Duke of Sussex & Others v ANL: thread 2

[bluegreygreen]

This is a continuation of the discussion on the previous thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/the_royal_family/5443044-duke-of-sussex-court-case-key-witness-statement-false?page=1

We are following the court case on the

His round of interviews in 2023 were very bitter about Camilla too, describing her as ‘dangerous’ and saying that there would be ‘bodies left in the street’. All very dramatic.

One of the interviews was with Anderson Cooper and I didn’t think AC (a serious journalist apparently) challenged him sufficiently, in a similar vein to Tom Bradby.

Anyway, Harry’s allegations were put out there in the public domain, by him, that ‘his truth’ is that the source of all the ‘leaking’ and ‘planting of stories’ for many, many years was Camilla. Charles and Camilla married in 2005, so Harry’s presumably talking from at least 2005 and probably earlier when she first ‘went public’ with Charles in 1999.

I don’t think he’s thought this through.

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/harry-accuses-camilla-of-sacrificing-him-on-her-personal-pr-altar/a/112852217.html

I take it the ANL can use this evidence in court?

Not that I believe Camilla was the leak.

....and worth remembering, on the Camilla thing, that Tom Parker Bowles, her son, writes for the Mail on Sunday on food. Might not be a stretch to think that some gossip might have come quite directly to ANL (not that they'd hang him out to dry, of course - and he may be unimpeachably discreet).

Just my view but at Leveson, the Mail did talk about its use of private investigators - and this aspect is what Sherborne is now, seemingly, trying to re-run at this hearing, painting them as unlawful data breaches.

The judge isn’t impressed at the continued attempts to re-open Leveson. Also, Sherborne still has the limitation problem with which to grapple. It seems the strategy for that is to have the claimants say that Leveson went right over their heads at the time and that they didn’t take any interest in this huge news story at all during 2011-12, or the subsequent jailings, or the trial of the well-known Cotswold Set stalwart Rebekah Brooks, or the shutting down of the News of the World.

Obviously this daft strategy wasn't part of Sir Simon Hughes’s evidence, given that he was a witness at the Leveson inquiry. He just got made to look like a tit in court aka ‘Sherborned’ in other ways.

Bloody hell I had forgotten about Rebecca Brookes, I was abroad a lot but I definitely remember that and news of the world. Sometimes my brain needs a shunt!

Dacre has started giving evidence again

David Sherborne begins by putting to Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail, that there could have been an investigation over whether unlawful information gathering was happening at his paper as invoices to private investigators were available to look at.
He questions Dacre on a statement made in the past by Robin Esser, the late former executive managing editor of the Mail, who said such an investigation could not have been carried out.
"You didn't want to look back because you knew perfectly well that the commissioning your journalists had done was unlawful", Sherborne says. "That's why you didn't want to look back, isn't it?"
Dacre says he wanted to "clean up the system" when it emerged that the use of "enquiry agents" was a practice apparently in use by several papers.
He tells the court the "landscape and climate of journalism is totally different" now.
"I brought the shutters down," Dacre says, as he argues he led the way in stopping the use of such agencies once their methods became known.

One of the interviews was with Anderson Cooper and I didn’t think AC (a serious journalist apparently) challenged him sufficiently, in a similar vein to Tom Bradby.

He tends not to do interviews with people who challenge him.

Thanks, @bluegreygreen - I’m having a tea break and need to catch up a bit.

Paul Dacre tells the court he became worried at the "gradual realisation" that "enquiry agents" may be using unlawful methods to obtain personal details.
"Things slowly snuck up on us," he says.
David Sherborne, lawyer for the claimants, questions Dacre about the obtaining of ex-directory phone numbers - one of several unlawful information gathering methods that Associated Newspapers Ltd is alleged to have commissioned.
Dacre says he does not know whether this is legal or not but if it was unlawful, it would be "very, very low on the Richter scale of unlawfulness".
He adds there "may well have been public interest" in obtaining the number - and suggests that it may have been used as a way of offering someone right of reply on a story about them.

This is interesting. I think the same (Spanish?) lawyer someone else was posting about upthread somewhere:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaintMeghanMarkle/comments/1r1eajh/chewbacca_defense_statement_of_paul_dacre_anl/

Reading over the reporting so far, it seems Sherborne is basically throwing everything at the wall and hoping some muck will stick in the Judge's mind

I agree it seems this way, @MrsFinkelstein, but regarding the ceaseless warnings about not turning this into a public inquiry I'm wondering if it's possible for the judge to just shut such nonsense down?

I know nothing about court processes, but surely he has at least this much control of his own court?

Dacre already covered this in the Leveson Inquiry in Feb 2012 - it was all recorded, it’s a matter of public record. Front page news over and over again. All over TV news.

Where’s Sherborne going with this? Isn’t he skating on thin ice with his own clients’ limitation arguments?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16909539#:~:text=%22Everybody%2C%20every%20newspaper%22%20had,their%20lives%20to%20the%20public.

