Ok this is as far as I got with establishing the hacked off ecosystem- disclaimer this is a working theory based on publically avaliable information and my opinion only.
The Post-Leveson Network
How the campaigners, lawyers, researchers, funders and insurer connect
This is not the story of a single organisation directing everything that followed Leveson. It is the story of a small and highly specialised network whose members repeatedly reappear in different roles: first as hacking victims and their lawyers, then as Leveson participants and press-reform campaigners, and later as researchers, claimants, solicitors, counsel and financial backers in successive cases against MGN, NGN and Associated Newspapers.
Many of these connections are unsurprising in a specialist area of law. They are not, by themselves, evidence of collusion or wrongdoing. Their significance lies in their cumulative effect.
The same people and firms repeatedly worked together; campaigning and litigation roles sometimes overlapped; research was financed by figures associated with the press-reform movement; and Temple Legal developed a close, long-running commercial relationship with the claimant lawyers whose later Associated Newspapers case it insured.
The network began before Hacked Off
The original organising structure was the group of solicitors bringing civil claims for phone-hacking victims. By 2011, claimant solicitors including Tamsin Allen, Mark Thomson, Charlotte Harris, Mark Lewis and Gerald Shamash were already coordinating their work. The group initially appears to have been coordinated by Allen and later by Thomson.
This matters because the litigation infrastructure did not originate with Hacked Off. The sequence was broadly:
- individual phone-hacking claims exposed evidence of wider misconduct;
- claimant solicitors formed a coordinated professional group;
- their clients became a recognised victim constituency at the Leveson Inquiry;
- some of those victims and lawyers became founders, directors or supporters of Hacked Off; and
- the same professional network continued into the large managed claims against MGN, NGN and Associated Newspapers.
At Leveson, David Sherborne and Sara Mansoori represented the victim core participants. Sherborne later became the most visible common counsel in the MGN, NGN and Associated Newspapers litigation. Mansoori remained part of the same small claimant privacy bar at Matrix Chambers.
The strongest continuous link at solicitor level is Mark Thomson. He represented hacking victims during the Leveson period through Atkins Thomson, and his later firm, Thomson Heath, went on to play leading roles in MGN and NGN litigation and to represent Sir Simon Hughes in the Associated Newspapers case.
Thomson's institutional line therefore runs from the earliest hacking claims, through Leveson, into each major generation of subsequent litigation.
Hacked Off brought the litigation and campaigning worlds together
Hacked Off emerged from the institutional environment of the Media Standards Trust and became independent in 2012. Its early leadership was drawn directly from the Leveson and claimant-lawyer world.
The board included Hugh Tomlinson KC, Charlotte Harris (wife of Evan Harris) and Hugh Grant, alongside academics and press-reform advocates. Brian Cathcart was executive director and Dr Evan Harris became associate director and later joint executive director.
Several people form particularly clear bridges:
- Hugh Tomlinson KC had led early phone-hacking litigation and later chaired Hacked Off. He combined claimant litigation experience with formal leadership of the press-reform campaign.
- Charlotte Harris was a foundational hacking solicitor, a Leveson-era legal figure and a founding Hacked Off director. She remained a prominent claimant privacy lawyer.
- Dr Evan Harris moved from political and campaigning work into a senior executive role at Hacked Off and later worked as a paralegal and researcher in hacking litigation. His marriage to Charlotte Harris is not evidence of misconduct, but it demonstrates how closely the personal, campaigning and litigation networks overlapped.
- Hugh Grant was a hacking claimant and major Leveson witness, then a founding Hacked Off director and donor, and later a claimant in the wider NGN litigation supported by Temple.
- Jacqui Hames moved from press-intrusion victim and Leveson witness to Hacked Off director and continuing campaigner.
- Sir Simon Hughes provides a direct continuity of a different kind: alleged hacking victim, Leveson witness, NGN claimant and finally Associated Newspapers claimant. His legal representation also links the later case back to Mark Thomson's older claimant network.
Hacked Off was therefore more than a general press-reform body with an occasional interest in litigation. Its governance incorporated lawyers and victims from the original claims, while its executives maintained close relationships with campaigners, researchers and the wider claimant community.
That does not mean Hacked Off, as a legal entity, controlled or funded the later Associated Newspapers case. It has expressly denied doing either. The more accurate point is that people and resources closely associated with its campaign sat within the wider network from which the claims emerged.
The claimant-lawyer network became a repeat litigation industry
The large hacking and unlawful-information-gathering cases were handled by a small number of specialist firms. Their roles changed between cases, but the personnel and working relationships remained remarkably stable.
