Against the odds, Prince Harry has won a landmark victory for British justice
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By poisoning the well of journalism, phone-hacking undermined confidence in a trade that tries, for all its faults, to hold the powerful to account. Harry’s efforts have struck a blow for democracy – which needs a free press people can trust. The worst thing about the phone-hacking scandal is, of course, the misery endured by those whose privacy was invaded. But the damage spread far and wide. All journalists were tarred with the same brush, and the resulting decline in trust in the media – which was never high – contributed to a toxic brew of online conspiracy theories.
News Group Newspapers (NGN), publisher of The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World, has admitted to “unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for The Sun”. It has offered a “full and unequivocal apology” to Prince Harry for this, and for “phone-hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information by journalists” at the News of the World, and has agreed to pay “substantial” damages – believed to be more than £10m.
This is a humiliating surrender by Rupert Murdoch’s company, which is plainly unwilling to risk greater and more emphatic humiliation in court and is therefore choosing to settle the claim. The company has also acknowledged that its response to the arrest of some of its journalists in 2006 was “regrettable”. This part of the agreed statement requires some decoding, because NGN has tried to save a shred of its dignity by insisting that it is making no “admission of illegality” in relation to post-2006 events. Harry wanted News Group to admit not only that its journalists had behaved badly, but that the company’s executives had covered up their wrongdoing. NGN has been forced to concede – without admitting that it broke the law – that the prince was right.
