Prince Harry Accused of Boosting Case with 'Trophy Claimants' as Trial Nears Final Chapter
Closing arguments in the 10-week High Court trial reveal fresh allegations against the claimants as both sides trade blows in a multimillion-pound legal battle.
Associated Newspapers Limited stands accused of deploying unlawful techniques — private investigators, blagging, covert information gathering — on an industrial scale over many years. But as the 10-week trial enters its final chapter, it is the claimants themselves who are now facing scrutiny. ANL's legal team has alleged that Baroness Doreen Lawrence was brought into the case by Prince Harry's legal team, not on the strength of her evidence, but as a 'trophy claimant' — a name calculated to lend moral weight to a lawsuit that, they suggest, needed it.
Baroness Lawrence is no ordinary addition to a claimant list. As the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a Black teenager whose racially motivated murder in 1993, and the botched investigation that followed, changed British policing and race relations forever, she has spent decades as one of the country's most prominent and respected civil rights campaigners. The claimants, a group of seven that includes Harry, Sir Elton John, and Baroness Lawrence, are represented by leading barrister David Sherborne, who used his closing submissions to press the court to reach sweeping conclusions about the scale of wrongdoing at ANL. The publisher, which denies all claims, has described the litigation as a headline-grabbing exercise. Sherborne argued that a document trail, he says, has been catastrophically — and, he implies, deliberately — depleted. The volume of missing material relating to ANL's payments to private investigators is, he told the court, "stark in the extreme."
Thousands of invoices, he argued, would once have existed to underpin those payments. "The difference between the known universe of payments to private investigators, which is vast, and the small number of invoices that have been disclosed is stark in the extreme," he said, as per The Guardian.
Yet the little that has survived, Sherborne contended. He described the thin remaining evidence as containing "conspicuous and often shocking" proof of unlawful activity. Remarkably, one cache of documents was recovered only by chance: a box of records relating to payments to private investigators — dubbed 'Pandora's box' by Sherborne — was stumbled upon by a legal worker last year, years into the litigation.
ANL has pushed back on all of it. In its own closing submissions, the publisher argued that the claimants had arrived at court armed with "headline-grabbing allegations" of hacking, phone tapping, and bugging, in the hope that the disclosure process would produce the evidence to support them and that ANL would ultimately settle. It didn't. "This robust and comprehensive defence mounted by Associated has resulted in the most serious of the claimants' allegations being struck out, or falling away, or being abandoned, or significantly reduced, before or during the trial," ANL's legal team said in a written submission. The publisher also stated that it had adopted a "demonstrably conscientious and generous approach to disclosure," handing over more than 2,700 documents.
