Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Prince Harry talked up his fight against Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) as an epic.
He said he was “slaying dragons”. So settling his legal claim against NGN, as he did yesterday, with every dragon still alive, could be personally difficult and presentationally awkward. But make no mistake, a dragon has been wounded.
As the costs and risks associated with Prince Harry’s and Tom Watson’s cases against NGN mounted there had long been recognition that Harry’s quest might have to finish as it has – with a handshake not a sword fight.
But the word from California was that an apology was as important as the damages NGN would pay, and the real significance of yesterday’s settlement was that Prince Harry got more than an apology.
He wrung two important admissions from NGN.
First, that unlawful activities were carried out by private investigators working for the Sun.
Second, that an alleged threat to the security of the emails of NGN CEO Rebekah Brooks wasn’t real.
The first didn’t pass anyone by. Never, in all the 1,300 cases of illegal information gathering that it has settled, has NGN admitted wrongdoing at the Sun. It didn’t quite do so yesterday, but the admission of arms-length illegality by private investigators commissioned by the paper’s news desk breaches the defensive wall NGN has spent years building not just around the paper but particularly around the company’s CEO, Rebekah Brooks.
The second admission was that an alleged threat to the security of Brooks’s emails wasn’t real. This was used as the pretext for the deletion of millions of emails across the company in 2011.
Back then, the suggestion was that stolen data was being handed over to Tom Watson whose case was settled alongside Harry’s.
“We now understand this information was false,” NGN said yesterday.
That admission has the potential to make life awkward for the publisher of the Washington Post, Will Lewis. In 2011 he was general manager of NGN and present inside the company at the birth of the ‘fake security threat’, as it was referred to in court.
Six months after the first messages referenced it, Will Lewis reported the ‘threat’ to police who were investigating phone hacking. A lot of people will want to know where the original ‘threat’ came from and how NGN – after more than a decade of standing behind the story – has discovered so late in the day that it wasn’t true after all.
The tantalising question now is whether this is the end of the whole NGN phone hacking saga. In the civil courts, where all the recent action has been, the answer is almost certainly yes. So many years have elapsed since the original sins took place that any new claimant would almost certainly be timed out.
Instead, Tom Watson pointed yesterday towards the criminal justice system.
The former Labour deputy leader will be delivering a dossier making allegations of criminality at NGN to the Met Police, he said, and he challenged the commissioner, Mark Rowley, to launch a criminal investigation into them.
He’s not a lone voice in asking for one – former PM Gordon Brown has been nudging the police in the same direction since at least last May – but they’re members of a small band.
There’s every chance it will grow after yesterday’s settlement but it has its work cut out if it’s to gain the kind of traction it might need to force Mark Rowley’s hand.
An officer who was once very senior in the Met and involved in one of its phone hacking investigations told Tortoise recently that the police commissioner would be mad to open a new criminal investigation. All those millions of pounds on an issue the public think is done and dusted? Not a chance.
NGN’s position on all this is clear and not surprising. It’s been striking how often the same phrase has appeared in their public statements recently: “As we reach the tail end of the litigation NGN is drawing a line under the disputed matter.”
So they hope, and this hope will have made the calculations behind their two admissions yesterday very intricate. How to concede enough to get over Prince Harry’s red lines and reach a settlement, but not so much that they either put too much fresh wind in the sails of the whole story of phone hacking and cover-up or left senior executives clearly more vulnerable to a criminal inquiry?
The ultimate judge of whether or not NGN got that balance right will be Mark Rowley. Don’t expect him to rush to make a call.
