The Duke of Sussex & Ors v MGN Limited

This is my judgment on the claims of the four above-named claimants against MGN Limited for damages and other relief in respect of numerous occasions of alleged misuse of private information. No other cause of action was pleaded.

The claimants are four of many claimants in the current (fourth) wave of the Mirror Newspapers Hacking Litigation (“the MNHL”). As its name suggests, the managed (but not group) litigation arose from allegations of phone hacking made by previous claimants against journalists, managers and editors of the three national Mirror Group newspapers and involving private investigators or agencies instructed by them. The allegations are now more wide-ranging than, but include, the hacking of the claimants’ and their identified associates’ mobile telephones.

I shall refer to the three national titles throughout as The Mirror, The Sunday Mirror and The People, even though their names have changed during the period under consideration. I refer to the Defendant as MGN, and only to Trinity Mirror plc (“TM plc”), its parent company from 1999 (now called Reach plc), when referring to that corporation specifically.

Only one previously scheduled trial has taken place in the MNHL. That was heard by Mann J in 2015. There were eight trial claimants and the judge gave judgment in favour of all eight on 21 May 2015 (Gulati v MGN Ltd [2015] EWHC 1482 (Ch) (“Gulati”), a date which will be of some significance for the fourth wave claimants. Subsequent trials have been scheduled but many individual claims (including claims eventually listed for trial) were settled by MGN by payment of an undisclosed sum and an apology.

As a result of a scheduled trial in January 2022 being lost because very few individual claims were ready for trial and each of the few that were ready settling at a late stage, I gave directions that a larger number of claims should be prepared and made ready to be tried in May 2023. The number of potential representative claimants was gradually reduced through case management conferences in October and December 2022 and pre-trial reviews in March and April 2023, and the claims to proceed to trial were finally selected (with substitutes in case of late settlement) at the end of March 2023.

The four claimants are not representative in the sense that issues determined in their individual claims will bind other claimants, but only in the sense that they were selected as covering a range of issues that also arise in many other claims. These also include issues pleaded in generic particulars of claim (“the generic issues”) that all claimants adopt as part of their individual cases. One of the range of issues, which arises in Ms Sanderson’s and Mrs Wightman’s cases but not in the Duke of Sussex’s or Mr Turner’s, is whether the claim is statute-barred.

In the remainder of this judgment and its Schedules, I often refer to voicemail interception (which is synonymous with “phone hacking”) as “VMI”, and to unlawful information gathering as “UIG”, for convenience. The term “UIG” includes “VMI”, so I sometimes refer to “other UIG” in order to distinguish other types of UIG, such as blagging and unlawful searches, from VMI.

Unlike in previous years, the four sample claims (and many others) have not settled. MGN explained in case management conferences preceding this trial that it was now unwilling to settle claims because it wanted certain key issues to be decided by the court, which could have a significant effect on the way that other claims will then be settled. These issues are the following. First, whether damages awarded to claimants for VMI or other UIG by or on behalf of MGN can include loss resulting from the actual publication of articles containing the private information thereby acquired, even when there is no separate claim that can now be pursued based on the wrong of publication; and second, whether some or all of the claims for UIG are statute-barred, and if so at what time they became barred.

These particular issues arise in this way because in May 2022, on MGN’s applications, I struck out claims by six sample claimants for damages for loss caused by publication of their private information in newspaper articles, on limitation grounds; but I refused to strike out or grant summary judgment to MGN on claims for damages based on the underlying UIG: see Sanderson v MGN Ltd [2022] EWHC 1222 (Ch) (“Sanderson v MGN”). I held that whether the claims based on the alleged UIG were issued too late had to be determined at a trial, as did the question of how (if at all) damages for the underlying UIG could reflect the nature and impact of the actual use that MGN made of the private information in some cases, namely publishing it in its newspapers.

In the light of my judgment in Sanderson v MGN, all fourth wave claimants now accept that their claims based on wrongful publication of articles containing private information are statute-barred. Their focus is now the underlying VMI or other UIG that led to the articles, and other instances of VMI or other UIG that did not lead to publication of an article.

