Hacking investigation journalist Nick Davies has spoken about the significance of Prince Harry’s legal action versus the Mirror.
He also said that if his investigation and campaign at The Guardian had succeeded in securing structural reform of the newspaper industry, the UK would not have left the European Union.
Former Guardian journalist Davies was speaking at the Sir Harry Evans Summit on investigative journalism in London on Wednesday before an audience of several hundred journalists.
Prince Harry is currently suing the publishers of the Mail, Sun and Mirror titles over allegations of illegal information gathering. The latest hearing got underway on Wednesday at the High Court in London and focuses on around 148 articles published about Prince Harry in the Mirror titles between 1996 and 2010.
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The ongoing phone-hacking legal actions were largely prompted by The Guardian phone-hacking investigation which culminated in the 2011 story revealing News of the World journalists had listened to the voicemail messages of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler ten years earlier.
Davies revealed that the hacking investigation came about as a result of a single tip-off and said the story was worth pursuing because it was about abuse of power by the police and press.
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He said: “You can’t do an investigation like phone-hacking unless you have an organisation and editor behind you and the organisation and the editor need to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from where most of them are, ie. not thinking commercially all the time and with a certain moral obsession.
“You need someone at the top of the organisation. I had Alan Rusbridger, who won’t let go of something because it’s wrong and that’s why we are going to pursue it. It doesn’t matter if the readers aren’t interested, we are going to do it.
“If instead of thinking commercially you start to think morally, you begin to climb that slope at the top of which is Harry [Evans]. You can’t do these stories unless you have a Harry.”
Asked by panel host BBC Radio 4 Today’s Amol Rajan what difficult moments he faced during the hacking investigation, Davies cited his reporting on the Milly Dowler story in which he claimed News of the World journalists had deliberately deleted voicemail messages after listening to them, thereby giving the family false hope their daughter was still alive.
Davies said: “There was a terrible thing. We were publishing dozens of stories over a two-year period. Pushing them back, pushing them back. We are breaking through, they are starting to retreat. Andy Coulson has resigned as the prime minister’s right-hand man. Scotland Yard has set up a straight press inquiry.
“Then we published this one story about the [13]-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler who had been abducted and murdered ten years earlier and we discovered the News of the World had hacked her voicemail. That’s got the emotional punch. It breaks through.
“Four months later as a result of the impact of that story, which meant the police had to dig deeper into their archives, new evidence emerges which threw really significant doubt over a key element of that story.
“At the end of the day, we still don’t know the truth. It’s possible that we were right, but 70% more likely that we were wrong. No reporter wants to publish a story that turns out to be false.
“Least of all do you want to do that when you are struggling against powerful people who are doing all they can to conceal the truth. Least of all when those powerful people publish newspapers which specialise in falsehood and distortion.
“Those newspapers are not just saying significant doubt over this part of the story. In the hands of somebody like Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail this becomes the false Milly Dowler story… It becomes ‘Nick Davies and Alan Rusbridger made it up’.”
Asked by Rajan about the likely consequences of Prince Harry’s latest legal action, Davies said: “Harry has got enough money. He is saying ‘I don’t care what you offer me, I don’t care how much it costs if I lose, I am going to have a hearing’.
“There are nearly 2,000 phone-hacking cases which have been silenced where the people suing have been paid off before they could get to court, the risks of going on were just too terrifying financially.
“We are moving towards an evidentiary hearing. If, as expected, he turns up to give evidence the newspapers who would like to ignore this story can’t do that – they are going to have to cover it.”
Talking about the likely consequences of the case, he said he wanted Rajan to imagine a world in which we see a photograph of a particular high-profile figure in handcuffs.
Davies said: “There are a great many steps before anything like that can conceivably happen. The ultimate possible achievement is that and that’s not much. It might make us happy, but what isn’t going to happen is that you are going to see structural reform of newspapers in this country so that they start telling the truth instead of dealing in falsehoods and distortion.
“If we had succeeded we would have that. This country would still be in the European Union if we had achieved that. But you still have newspapers who abuse their power and are using falsehood, distortion and spite to damage this country over and over again.”
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