Prince Harry has won the latest round of his long-running legal struggle with the publisher of the Sun, as a high court judge denied a request to postpone the trial.
News Group Newspapers (NGN) has requested to postpone the trial for alleged unlawful information collecting, which is planned for January next year, so that the court could determine if Harry and 41 others’ claims of unlawful news gathering were made too late.
On Friday, Mr Justice Fancourt stated that there was “plainly considerable risk” that assessing the timeframes of the claims would be costly and would push the complete trial back by another two years, which was “unsatisfactory”.
From the mid-1990s to 2016, Harry and others, including Labour peer Doreen Lawrence, accused Murdoch-owned tabloids the Sun and the now-defunct News of the World of illegal news gathering, including the use of private investigators, leaking confidential information, burglary, and intercepting phone calls and voicemails.
At a hearing on Wednesday, NGN lawyers argued that the court should first consider whether the claimants may have known they had a claim earlier and so be excluded from proceedings.
Typically, claims must be submitted within six years. The NGN lawyers claimed it was the “most efficient” means of handling matters and might “promote” settlements. The claimants’ lawyers contended that it would cause delays and be “highly disruptive and prejudicial” to proceedings.
Fancourt dismissed the application, stating that it was not equitable or convenient to cancel all 42 claimants’ trials in January 2025 for a single issue trial.
NGN’s lawyers stated that it will cover the costs of making the request. News UK, the Sun’s parent business, paid £51.6 million in expenses related to the incident in 2023 and £128.3 million in 2022.
News UK has settled over 1,500 phone-hacking claims since the Guardian disclosed the scandal that led to the demise of the News of the World in 2011. It has repeatedly disputed that improper information collecting occurred at the Sun.
The path to trial in Harry’s case against NGN has been lengthy and costly. Hugh Grant, an actor, pulled out of the case on Wednesday after accepting a “enormous” settlement from The Sun.
The actor accused the Sun of phone hacking, illegal information collecting, landline tapping, bugging his phone, and burglarizing his home and business. Grant said he was obliged to pay or face a £10 million legal bill because tight regulations governing expenses in civil action meant that if he had not settled and won the case, his legal fees may have significantly outstripped any damages granted.
On Wednesday, an NGN spokeswoman stated that the company had unreservedly apologised to phone-hacking victims in 2011 and given financial damages “to those with proper claims” against the News of the World, but that the Sun did not accept obligation for ongoing claims against it.
Last month, Harry’s lawyers sought to directly implicate Rupert Murdoch in the trial, alleging that he had “turned a blind eye” to a widespread cover-up of crime at his publications and oversaw a “culture of impunity”.
In a move criticized by the Sun’s publishers as an attempt to use civil proceedings as a “substitute for a public inquiry,” the duke’s barrister David Sherborne attempted to amend the privacy claim to make specific allegations about the “destruction and concealment” of evidence, including by Will Lewis, the newly appointed publisher of the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos. The judge has yet to determine whether the claim can be revised.