Former Sun royal editor Duncan Larcombe is today no fan of his former employer, but he believes Prince Harry’s legal campaign against the tabloids is “deluded”.
Larcombe spoke to Press Gazette as he published volume one of his memoirs, covering his time on local newspapers, at Ferrari news agency in Kent and then working his way up through the ranks to become Sun royal editor.
While Larcombe clearly enjoyed his time at The Sun, he also paid a heavy price for his successful tabloid career. He was diagnosed with PTSD after covering the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami for the paper in Thailand. And he also spent more than 1,000 days on police bail before standing trial in 2015 over payments to sources.
Larcombe was one of 29 journalists charged as a result of News Corp disclosures to the police, none of whom were convicted at trial. Sixteen Sun and News of the World sources were however jailed as a result of confidential emails being handed over to Operation Elveden by The Sun’s publisher. Larcombe left the paper in 2016 a year after he was acquitted by a jury.
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Larcombe’s time as a Sun reporter, from 2000 onwards, was during a period when we now know phone-hacking was rife at the Mirror titles and the News of the World.
Asked if he saw evidence of the “dark arts” in action during his time at the paper, he said: “Fleet Street reporters could get car number plates flipped and find the owner. I genuinely never knew about the phone-hacking side of things.
“When Clive Goodman was arrested and his desk at the News of the World was seized by police, for a moment I thought ‘shit, I didn’t realise you could access voicemails – am I going to be in trouble for not being able to do that?’
“But I wasn’t, it was a great relief.”
However, asked if the culture of The Sun could have encouraged rule-breaking, he said: “The mindset was not about rules, it was about results.
“The pressure, the toxicity of the newsroom where we had to win at all costs… I’m pretty sure that’s why the room next door at the News of the World came so unstuck.”
Ex-Sun royal editor: ‘After I covered the tsunami I just freaked out’
Larcombe recalls an environment where huge demands were placed on reporters and he felt that scant regard was given to their wellbeing.
This culminated, he said, in his time in Thailand covering the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 – one of the deadliest natural disasters in history.
Larcombe was the first journalist to reach Khao Lak, a beach resort that had been entirely washed away, with 5,000 dead in total at the resort and 800 killed at a single hotel. In his book he recalls being scolded by the newsdesk who told him: “Where the fuck have you been? Chrissie from Eastenders is in Phuket, we need you to track her down.” He said his exclusive report had been ignored and no-one ever enquired about his wellbeing after days spent witnessing a “vision of hell”.
Larcombe said: “I was diagnosed with PTSD several years later. After I covered the tsunami I just freaked out, I was just so angry and annoyed with the way The Sun dealt with me. I got the royal editor job straight away so I threw myself into it but I was quite keen to leave the paper.
“The obsession with daily newspapers is the next day’s paper, and anything that gets in the way of that isn’t relevant.”
After his acquittal on charges of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office Larcombe, like other Sun journalists who were arrested, was left feeling deeply disillusioned about the way his former employer acted.
“If you work for a newspaper you think you are working for a team but what we discovered was we were working for an organisation where self-preservation of the hierarchy was the number one rule.
“The News of the World didn’t have on page two ‘we hack phones, give us celebrity phone numbers and we will pay you cash’ – but the Sun ran an ad on page two every day saying ‘we pay cash for stories, ring this number’.
“The journalists aren’t the ones who were corrupting the public if that was the case and I think that’s how the juries saw it…
“It’s a scandal that has been forgotten but it’s a scandal because it comes with real cost. People have been left almost unemployable. I don’t think I could get a job on a newspaper now if I tried.”
‘Prince Harry has changed’ and legal campaign against press is ‘deluded’
Larcombe said he nonetheless also looks back with fondness on his time at The Sun and his book offers a riveting and at times nerve-racking ride through the final years of tabloid media dominance.
“I worked with some fantastic people,” he said. “There was a real sense of identity around what is a Sun story, and I miss it.”
Volume two of Larcombe’s memoirs will deal with his time as Sun royal editor covering Prince Harry during the years when the royal claims he was the target of widespread illegal newsgathering.
Harry is set to take The Sun and Daily Mail publishers to trial next year: he claims The Sun’s publisher used phone-hacking and private investigators to source private stories about him and alleges the Daily Mail publisher engaged in secretly recording private phone calls and illegally obtaining health and bank records.
Both publishers deny the claims and plan to defend them at trial.
Asked what he makes of Harry’s ongoing legal disputes, Larcombe said: “Prince Harry has changed. We used to write about his indiscretions: wearing a Nazi outfit, going to strip clubs, always knowing that the readers absolutely loved the guy and we were in tune with that.
“The sense was this is what I would do if I was a prince. When he met Meghan he changed.
“He decided that the press are evil and the press have got to be punished.
“The court cases are all part of the slightly deluded belief that if it wasn’t for the press his life would be better.
“But if the press made his life worse, why would he live in LA and go to public events? Why have his own faux royal engagements like his visit to Nigeria? Why do it if he was fed up with the attention?
“He believes the press killed his mother and that’s where Harry’s head is.”
The Sun would have frequently paid for stories about Prince Harry, but Larcombe says royal stories were legally acquired during his time at the paper.
“When I was at The Sun we covered whatever Harry did because the readers loved him. We would often get a call from a Sun reader at Johannesburg Airport or wherever and say I’ve just seen Prince Harry. That is how we would get stories.
“He is deluded if he thinks there was some massive conspiracy to break the law from a Sun point of view. And I am fairly confident that applies across the board.”
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