A leading media lawyer called on Prince Harry to apologise after the estranged royal impugned the integrity of the UK’s leading media law judge.
Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all 97 claims of illegal newsgathering brought against Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers by Prince Harry, Sir Elton John, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, David Furnish, Liz Hurley, Sadie Frost and Sir Simon Hughes after a four-year legal battle costing at least £50m.
In a statement issued hours after the 436-page judgment was published last week, Harry and Lawrence noted that Mr Justice Nicklin represented Mirror Group Newspapers in previous hacking litigation and that the ruling was “a complete and obvious whitewash”.
They also said that the judgment was “inconsistent” with the Mirror case which they said allowed “generic findings about various private investigators”.
A separate case brought by Prince Harry against Mirror Group Newspapers, which did not involve Nicklin, resulted in a 2023 finding that the publisher’s journalists used 11 private investigators and their associates “very substantially… in connection with extensive and habitual unlawful information gathering and phone hacking activities”.
Louis Charalambous, who has acted for both claimants and publishers in high-profile defamation cases, told the Press Gazette podcast: “He has impugned the integrity of Mr Justice Nicklin, I think unfairly, and it’s really beyond the pale.”
He added: “It’s not something which we normally see. Certainly this shouldn’t have been sanctioned by any lawyers.”
Before he became a judge, Matthew Nicklin QC represented Mirror Group Newspapers in 2015 in litigation brought by six victims of phone-hacking.
Charalambous said because the Mirror admitted liability, the judge in that case was not required to make a ruling on whether or not the hacking took place.
He said: “That’s a massively key difference that doesn’t come out in this bitter statement. That’s a key difference. They admitted liability, they admitted wrongdoing, they admitted criminal conduct.
“Now, that statement that there’s there was a reverse of the previous case. It just should not have been made…
“The way the statement reads is that the judge wasn’t serving justice without fear or favour. And quite frankly it was very ill advised.
“He really should think about withdrawing some of those allegations and apologising.”
Former Daily Mail showbiz editor on ‘terrifying’ court ordeal
Former Daily Mail showbiz editor Nicole Lampert spoke to Press Gazette about the impact of being falsely accused of involvement in illegal newsgathering relating to seven stories published between 2002 and 2006.
Liz Hurley said she thought her living room was bugged for one of the stories while Sadie Frost contended that Jude Law’s phone was bugged.
Lampert said: “No journalist that I know has ever done anything like that or has been accused of anything like that…
“Every time I got asked about it – and I had to spend quite a lot of time with the Mail’s lawyers – it was just like ‘there’s no evidence…how can this be going to trial when there is nothing’…
“The week before I just didn’t sleep really because it felt like my entire career was on the line, my reputation, I didn’t know what was going to be said in court.”
Talking about her time in court, she said: “It was just terrifying. I knew that I’d done nothing wrong, but I didn’t know what was going to be thrown at me, and I didn’t know what the judge would be like.”
She described her cross-examination by claimants’ lawyer David Sherborne as “aggressive and sneering and, it quite quickly appeared to me, just desperate”.
He asked about a story covering Sir Elton John’s wedding which included a figure for police security costs. She said the number probably came from Sir Elton’s PR, Gary Farrow.
“He was like: ‘well, I suggest to you, Miss Lampert, that it was from phone-hacking. And I just said, ‘whose phone do you think I hacked?’
“And he said, well, Thames Valley Police. And at that point the judge said: ‘Are you seriously suggesting that Miss Lampert hacked the police?’”
Talking about her reaction to all the claims being dismissed, she said: “There was joy, but there’s also anger that we have had this hanging over us for four years, that there was no case, that this was simply desperate behaviour from Sherborne, from these celebrities and from [journalist and legal researcher] Graham Johnson.”
Asked what she made of Harry’s post-trial statement, she said: “I think it’s partly petulant, childish behavior of someone that really is not a child anymore, even though he behaves like one.”
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