Following admissions made before, at, and after the Gulati trial, and in view of the findings of Mann J in his judgment about “extensive and habitual” use of phone hacking and other UIG carried on at MGN’s newspapers from about mid-1999 to about August 2006 (which, MGN accepts, binds it at this trial), one might have thought that MGN would not have contested vigorously all the allegations of VMI and UIG made by these claimants. Nothing could be further from the truth. MGN has made only very limited and in some cases non-specific admissions about UIG carried out or commissioned by its employees.

MGN called evidence from a number of witnesses who said that they had not seen any phone hacking being carried on, and were unaware of and had not used any UIG at MGN’s newspapers. It disputed the extent of phone hacking and UIG, and disputed that the vast majority of articles about which the claimants complain were the product of VMI or any other form of UIG. It disputed in many cases that the information was of a private nature protected by Article 8 of the Convention. It also disputed, save in a few instances, that the activities being carried on by private investigators (“PIs”) were either criminal or unlawful (in the sense of creating an actionable civil wrong, not a crime).

To be fair to MGN, part of the reason for its contesting these matters was that, by their generic claim, the claimants seek to establish much more than had been proved in Gulati. They seek to prove that extensive and habitual VMI had been carried on by MGN during a much longer period, namely also during the years 1991-1999 and 2006-2011. They also seek to prove that from 1999 the MGN board (and following a merger in late 1999, the board of TM plc) and MGN’s legal department were aware of the extent of the phone hacking and other illegal and unlawful activities being conducted, turned a blind eye to them, and then actively sought to conceal them. The allegations about board and legal department knowledge are serious, and a significant part of the evidence in the first part of the trial, dealing with the generic claim, was concerned with them.

At the conclusion of the evidence on the generic claim, the claimants’ legal team provided a list of the factual findings that they were inviting the court to reach. I had requested this during the opening of the claim because there was little clarity in the written opening of the claimants about the precise extent of the findings sought. The claimants decided to wait until the evidence on the generic claim was almost completed before providing it, despite my indication that it would assist the court and the Defendant to have it as soon as possible.

Despite the delay, the findings set out in the document provided were ambitiously wide-ranging and, in substance, amounted to a request to find that essentially the whole of the generic claim, as pleaded in the Re-Amended Generic Particulars of Claim (“GenPoC”) was proved. In no respect did the claimants say that, in view of the evidence given on the generic claim – which by that stage had nearly been completed – they abandoned their case as regards any year, journalist, editor, executive, lawyer or PI. When I pushed gently in the course of closing submissions, Mr Sherborne did nevertheless concede that there was precious little evidence of VMI or UIG from 1991 to 1994.

I also asked for an agreed list of the main issues to be decided but no such agreed document emerged.

Despite the claimants’ lack of focus on the really important issues and the apparent inability of the parties to agree what they are, it is clear that there are some principally important issues for decision in this trial, apart from the extent to which each individual claimant has proved their case on VMI and UIG on a very detailed level, and then the appropriate quantum of damages for any misuse of private information proved. These main issues were constantly at risk of being obscured by a mass of individual details, disputes and documents relied upon by the claimants in an attempt to maximise the range of possible findings of wrongdoing.

The main issues are:

The four claimants bring claims that raise these generic issues, as well as the allegations of phone hacking or other UIG directed at them personally. Their individual claims comprise general allegations (such as unlawful surveillance being carried out, and their and their associates’ mobile phones being hacked over a long period) as well as complaints about specific occasions of hacking or UIG that led to the publication of the articles about which they complain. There is no longer a claim for damages for the publication itself; rather, publication of each article, including allegedly private information, is being used by the claimants to identify the time at or shortly preceding which their phones must have been hacked, or their private information must have been obtained by other unlawful means, e.g. obtaining their phone records or travel arrangements by ‘blagging’ the information from third parties.

There are 148 published articles on which the Duke of Sussex relies; 37 for Ms Sanderson, 28 for Mr Turner and only 2 for Ms Wightman. In order to make the trial manageable within the 7 weeks allotted for it, a selection of 33 of Prince Harry’s articles was agreed by the parties as a representative sample. This includes articles chosen by either side, so for that reason some are likely more strongly to support the Duke’s case and others are more likely to support MGN’s case that the article contained only material already in the public domain or facts that were not within the scope of Article 8 protection at all. The articles were also selected to cover the full period about which the Duke complains that UIG was being conducted, namely 1996 – 2011. It is expected that determination of this sample, in his case, will enable him and MGN to resolve the remainder of his claim by agreement. As will become apparent, the Duke appeared much more concerned to establish the full, broad picture about MGN’s illegal activities than to be compensated for individual instances of UIG.

