The times:
In the lobby of London’s five-star Corinthia Hotel, an imposing spherical chandelier hangs from the vaulted ceiling like a full moon. It is a venue designed to impress, and it was here, in January 2022, that two of Britain’s best-known celebrity lawyers agreed to meet Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, whose son Stephen was murdered 29 years earlier in a racist attack.
It was a meeting that would lead to one of the most significant trials the High Court had seen for years. A group of celebrities spearheaded by Prince Harry would be joined by Lawrence in suing the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday’s owner, Associated Newspapers. The group would claim journalists had repeatedly hacked their phones and illegally obtained their private details. In the case of Lawrence, they even accused the Daily Mail of bugging her.
On Tuesday the group lost on every count. The 436-page judgment handed down by Mr Justice Nicklin humiliated the claimants. He concluded they had no evidence that the 55 stories involved had been obtained through unlawful means.
The costs, to be decided by the end of the month, are estimated to be more than £50 million, some of which could fall on the shoulders of the celebrities. Politically, it was the first serious setback in the 15-year campaign by the pressure group Hacked Off and celebrities, led by Hugh Grant and the comedian Steve Coogan, to impose stricter regulation of the free press and usher in another public inquiry, known as Leveson 2.
The quietly spoken Lawrence, a 73-year-old former bank clerk who emigrated from Jamaica to London in the 1960s, cut a very different figure from the sleek pair who had invited her to the Corinthia that day.
David Sherborne, the barrister famed for his flamboyant courtroom manner, is the country’s most famous media lawyer. Renowned for representing celebrities from Princess Diana and Johnny Depp to Coleen Rooney in the “Wagatha Christie” trial, he earns substantial money suing newspapers. Anjlee Sangani represents A-list celebrities such as Sir Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley.
Sherborne, 57, and Sangani, 41, were at the hotel to convince Lawrence that she was the victim of a far-fetched plot: that the newspaper which for decades had championed her family’s fight for justice for Stephen after botched investigations by the Metropolitan Police, had been secretly betraying her.
It must have seemed astonishing, given that it was the Mail which, appalled at the Met’s failure to prosecute any of Stephen’s killers, ran a front page in 1997 picturing the five men under the headline: “Murderers — The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us”.
Lawrence was a guest of honour at a 2017 dinner to recognise Paul Dacre’s 25 years as editor of the Mail. The lawyers told a stunned Lawrence that their team had heard confessions from private investigators that journalists from the newspaper had been spying on her; hacking her voicemails, tapping her home telephone, monitoring her phone bills and bank accounts and even bugging a café she used. “Never could I have believed this was possible, and that the people who had been professing to help us fight for justice for Stephen could stoop so low,” Lawrence would later say.
This apparently impressive legal duo and those opulent surroundings were not the only factors that influenced Lawrence’s thinking. She had recently been alerted to the alleged spying by none other than Harry, who emailed her twice, urging her to meet the lawyers.
When the case came to court in January, Lawrence was joined by a cast that included the prince, Elton and his husband, David Furnish, and the actress Sadie Frost. All claimed the Mail had obtained their personal information illegally. Nicklin’s judgment dismissed every one of their claims for a lack of evidence.
At the High Court, the celebrities mostly seemed unconvincing in their protestations when the Mail’s barrister, Antony White KC, proposed that it was their social circle and publicists who were briefing the papers, not private investigators stealing their secrets.
The Mail journalists, including Dacre, were for the most part confident and steadfast, the judgment said. In court, the Daily Mail’s former crime editor, Stephen Wright, who had worked for decades on the Justice for Stephen Lawrence campaign, fizzed with outrage when his decades of professional work were besmirched.
Describing Sherborne and his team as “a mob of shysters, spivs, useful idiots”, Wright said: “You have set out with your mob to try to destroy me and my reputation. You have done that shamelessly and you are still trying. It’s an utter disgrace.”
The “mob” in question were the privacy campaigners gathered around the pressure group Hacked Off, fronted by Grant, who have brought more than £1 billion in successful claims through the courts against the Mirror and News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, which is owned by the same company as The Sunday Times. Grant, Coogan and other celebrities are the stars of the group, but it also features a powerful band of lawyers and barristers. They include Sherborne and Hugh Tomlinson, a barrister who also chairs Hacked Off.
Much of the funding for the investigation into the Mail newspapers came from the estate of the late Max Mosley, the late Formula 1 tycoon whose orgy with prostitutes was exposed by the News of the World in 2008 and won a privacy case against the newspaper.
But the suspicion is that the underlying objective for the celebrity privacy campaigners was to prove that Associated executives, including Dacre, had lied to the 2011 Leveson inquiry about the Mail’s innocence. If successful, this would have rejuvenated Hacked Off’s campaign for “Leveson 2”, and the potential imposition of harsher curbs of newspapers with tougher privacy laws.
It did not work out that way.
‘Biggest media scam in history'
been acquitted of the axe murder of his former business partner Daniel Morgan.
Lawrence’s witness statement said Rees had admitted to working for the Mail to steal information on the Lawrences. This extraordinary claim was made despite the fact that Rees was a sworn enemy of Wright after Mail exposes about Rees’s links to corrupt police officers. Furthermore in a documentary for Channel 4 Dispatches shortly before the trial, Rees suggested the claim was nonsense. “They are going to have to rethink that,” he said of Lawrence’s legal team. Asked if the Mail did anything illegal as far as he was aware, he responded: “No.”