There's a tense exchange between Paul Dacre and David Sherborne, lawyer for the claimants, as he's questioned about his knowledge of the arrest of a former Mail on Sunday journalist in 2003 over an allegation of unlawfully obtaining information for a story.
In his witness statement, Dacre detailed that he didn't remember reading about the journalist's arrest.
He tells the court that though the Mail on Sunday was under the ownership of Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), it was "totally autonomous" from his paper, the Daily Mail.
Sherborne puts to Dacre that he "would have been concerned" that police were interviewing a journalist working for ANL "in relation to a possible criminal offence" as he was editor-in-chief of both papers at the time.
Dacre insists he was dealing with the "bigger picture" for the brand and not "this kind of stuff".
He says the late former Daily Mail lawyer Eddie Young "would have alerted me if he thought it was a problem".
As questioning continues, Dacre accuses Sherborne of twisting his words - and suggests he is also trying to put Young's reputation in a negative light.
"You're very good at smearing the living, you're even better at smearing the dead," Dacre says.

Apparently during Leveson, Paul Dacre said, "Hugh Grant has spent his life invading his own privacy".

So far, as far as I can tell from the reporting, there don't seem to have been any specific questions relating to the claimants' articles.

I spoke too soon!

David Sherborne takes Paul Dacre to a 2007 Daily Mail story detailing travel arrangements for Prince Harry and his former girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.
Sherborne asks if Dacre was aware of how journalist Rebecca English obtained details for the story, which allegedly included the exact seat on the plane the royal was sitting in.
It's alleged that the information was obtained through a private investigator.
Dacre says he wasn't aware of how English got hold of the information - but then adds that "airlines were very relaxed" about giving out details at that time, and when Dacre himself was a journalist.
Asked whether the only way the seat number could have been obtained was through an unlawful method, Dacre says: "I don't know that."

David Sherborne is being repeatedly interrupted by Mr Justice Nicklin over how relevant Sherborne's questions are to the case he must rule on.
At one point, he tells Sherborne to "move on" from his line of questioning.
He also tells the claimants' lawyer to use his time "wisely" - after yesterday imposing a 3pm deadline for today's questioning, by which Sherborne must wrap up.

Does Sherborne even have relevant questions? He's skating on thin ice now

An interesting thing that isn't being made clear is WHY journalists would use these 'search agents' like Steve Whittamore etc. Sherborne's implication is that they were always a force for evil illegally accessing information, but that's just not true.

Back in the days before extensive wifi, journalists would travel around the country on stories with laptops but no internet access. These agents could be rung up and would be able to provide information from their extensive digital databases (sometimes from Land Registry, directory enquiries, electronic birth/marriage/death records, and enormous advertising databases which are put together based on those boxes you tick on forms to allow your information to be used). All of those are totally legal, as long as you pay the enormous fees to access them.

The really good agents could jigsaw together information and cross-ref sources to work out where people lived, who their families were and where they lived, and any contact information. It's a real investigative skill.

That might seem unsavoury, but not illegal. I suspect most of the information being obtained was along these lines. And the reason the Mail/MoS had the most prolific usage is that they were a huge operation and had journalists travelling around the country/the world all the time because they had the budget.

That's a very good point @PrayForMyBum.

As I keep saying, paying for information isn't illegal.

We're used to thinking of journalists as having access to WIFI and online databases, but some of the allegations relate to articles as far back as 1993 - early dial-up years.

That’s such a good post, @PrayForMyBum. Absolutely spot on.

A good PI is a bloody good researcher, and has subscriptions in place for 192.com, paywalled websites, library reading rooms (for recent electoral rolls, for example), registration offices, online catalogues and databases, Ancestry, and all the rest.

Questioning now moves to the time of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, which was announced by former prime minister David Cameron in July 2011.
Dacre provided a statement to the inquiry that he was not aware that any journalist employed by Associated had ever carried out or commissioned phone hacking. He said the same during inquiry proceedings, and that he was aware of private investigators but had no evidence to suggest anything unlawful was going on.
In court, Sherborne points Dacre to invoices allegedly showing payments by the Daily Mail to what Sherborne calls "deeply suspicious" private investigators in the 2000s.
Sherborne says the documents were being looked into in June 2011 - a month before the inquiry was announced.
Dacre tells the court he was "totally unaware" that any such investigation was going on.
He later says he "trusted his lawyers" to give him accurate information and help him prepare for the Leveson Inquiry.

Sherborne is trying to re-run Leveson

David Sherborne, for the claimants, now questions Paul Dacre on his written statement.
In paragraph 79 of Dacre's statement, he writes:
"Of one thing I am sure: if I had been told that there was definitive evidence that a journalist or an agent on their behalf had blagged significant private information which was not in the public interest then I would have been pretty furious."
Sherborne then pulls up a letter sent to Dacre, among others, in August 2010, from a lawyer acting for Labour MP Clive Betts. Betts is not a claimant in this case.
The letter alleged that Betts's personal information had been obtained through unlawful means for a story published in the Daily Mail.
Dacre says he received "lots of letters every week" and he wouldn't have seen it, adding that it would have been handed straight over to the legal department.
He also says he received "maybe hundreds" of messages from "rich and powerful people" every year, who he claims would use lawyers to try to suppress papers from "telling the truth".

Wow - that is interesting.

By implication, Betts' letter did not show definitive evidence of illegal activity, or the legal department would have told Dacre.

Again, where is the relevance to the claimants' articles? Betts isn't a claimant - and he was writing in a personal capacity, not on behalf of someone as their MP.