Prince Harry awarded £140,000 in phone hacking case

The High Court has this morning awarded Prince Harry £140,600 in damages after ruling that he was the victim of mobile phone hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN). Mr Justice Fancourt said that the Duke of Sussex’s personal phone was targeted to a ‘modest extent’ by the Mirror papers between 2003 and 2009. However there was ‘extensive’ use of the practice more widely from 2006 to 2011 and ‘even to some extent’ during the Leveson Inquiry into media standards. The court also ruled that Piers Morgan, when he was editor of the Daily Mirror, knew about phone hacking, based on evidence given by Omid Scobie.

The Duke of Sussex had claimed journalists at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People publisher were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called ‘blagging’ or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities. Of the 33 sample articles examined in this case, 15 were ruled to be ‘the product of phone hacking … or the product of other unlawful information gathering.’