Fast forward to October 2022 and, out of the blue, six very well-known people accused Associated Newspapers of not just accessing their voicemail messages and using private investigators to “blag” their personal information, but also bugging phones and aggressive surveillance techniques.
To cap it all, one of them was Baroness Doreen Lawrence. The Mail had strongly backed her campaign in the 1990s to bring her son Stephen’s killers to justice.
Now, she claimed a senior reporter had tasked investigators with phone-tapping and bugging to get information for stories.
It was, in the lengthening history of allegations against the press, a bombshell.
In this trial, the claimants – Baroness Lawrence, Prince Harry, the actresses Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost Law, Sir Elton John, his husband David Furnish, and the former Liberal Democrat minister Sir Simon Hughes, who joined the action at a later stage – must prove their privacy was breached by journalists working for Associated Newspapers.
The first challenge: there is a six-year time limit for claiming breaches of privacy, starting from when it happened, and some of the allegations go back decades. To get around this rule, they have to show they didn’t know they had a potential case until more recently.
Associated alleges that to achieve this, friendly journalists published articles on fringe news websites to create artificial “watershed moments” when it could be claimed the victims had “discovered” the truth about what the papers had done. The other side strongly denies that. The judge will decide.
Some of the evidence they hoped to deploy has come from the private investigators themselves. Some has been paid for information. Not a deal-breaker in the civil courts, but the judge will have to consider whether it damages the credibility of their evidence.