In Ms Sanderson’s, Mr Turner’s and Ms Wightman’s claims, all their articles are the subject of this judgment.

As the determination of the claimants’ claims involves consideration of each and every PI invoice and payment request on which they rely as evidencing UIG, as well as the provenance of the content of the articles, it is appropriate to consider some of these detailed matters in a schedule to this judgment, in order to keep the main judgment within reasonable bounds and make it readable. I have therefore created a schedule of what are called the UIG Episodes (based on payment records where there is no proximate article) for the Duke’s claim and Ms Sanderson’s claim, where there are many of these Episodes. In the case of Mr Turner and Ms Wightman I have dealt with the Episodes as part of my treatment of their claims based on the articles, in the main judgment.

I have adopted the same approach in relation to assessing the evidence relating to each of the 51 PIs alleged by the claimants to have conducted UIG activities on behalf of MGN. The evidence that I heard relating to some of the more important PIs is addressed in Parts II and III of this judgment but the individual treatment of each and every one of the PIs is set out in the PI Schedule. I summarise my conclusion relating to them briefly at the end of Part III.

Following the way that the trial was conducted, there are two essentially separate sets of findings in this judgment: the generic case relied on by all claimants, in relation to which the issues identified in [18] above are the main issues for decision; and the claimant-specific claims, based to a large extent on inferences to be drawn from the published articles and the invoices relied upon. The claimant-specific claims are addressed in Parts V, VI, VII amd VIII of the judgment. The generic part and the claimant-specific parts are however not wholly self-contained. Some of the evidence and findings in the claimant-specific claims feed into the conclusions on the generic case, but more often it is the broader conclusions reached in relation to the generic case that are relied upon by the claimants as the basis of findings that they seek in the claimant-specific claims.

That is because the claimants’ case is to a significant extent based on inference. Firm evidence to prove incidents of UIG in their individual cases is often lacking. It is either no longer available, or it has been destroyed (whether inadvertently or otherwise) in the years since the matters complained of occurred. The claimants contend that some of the evidence has been deliberately destroyed in order to cover up the wrongdoing, and invite the drawing of adverse inferences as to what that evidence would have shown. In some cases, the first-hand evidence relating to allegations is lacking because a relevant witness has not been called. I will have to consider what inferences, if any, should be drawn from the failure to call particular witnesses.

Put very shortly, the claimants’ approach is to rely and build upon the findings of Mann J in Gulati, namely that phone hacking and other UIG were used in an extensive and habitual way across all three national MGN titles during the period 1999-2006, and that certain individuals and PIs were culpable in that regard. In 2017, MGN admitted that the findings made by Mann J apply in respect of all the newspaper desks at all three newspapers.

Since the Gulati trial, much more documentary evidence has come to light – including documents that should have been disclosed by MGN for that trial but were not disclosed – to support the findings previously made. The claimants say that the evidence now goes further, and justifies the same conclusions being reached in relation to earlier and later periods of time. They argue that in view of (1) the Gulati findings, (2) the further evidence that does exist, (3) the guilty knowledge of the legal department and the board, (4) the culpable failure of MGN to preserve or produce documentary evidence and (5) its failure to call witnesses who might have been able to confirm or refute the claimants’ cases based on suspicious publications or activities, the court should infer that all MGN’s published articles were the product of phone-hacking or other UIG, and that PI invoices evidence such wrongful activities.

MGN’s case is that there is insufficient evidence to extend the period during which phone hacking and UIG were carried on (indeed, that Mann J positively found that it did not, or was much reduced, after the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire in late 2006); and insufficient evidence to prove that the legal department and members of the board (much less the board as a whole) knew that illegal or unlawful activities were being carried on by journalists and editors, and therefore no proper inferential basis for findings going beyond the findings in Gulati. It accordingly contends that the onus of proof lies firmly on each of the claimants to prove the particular allegations that they make and argues that they have failed to discharge that onus.

