Prince Harry isn’t criticizing QEII for working out the ‘deal’ with NGN in 2012

On Day 2 of the pretrial hearing in Prince Harry’s case against the Sun and News Group Newspapers, additional information was introduced from Harry’s lawyer, David Sherbourne. According to the Guardian, Sherboune emphasized that Harry does not and did not “blame” Queen Elizabeth II for entering into a deal with the devil, Rupert Murdoch and his press outlets. QEII agreed to the deal in which no royal would sue NGN over all of the phone hacking, mostly because no one in the palace wanted to have a royal on the stand, giving evidence or testimony and be subject to cross-examination. Harry accepted the deal when he learned about it in 2012, but he still went to his grandmother in 2018 to push the issue and try to get NGN to back off of Meghan and/or give Harry an apology. This time frame is a big issue for the pretrial hearing, because NGN argues that Harry simply should have sued them back in 2012. This is Harry explaining why he didn’t or couldn’t.

Harry’s barrister, David Sherborne, told the court that the prince understood why the royal family had agreed to a deal: “If it needs to be said – and apparently it does – this is no criticism of the Queen or his family, and he accepted it, because he had to.”

Sherborne said that Harry had been “kept out of the loop” by the rest of the royal family on the existence of secret deal, only learning about in 2012. The lawyer told Mr Justice Fancourt that Harry had asked him “to express his frustration” at not being present at the high court but he had been unable to travel from his home in California. Sherborne, speaking on day two of the hearing, added that Harry was coming back for his father’s coronation and would be in London when his separate case against the publisher of the Mirror goes to trial next month.

“He is also following by video link despite the time challenges,” Sherborne told the court on day two of the hearing.

In a potential blow to Harry’s case, the judge overseeing the case said he was troubled by an “inconsistency” in his allegations. Harry claims he knew about the alleged secret deal that prevented him bringing a legal case against Murdoch’s company in 2012 – while also claiming he only fully appreciated the scale of phone hacking properly in 2019.

Murdoch’s company argues Harry waited too long to file his legal case as he should have realised he was a potential victim of phone hacking at the time.

By way of mitigation, Sherborne said Harry was serving in the army at the time of many of the key phone-hacking revelations and had limited access to publications that were reporting on voicemail interception at the News of the World and other outlets. The lawyer said: “He was on active service in Afghanistan and they didn’t have the Guardian.”

[From The Guardian]

Just to get this straight – NGN (likely) had a deal with Buckingham Palace and Clarence House (then Prince Charles), a deal which was a result of the Leveson Inquiry and the Windsors finally understanding the extent to which their communications were being monitored for decades. The deal was “no Windsor can sue NGN, because NGN would drag them into court and ask them extremely embarrassing questions.” Harry was presented with the deal as fait accompli in 2012 and he understood why everything had been worked out that way. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t ready to deal with all of it. Then years passed and NGN and the entire British media apparatus began targeting Meghan Markle… and obviously, Harry felt differently about the “deal” by then. It seems like QEII felt differently as well, as she signed off on Harry’s pursuit of accountability. That was when Charles and the Windsors’ lawyers shut down Harry. It wasn’t until 2019 that Elton John convinced him to simply get his own lawyer, which Harry did and he promptly sued everybody. Meanwhile, NGN managed to secretly settle with Prince William in 2020 and there were no cries of “Willy shouldn’t have waited this long to pursue justice!”

Anyway, long story short, I don’t get why “you should have sued us back in 2012, when we were lying about everything and making backroom deals with your granny” is a legitimate legal argument.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.