- Hamlins became the principal modern hub. It says it has acted in more than 1,300 unlawful-information-gathering cases, served as lead solicitor in the NGN litigation and took a leading role in the Associated Newspapers action. It represented Prince Harry and Sadie Frost and repeatedly instructed Sherborne.
- Thomson Heath, descended from Atkins Thomson, provides the strongest link to the earliest claimant group. It led substantial MGN and NGN work and represented Simon Hughes in the Associated Newspapers litigation.
- Clintons repeatedly appeared in privacy and hacking cases, including work associated with Prince Harry, and regularly instructed Sherborne.
- Charles Russell Speechlys acted for numerous hacking claimants and developed a documented repeat relationship with Temple for ATE insurance.
- Atkins Thomson was historically central. Court material records Sherborne being instructed through Atkins Thomson for a coordinated group that included Atkins Thomson, Clintons, Hamlins, Steel & Shamash and Taylor Hampton.
- gunnercooke represented Baroness Lawrence, Elton John, David Furnish and Elizabeth Hurley in the Associated Newspapers litigation and jointly instructed the common counsel team with Hamlins and Thomson Heath.
- Sheridans joined the Associated Newspapers case after Callum Galbraith moved there from Hamlins and Prince Harry and Sadie Frost followed him. The movement of one solicitor carried the existing client and counsel relationships into a new firm.
David Sherborne was the most consistent barrister across the managed litigation. He was instructed by Hamlins, Thomson Heath, Clintons, Atkins Thomson and gunnercooke at different points. In the Associated Newspapers case he worked with a common counsel team that included Julian Santos, Ben Hamer and Luke Browne, all of 5RB.
This was coordinated litigation across several firms rather than a series of unrelated cases. Coordination is not suspicious in itself: group litigation requires common counsel, shared evidence and organised claimant representation. It does, however, explain why professional confidence and assumptions could circulate within a relatively closed group.
Temple was part of this market long before the Associated Newspapers case
Temple Legal did not make an isolated decision to insure the Associated Newspapers claim. It had deliberately established itself as a leading provider of after-the-event insurance for media litigation. ATE cover protects claimants against defined litigation costs if a case is lost and can also support disbursement funding.
Temple has insured or promoted its involvement in claims including Gulati, BNM, Jordan and Simpson against MGN, as well as litigation involving Prince Harry and Lord Watson against NGN. It has also publicised relationships with firms such as Carter-Ruck and Charles Russell Speechlys.
Two earlier examples show the pattern clearly:
- In BNM v MGN, Atkins Thomson acted for the claimant, instructed David Sherborne and obtained Temple ATE cover.
- Charles Russell Speechlys publicly praised Temple for providing and increasing cover as hacking claims approached trial. Temple described itself as the principal litigation insurer for phone-hacking claims against both MGN and NGN.
Temple's legal director, Matthew Pascall, is the principal personal link. Temple and Pascall describe his role in the Prince Harry and Lord Watson NGN litigation as central and instrumental, saying that he worked closely with Sherborne, Hamlins and Clintons. Their public language presents Temple not simply as a detached insurer but as an organisation helping victims challenge powerful media groups and secure accountability.
Against that background, Temple's reported £16.2 million cover for the Associated Newspapers case looks less like an inexplicable wager by a small insurer and more like the continuation of an established specialist business model. Temple knew the firms, counsel, type of claim and settlement history. Its gross policy limit also need not equal its own net exposure: the risk may have been divided through reinsurance, co-insurance, staged limits, exclusions and continuing disclosure obligations.
The remaining question is not why Temple entered this field, but how it assessed and continued this particular risk. Four explanations remain plausible and may overlap:
- Temple received an incomplete or overly favourable presentation of the evidence.
- It relied heavily on a successful group of repeat lawyers and accepted their framing of the case.
- Its true economic exposure was substantially lower than the headline policy limit.
- It expected Associated Newspapers to settle, as other publishers had done, rather than take the case to trial.
Temple reportedly used Godwin Busuttil KC to monitor the merits of the Associated Newspapers claims. Busuttil is a specialist media barrister at 5RB, the same chambers as Sherborne and the common counsel team. Chambers membership does not imply a shared interest: barristers are self-employed and regularly act on opposing sides. Nevertheless, using a member of the same specialist set reinforces the appearance of a tightly concentrated professional circle rather than wholly external scrutiny.
The Associated Newspapers research operation connected campaigning to litigation
The research behind the Associated Newspapers claims was associated principally with Graham Johnson, Evan Harris, James Waddell and others gathering statements and documentary material.
