Mr Justice Nicklin rejected the privacy claim against the Daily Mail on Tuesday, ending a case brought by Prince Harry and six others after more than a decade of preparation. The ruling shut down one of the most closely watched offshoots of the phone hacking scandal.
That is why the case has been drawing attention now: it put a major newspaper back under the glare of the reform campaign that followed the hacking revelations, and it did so with Prince Harry among the claimants. Elton John, David Furnish, Elizabeth Hurley and Doreen Lawrence were also part of the action, which had been built over 11 years before Tuesday’s defeat.
The claim was never a straightforward one. It leaned heavily on Graham Johnson, who called himself a “professional liar” and had already served a two-month suspended sentence after admitting he hacked a soap actor’s phone while working at the Sunday Mirror. He had resigned from the News of the World in 1997 after a fake sighting of the Beast of Bodmin, a history that sat awkwardly beside any attempt to present him as a dependable witness.
Nicklin’s rejection turned on that weakness. Johnson was approached by Evan Harris at Westminster magistrates court, where he was asked whether he wanted to help expose press wrongdoing, and later met Hugh Grant at KX Gym in Chelsea on 26 January 2015, six weeks after his last court appearance. Johnson then proposed that Grant pay him to investigate a rumour that the Daily Mail had allegedly offered payments to Ian Huntley, the man later convicted of killing Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in 2002. That chain of contact may have suited the campaign’s purpose, but it also exposed how much the case depended on a witness whose record made him easy to attack.
The wider setting mattered too. The Daily Mail had escaped criminal investigation during the phone hacking scandal, while Paul Dacre told the Leveson inquiry that he had never published a story known to have originated from voicemail interception. That left the claim trying to extend the logic of the hacking era to a newspaper that had so far avoided the same scrutiny. Tuesday’s ruling leaves the claim dead and the unanswered question sharper still: whether the campaign can build a cleaner case next time, or whether this one was always too reliant on Johnson to survive.