As to the knowledge of the legal department and members of the board, MGN’s case is that neither knew that anything illegal (such as phone-hacking, obtaining ex-directory numbers, doing unauthorised credit searches and searches of the full electoral register, and blagging of personal data) was being done until December 2013, when there was proof of some of these matters as a result of the exchanges between MGN’s criminal solicitors, K&L Gates, and the Metropolitan Police Service (“MPS”). Mr Partington admits that he knew from 2004 (following Operation Glade) that unlawful (not illegal) activities were being conducted by journalists or staff at MGN and considers that some were justified in the public interest. Mr Vickers, a main board director with responsibility for corporate governance and communications, internal audit, HR, and regulatory and editorial legal matters, explained that he had always known about some unlawful activities and was not interested in things that were only arguably civil wrongs, but would have been interested in anything criminal, had he known about it. Ms Bailey, the CEO of Trinity Mirror plc from 2003 to 2012 does not admit that she knew anything about unlawful or illegal activities.

Further, MGN contends that its board and the board of TM plc did not as a whole know anything, because there is no suggestion that the non-executive directors (NEDs”) or the chairman were told anything. Its case is that, to the extent that matters relating to extensive and habitual VMI and UIG were concealed from the board and the legal department by others, it was done at a level lower than Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey. However, MGN does not have a positive case about who was doing the concealing at that level.

I deal in full with each claimant’s individual claim before turning to some jurisdictional issues in Part IX, the limitation defence to Ms Sanderson’s and Ms Wightman’s claims in Part X and the issue of principle relating to causation of loss that I described in [8] above in Part XI. (The limitation defence to the claims based on UIG was not advanced in the Duke of Sussex’s and Mr Turner’s cases because their claims were issued much earlier in time.)

Finally, I will address the quantum of the damages to which each claimant may be entitled, together with questions of other relief that is claimed.

As I have explained, the fact-finding in this trial does not start with a blank canvas. Before the trial due in Gulati in March 2015, MGN admitted liability to Ms Gulati and 9 other claimants, in September 2014 in relation to most of the articles complained about, and made specific admissions relating to VMI and UIG over the following months. It then published a general public apology for phone-hacking in February 2015. The admissions were, however, imprecise as to the extent of UIG, and the trial proceeded in order for the court to make findings about the extent to which phone-hacking and other unlawful activities were carried on, whether the few non-admitted articles were the product of phone-hacking, and then decide the principles for and the amount of compensation payable to each of the trial claimants in respect of both the underlying wrongs and the publication itself. (There were also admissions by MGN in relation to articles published about other claimants at the time, whose cases were not tried in 2015. I will refer to these “admitted articles” later.)

Mann J found that MGN carried on phone hacking and other unlawful activities, such as using PIs to obtain phone records and credit card information and blagging medical and other confidential information, on an extensive scale, and that this was generally done across the desks of the Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and The People. The unlawful activities were “extensive and habitual”. The word “habitual” is significant: it means that phone hacking and other unlawful information gathering had become part of the normalised way that journalists were routinely carrying out their work during that period. The identity of the claimants in that trial meant that the activities of all the principal desks of the newspapers were in issue save for the sports desk, as there was no sportsman or sportswoman whose claim was tried.

Any potential gaps between findings relating to some but not all of the newspapers and different desks were closed when, on 19 July 2017, MGN formally admitted that the generic findings in Gulati applied across all three newspapers including the sports desks of those papers, though it did not admit that any particular journalist or particular method of unlawful information gathering was covered by the findings. The admission was slightly curiously worded, in that Mann J made factual findings about VMI and other UIG and made findings about certain journalists. What I take the admission to mean is that MGN does not admit that the generic findings and all methods of UIG apply to every journalist, which is a perfectly reasonable qualification of its admission; or that each desk used every method of UIG. It does however mean that no desk at any of the three national newspapers can claim to be excluded from the generic findings.

It is important in this trial to appreciate just how far-reaching those admissions and generic findings are. I will summarise them below. My impression at various stages of this trial, when listening to some of MGN’s witnesses and hearing its Counsel cross-examine the claimants’ witnesses, was that MGN was either in a state of denial about the extent of the Gulati findings or had forgotten what they were. Several MGN witnesses asserted that they had never seen and did not know of any VMI or UIG being carried on whatsoever; and MGN strongly argued, in opening the individual claims, that there was no evidence whatsoever to support allegations of VMI in any claimant’s case.