Public reporting and trial evidence identify financial support for Johnson's work from Max Mosley or Mosley-linked companies and later his estate, Hugh Grant, Geoffrey Stunt and a loan from Evan Harris. Mosley-related funding reportedly included more than £100,000 for investigators and a £565,000 company loan to Johnson's publishing operation. Johnson said Mosley encouraged the Associated Newspapers investigation and the launching of claims.
The functional chain was therefore:
Mosley and other supporters financed research; Johnson, Harris and others developed witnesses and material; claimant solicitors converted that material into claims; Sherborne and the common counsel team advanced them; and Temple insured the litigation.
This is the most important point of interconnectivity. It does not establish that Hacked Off paid the claimants' legal bills. Hacked Off has denied funding or working on the case and has said Johnson was never its employee. That denial can be literally true while the wider network remains relevant: former or current Hacked Off figures participated in research, funding, claimant representation or campaigning around the same subject.
The defensible conclusion is therefore not that “Hacked Off bankrolled the case”. It is that individuals and funding sources associated with the Hacked Off and Leveson movement helped sustain the people, research and institutional environment from which the case developed.
The money came through separate but overlapping streams
The funding must be divided into four distinct categories:
- direct funding of Hacked Off;
- funding of the wider press-reform infrastructure;
- funding of research and investigation that later generated claims; and
- insurance and other financial support for the litigation itself.
Conflating these streams would overstate the evidence.
Direct support for Hacked Off
Known support includes a £50,000 grant from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in 2012–13, Hugh Grant's donated hacking damages and smaller reported donations from Arpad Busson, Jemima Khan, Guy Chambers and Simon Singh. Hacked Off also accepted anonymous donations, so the public list is necessarily incomplete.
Hacked Off announced an anticipated grant of more than £20,000 from the Lebedev-founded Journalism Foundation, but contemporary reporting questioned whether it was ever paid because the foundation had already been wound up. That remains unresolved.
The Rowntree grant raises a legitimate political-network question because Evan Harris was a former Liberal Democrat MP and the present JRRT board contains several prominent Liberal Democrats. The current board cannot, however, be used as evidence of who approved a grant in 2012. The relevant evidence would be JRRT's board membership and decision records at the time.
The Media Standards Trust and Journalism Foundation
The Media Standards Trust provided the institutional setting from which Hacked Off emerged. It was supported by a range of charitable foundations and had a board drawn from media, law, finance and public policy.
Max Mosley and the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust
Max Mosley's personal, corporate and estate funding must be kept separate from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust.
Mosley personally supported Hacked Off, Leveson core participants, strategic meetings and Johnson's research. He was an active participant in the press-reform project, not simply a passive donor.
AMCT, by contrast, made broad charitable grants in areas including research, justice, education and social impact. Its principal identifiable press-related commitment was to the Independent Press Regulation Trust, which in turn funded IMPRESS. The money paid for the operating infrastructure of a recognised press regulator: staff, complaints handling, arbitration, investigations, standards work, publisher support and governance. It was institution-building, not evidence of funding lawsuits.
AMCT also supported JUSTICE and Open Democracy, but the material reviewed does not identify direct AMCT grants to Hacked Off, Temple, Graham Johnson, claimant law firms, Matrix, 5RB, Sherborne, Tomlinson or the Harris family. Separate funding from Mosley personally or through his companies should not be attributed to the charity without evidence.
What the network establishes
The evidence supports five measured conclusions.
First, there is genuine continuity from the earliest hacking claims to Leveson, Hacked Off and the later MGN, NGN and Associated Newspapers litigation. The same victims, solicitors and counsel repeatedly reappear.
Second, Hacked Off's leadership was not separate from the claimant-litigation world. Several founders and directors were hacking lawyers, victims or later litigants, and Evan Harris subsequently participated in litigation research.
Third, the Associated Newspapers case arose from a research operation funded by people closely associated with the wider press-reform movement, even though Hacked Off as an entity denies funding or working on the claims.
Fourth, Temple was not a neutral newcomer. It had spent years building close commercial relationships with the same claimant firms and barristers and had repeatedly insured their phone-hacking portfolios. That history makes its decision commercially intelligible, while also making the quality and independence of its underwriting scrutiny a legitimate subject for examination.
Finally, the funding picture is plural. Hacked Off donations, foundation support for press reform, Mosley's personal financing of research, AMCT's support for IMPRESS and Temple's insurance of litigation were different streams. They intersected through people and shared objectives, but the evidence does not justify treating them as one common fund.
The overall picture is therefore best described as a concentrated and self-reinforcing professional ecosystem. Its importance lies in the ease with which a successful narrative, once accepted by trusted repeat participants, could move from campaigning, to funded research, to litigation and finally to substantial insurance cover without receiving genuinely independent challenge.