VF: Prince Harry’s civil case against the Sun should be a criminal investigation

Royal historian/commentator Clive Irving has a fascinating new piece in Vanity Fair about Prince Harry’s lawsuits against the British tabloids. Just eight months ago, Harry scored a massive victory in his lawsuit against the Mirror, and the Mirror settled the rest of Harry’s outstanding claims out of court. Next up? The Sun, part of the Murdoch family’s News Group Newspapers or News UK. Right now, Harry’s civil case against the Sun is scheduled for January. Hugh Grant backed out of his part of the lawsuit because the Sun offered him a huge settlement and he basically couldn’t refuse. There’s no word on whether Harry has been offered a settlement, but I suspect that Harry is committed to seeing this through to the bitter end.

Irving’s piece is notable because he’s putting all of the moving pieces together: there’s Harry’s civil lawsuit, there’s the ongoing criminal investigation into the extent of the Sun’s illegal activities, there’s former prime minister Gordon Brown making some startling revelations about how thoroughly NGN sought to destroy him, and there’s Will Lewis, who used to be CEO of NGN and is now CEO of the Washington Post… and currently set on burying any and all stories about his sleazy criminal past. Some highlights from Irving’s piece:

Prince Harry & Will Lewis: Whichever way it goes, Harry’s obdurate effort to expose the truth about the most egregious scandal ever to envelop British journalism has already inflicted serious collateral damage on the reputations of a cluster of top newspaper executives, prominent among them Will Lewis, now the CEO and publisher of The Washington Post.

Gordon Brown’s Guardian column: The pressure of these allegations [in the civil case] has now been heightened by the intervention of a former British prime minister, Gordon Brown. His move underlines the fact that the most damning allegations are not about the scale of the newsroom-directed hacking itself, but about measures allegedly taken by Murdoch executives in 2010 and 2011 to destroy a trove of incriminating emails and computer hard drives. As Brown himself put it, writing in The Guardian: “While Lewis has always claimed he was Mr Clean Up, these new allegations point to a cover-up. The destroyed emails were likely to have revealed much more of News Group’s intrusion into the private lives of thousands of innocent people.”

What they did to Gordon Brown: Brown claimed that hackers had reverse-engineered his phone number, faked his voice to secure personal information from his lawyer, paid an investigator to break into the police national computer searching for personal information about him, and accessed his medical records. In his Guardian column, Brown wrote that after he passed to police new evidence to support these allegations, Scotland Yard assigned a special inquiry team, part of its central specialist crime command, to review the material to determine if there are grounds for criminal prosecution.

The Murdoch executives have lied for years: The Murdoch executives told the inquiry that they had spent 30,474 pounds on PIs between 2005 and 2011 and none of the payments had been to conduct unlawful acts. The claimants have now submitted to the court an audit of the accounts of 12 PI contractors. It shows that one PI contractor alone was paid 323,285 pounds during that period. Indeed, the discovery process has led to the startling claim that the Murdoch organization spent well over 1 million pounds on PIs “to unlawfully gather information” at that time. The audit comments that the version given to Leveson was “grossly misleading.”

The urgency for a criminal investigation: As a result of these far broader new allegations, a person familiar with those involved tells me that Brown is likely to be followed by at least two other prominent politicians in pressing Scotland Yard to consolidate the case for a criminal prosecution, which could follow even if Harry were to accept a settlement and there was no trial.

A showdown between Prince Harry & Rebekah Brooks: The threat of a trial feels like the final showdown between them. Everything that would spill into public view in a trial would tell another story: that years of discovery in a civil case has uncovered far more than the police investigation that led to the only criminal trial resulting from the hacking, in 2014, when Brooks was found not guilty of a charge to pervert the course of justice. As things stand, the new Scotland Yard review of that evidence would likely not be completed before the scheduled January trial. A source with knowledge of evidence uncovered in recent discovery told me that there were thousands of pages of witness statements not yet disclosed in court papers that would greatly assist the police investigation.

Harry is leading the charge: Prince Harry’s prominence and his financial resources have powered up this fourth and final wave of litigation by victims of hacking. The other claimants in this group could have never on their own amassed such a formidable challenge to the Murdoch lawyers. Harry has cast himself as the lone avenger for many years of pain inflicted by the lawless pursuers of (and profiteers from) royal celebrities. Although he believes he is acting in the public interest, this is not to be confused with the palace interest, in which he is certainly at odds with his father, the king. That breach is widened by Harry’s belief that the palace communications team frequently briefs against him and his wife Meghan Markle.

A pyrrhic victory: Whatever the result, Harry is trying to litigate something that can’t be litigated. A victory in court against Murdoch would be a famous one, but it would not change the fundamental animus against Harry in the trinity of London tabloids: the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, and—most repugnant of all, the sui generis of the form—The Sun. Harry is the most unsettling force ever to break from the disciplines of the institution he was born into, even more so than his mother, Princess Diana, who provided the closest he ever got to knowing what a real family meant.

[From Vanity Fair]

“That breach is widened by Harry’s belief that the palace communications team frequently briefs against him and his wife Meghan Markle.” Ah, yes, wherever would Harry get this “belief.” Harry knows that the palace briefs against him constantly, still, to this day. Harry knows that the palace has been briefing against him constantly for years. As for the tea about Gordon Brown and the wealth of evidence already compiled in the civil case… I don’t have a lot of hope or faith in the British criminal justice system. They are fundamentally compromised by the very thing they are supposed to be investigating. The tabloids paying private investigators for dirt on royals and politicians are the same tabloids paying cops and prosecutors for the dirt. The fact is, Harry would also admit that even if he wins this lawsuit, it doesn’t change the fundamental situation with the British media and the left-behind Windsors. If anything, the British tabloids will be even angrier and they’ll lash out at him even harder. And to that I say, I hope Harry tells them all to kiss his ginger ass.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images. Covers courtesy of The Sun.