On the phone last week, Rees told me he had been offered “£2,000 or £3,000” a month by the claimants’ team to make a legal statement about hacking and other illegal activity (Johnson denied this). Rees added: “That was just never going to happen … I might as well go and rob a bank — why would I put myself at risk of eight years in prison for perjury?”
He added: “I don’t like the Mail but they deserved that win. All those greedy bastards — Johnson, the Hacked Off team, Lawrence and Elton John — thought they saw an easy cash cow. Nicklin [the trial judge] proved to them the judiciary is far too clever to be conned by people like that. Hopefully this will teach them a lesson.”
A third private investigator’s evidence also fell apart. Christine Hart was recorded saying she had phoned Lawrence pretending to be a reporter from The Guardian. She had been paid to do this by Wright at the Mail, Lawrence alleged. The piece of information Hart gleaned through such “blagging”, Lawrence claimed, had ended up in a Mail story written by Wright.
Hart was not called to testify, but during the trial she contacted a freelance journalist to admit she had got her facts wrong. Now, she claimed, it was Stephen Lawrence’s father, Neville, whom she had blagged for the information, not his mother. When I spoke to Neville Lawrence about this, he said he had never spoken to any female Guardian journalist or anyone claiming to be one.
Doreen and Neville Lawrence are now divorced and estranged, but the 84-year-old Neville said he was utterly baffled about why his ex-wife had accused the Mail of all this wrongdoing. “Why would a paper that was so dedicated to helping me do that? Why?” he asked.
Attempts to settle rejected ‘with venom’
The claimants tried to settle the case with increasing urgency in the run-up to the trial. Sources claim Sherborne offered to settle for all the defendants for a payment of anything up to £5 million, rejected out of hand by Associated.
These efforts began via backchannels about a year ago and were always instigated by the claimants. They offered to drop all their cases if Associated would pay for its multimillion-pound costs. Each effort was spurned “with venom” by Associated’s team, one source said.
One source said Sherborne had been “very, very” keen to get a meeting with Associated chiefs, including its proprietor, Lord Rothermere, but they refused to grant him an audience.
In December last year, a retired Metropolitan Police officer, DCI Paul Settle, was asked to contact Wright to try to negotiate a peace. “[Lawrence] had realised the error of her ways a bit too late,” Settle told me. “It was along the lines of: ‘We now realise Stephen Wright hasn’t done anything wrong but we still think the Mail was at it,’” he recalls. Associated rejected the offer.
Settle was asked to try again a few days later, on Christmas Eve, but Associated again said no. In the week before Christmas Lawrence and Khan were seen in a car park meeting Dacre and a senior Associated lawyer at the Inns of Court off Fleet Street. In that meeting, they offered to settle the case with a statement praising Dacre and Wright’s journalism but they hinted they wanted a financial settlement.
Several phone calls followed in the new year when Khan dropped an additional bombshell: that Lawrence should also be paid £650,000 to drop the case. The offer was rejected, because the Mail would not pay compensation for something that had never happened. Khan declined to comment on this. The trial went ahead and Harry met Lawrence at the House of Lords on January 22, the day he testified in court. Lawrence then testified against the newspaper.
After the judgment, an unrepentant Johnson told me the result was “disappointing”. He also dismissed the charge that dozens of respected journalists had been put through years of worry before testifying in court to defend themselves.
Despite his arrogance, it is hard to see the case as anything but catastrophic for the press reform campaigners who supported it. Some deeply cynical tactics were exposed. Johnson’s methods will be picked over in a forthcoming costs hearing at which Associated will argue that the lawyers, including Sherborne, relied on evidence that was flimsy at best and possibly fraudulent.
Nobody in the claimants’ camp came out of the case well. Not that their solicitor Sangani was there to see it. Having been instrumental in persuading Lawrence to sign up at the Corinthia Hotel summit, Sangani quit the case shortly before it started.
Her law firm, Gunnercooke, now refuses to say why, citing “client confidentiality”. One source said she had got “cold feet on the case” last summer. The judge was scathing about the chaotic way she behaved in taking Burrows’ first witness statement — the one he later claimed was a forgery. She visited him twice at his house, and again sitting on a wall outside a coffee shop.
The defence suggested she had left most of it up to Johnson to prepare. The judge described her decision to sign off on a witness statement largely taken by the unqualified Johnson as “a serious error of professional judgment … She should not have signed the certificate in the terms she did.”
Despite the failure of the case, Hacked Off’s push to restrict press freedoms further remains alive. A board member, Jacqui Hames, wrote on its website: “It was difficult to see how this information could have been obtained without breaking the law, without spying on their targets.”
On Friday, Grant was claiming on X that the press had launched a “disinformation attack” on Hacked Off, and cited a quote that press regulation remained “ineffectual”. Worryingly for free speech advocates, he appears to have the ear of Andy Burnham, who met Grant and Coogan on the Makerfield campaign trail.
Meanwhile in a post-judgment outburst on Tuesday Harry and Lawrence accused the judge of “a complete and obvious whitewash”. It is not known who wrote the statement. Sherborne declined to comment. But quite what Harry and his fellow wealthy celebrities make of the underhand tactics used by the orchestrators of the case is a question they have yet to answer.