Prince Harry and Co-Claimants Face Multi-Million Debt After Hacking Case Loss

In a striking courtroom decision today, Prince Harry and several others were ordered to fork out millions to the Daily Mail. This comes after a judge deemed their hacking case was handled in a manner that was “unreasonable to a high degree.”

The group, which includes the Duke of Sussex, Baroness Lawrence, and Sir Elton John, among four others, has been given a week to settle the initial sum of £9,544,355, as per the High Court’s directive.

Mr. Justice Nicklin enacted a rare ‘indemnity order’ that requires these claimants to cover most of the legal expenses resulting from their ill-fated legal battle. Indemnity orders typically reflect cases where the judge sees evidence of misconduct.

The judge justified this unusual measure, arguing that the litigation against the Mail deviated significantly from normal proceedings.

He elaborated, saying, “The claims, along with the way they were brought forward, argued, pursued, and publicly presented, involved conduct that placed this case beyond the bounds of typical and reasonable civil litigation.”

He added: ‘The cumulative effect of these matters takes the case well outside the norm. The conduct was unreasonable to a high degree.’

A spokesman for the Mail’s publisher, Associated Newspapers, said: ‘His judgment is a devastating critique of an attempt to destroy a newspaper and the reputations of its journalists, editors and executives.’

The Mail’s publisher spent £34.4million over four years defending innocent journalists against serious criminal accusations. In a landmark ruling on July 7, Mr Justice Nicklin completely exonerated the Mail’s journalists, throwing out in full allegations that they hacked, bugged and blagged to get stories.

Today’s ruling on the costs of the failed case comes as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex prepare to return to Britain six years after quitting their life in the UK.

The judgment means Associated Newspapers is free to seek a much larger proportion of its costs from the case waged by Harry – who once styled his campaign against newspapers as ‘slaying dragons’ – and the other claimants. They also include Sir Elton’s husband David Furnish, model Elizabeth Hurley, actress Sadie Frost and former Lib Dem minister Sir Simon Hughes.

It is a costly blow to the seven claimants, whose insurance policy only covers them for £16.2million.

And it does not include their own legal costs, which are thought likely to be at least £20million, although it is understood their lawyers acted, at least in part, on a ‘no-win, no-fee’ basis.

After winning the case, the publisher applied for its legal costs to be paid on the fuller ‘indemnity basis’ because Harry’s side had pursued the high-profile case in a ‘cavalier’ and ‘highly unreasonable and inexcusable’ fashion. 

Serious criminal allegations of phone hacking were sprung on wrongly-accused journalists without any foundation, and some aspects were ‘not only unfair’ but ‘in flagrant breach’ of the judge’s repeated warnings to the claimants’ lawyers, it was said by Associated’s lawyers.

An indemnity award means that legal costs are considered on a higher basis than the ‘standard’ way of assessing them. Associated does not need to show its costs are ‘proportionate’ and does not need to adhere to a previous budget set by the court.

Today Mr Justice Nicklin listed a series of reasons why the claimants deserved to pay higher costs, including the ‘continued pursuit of serious allegations that lacked an adequate evidential foundation’.

They also ploughed on with their case despite knowing private investigator Gavin Burrows had withdrawn his cooperation.

During the trial, Mr Burrows – their supposed star witness – declared that his supposed ‘confession’ statement was ‘a pack of lies’ written by others and complete with a forgery for his signature. The most serious accusations of criminal conduct against innocent Mail journalists were all based on the claims involving Mr Burrows, who was paid substantial sums of money by the claimants’ lead researcher, the convicted phone hacker Graham Johnson. 

The Mail spokesman said: ‘From well before the trial started, the claimants’ lawyers knew that their main witness had denied making the preposterous allegations on which the claims were based.

‘Despite this collapse in evidence to support the extremely serious allegations of “abhorrent criminal activity, crimes and terrible and reprehensible covert acts” by the Mail, they were emblazoned in a lurid press release issued on behalf of Baroness Lawrence, Prince Harry and the other claimants, with the exception of Sir Simon Hughes. 

‘The allegations were not withdrawn, and were pursued until the bitter end of the trial.’

In his ruling, Mr Justice Nicklin said: ‘The Court concluded that Associated’s costs should be assessed on the indemnity basis’.

The judge also declined to place a ‘cap’ on the amount that could be claimed.

The Mail’s costs will still need to be considered by a specialist costs judge, but today’s ruling means a much larger proportion will be recovered.

After comprehensively losing their case last month, the duke and Baroness Lawrence lashed out in an extraordinary public statement that accused the judge of bias and called his ruling ‘a complete and obvious whitewash’.

While criticising the way the claimants’ case was run, the judge made the point that he had not found that any of the claimants themselves had acted dishonestly.

At last month’s two-day hearing to consider costs, Sir Simon appeared to distance himself from his fellow claimants. It was said on his behalf that he did not ‘plan to target’ Associated Newspapers.

But the publisher’s lead barrister Antony White KC said Sir Simon had accused it ‘of the most heinous criminal acts’ and had never withdrawn any of his allegations.

Mr White said the claimants’ individual cases were ‘pursued for the most part without any supporting documentary evidence’, adding that the ‘scatter-gun approach of putting serious allegations to some witnesses, without identifying any supporting evidence, was improper and cavalier’.

The ‘coordinated media attack’ on the Mail – code-named Operation Bluebird – formed part of a political strategy to pressure the Government into holding a second Leveson inquiry into Press standards, he told the court.