, have brought legal action against Associated Newspapers Ltd.
They have accused the publisher of allegedly carrying out or commissioning unlawful activities such as hiring private investigators to place listening devices inside cars, 'blagging' private records, burglaries to order and accessing and recording private phone conversations.
The Duke's claim concerns 14 articles published between 2001 and 2014.
Associated firmly denies the allegations, describing them as 'lurid' and 'simply preposterous'.
'Cast-iron demonstration'
The judge said that if there was a 'cast-iron demonstration' by a journalist that information was obtained from a 'straightforward, up and down source', it may represent a breach of confidence but not necessarily unlawful information gathering.
The judge said it would not help him 'one bit' to then examine other articles by that journalist.
He warned Mr Sherborne that he was coming 'perilously close' to suggesting that the defence was irrelevant just because he was satisfied that a particular journalist habitually used unlawful practices.
'What is the control mechanism to ensure this does not become a wide-ranging public inquiry?' he asked. 'What the court is looking for is real examples.'
Mr Sherborne argued that further evidence was needed from Associated.
'The claimants' cases allege a web of illegal acts – pulling on threads of that web may reveal more of the pattern,' he said.
Antony White KC, for Associated, accused the claimants of 'hunting for an ever-expanding case that there were other victims' of unlawful information gathering'.
He said they were trying 'to fish for something' that might assist their claim.
'Associated denies the claims'
Mr White also warned that the case must not be treated as 'just another example' of the phone hacking litigation brought against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) and News Group Newspapers (NGN), publisher of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World.
He accused the claimants of trying to maintain there was an 'obvious and inescapable inference' that if a journalist worked at a paper found guilty of phone hacking that person must be guilty in this case.
'These claims differ fundamentally from the claims against MGN and NGN', he argued, and must be 'independently proved'.
The claims against NGN and MGN were based on 'a bedrock of criminal convictions', he said, adding: 'There is no similar 'bedrock' here. Associated denies the claims.'