Despite the admissions and findings in Gulati, it was MGN’s case that only one out of 148 of the Duke of Sussex’s articles and one of 38 of Ms Sanderson’s articles was the product of any unlawful activity, despite 119 of those articles having been published during the period covered by the Gulati findings. Further, none of Mr Turner’s 28 articles (which span a much broader period) are admitted to have been the product of unlawful activity.

In summary, the claimants allege against MGN that:

As in the Gulati trial, the main allegation by these claimants is voicemail interception, whether by journalists or editors at MGN or by PIs commissioned by MGN. It is accepted by MGN that voicemail interception is a criminal offence and that there could not be a public interest defence to any such activity.

The allegations of wrongdoing are, however, much broader than merely voicemail interception. The other principal allegations are unlawfully obtaining private or confidential information without consent from third parties by deception (generally referred to as “blagging” or “pretext calling”) and unlawfully obtaining information by conducting searches of databases in excess of legal authority, such as unauthorised use of the full electoral register, registers containing ex-directory telephone numbers, telephone subscriber details, vehicle registration records, financial or credit information, and the like. The information allegedly blagged or unlawfully obtained by journalists or PIs sometimes includes confidential medical details, banking and other financial information and telephone subscriber details, including call data and lists of “friends and family” favoured numbers.

There are other matters alleged by the claimants that MGN accepts would be criminal offences, including breaches of section 55(1) of the Data Protection Act 1998 (knowing or reckless disclosure of personal data without consent) (and its statutory predecessor, s.5 of the 1984 Data Protection Act), and regs. 94(3) and 115 of The Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2002 (unauthorised supply, disclosure or use of full copy of full electoral register), as amended. Section 55 also includes offences of selling or offering to sell personal data obtained in contravention of subsection (1), which includes information extracted from personal data.

The 2002 Regulations permit the supply and use of the full, unedited version of the electoral register for various purposes, including under reg.114 to credit reference agencies. Reg. 96 restricts use of copies of the full register or any information contained in it. So any PI or journalist who has obtained information derived from the full electoral register other than for a permitted purpose and uses that information commits an offence. Paying for information obtained from a credit reference agency, when unauthorised by the subject or otherwise justified by the Regulations, would therefore be a crime. However, MGN points out that illegality in relation to misuse of the full electoral roll cannot predate 31 July 2002, when the 2002 Regulations came into force. The 2001 Regulations did permit broader use and provision of the full register but were held to be unlawful in R (Robertson) v Wakefield MDC [2002] QB 1052.

The 2002 Regulations provide for sale of the full register to certain organisations, including credit reference agencies, for use when performing particular functions only: regs 112(3) and 114(3). It was noted in Experian Ltd v Information Commissioner [2023] UKFTT 0132 that there is nothing to stop a credit reference agency, such as Experian, making use of other sources of information that are open sources and selling them, as part of its business. But that is a different type of business and does not encompass doing full credit reference searches using the full electoral register among other restricted information.

In many cases the matters alleged do not give rise to any illegality but may be unlawful, as being a breach of confidence or misuse of a claimant’s private information, if the information is confidential or sufficiently private and there is no countervailing case based on freedom of expression or, more narrowly, a public interest defence. In so far as public interest may arise, it is obviously something for MGN to prove in a given case, not for the claimants to disprove.

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, reg 18(6), a request for personal data to be withdrawn from a telephone directory has no effect in relation to editions of the directory published before the request is made. That means that ex-directory telephone numbers may sometimes be legitimately available by reference to previous editions of a directory for which the subscriber did not request data withdrawal.

MGN accepts that bugging of homes or cars and tracking of cars are unlawful, unless there is a public interest defence; and that obtaining criminal records or an itemised telephone bill will similarly be unlawful, absent such a defence (which will be rare). Unauthorised access to DVLA data is in my judgment in the same category (MGN made no express concession in relation to it), though it may also give rise to an offence under the Data Protection legislation.

For the purposes of the individual claims in these proceedings, it generally makes no difference to the issue of tortious liability for misuse of private information whether the infraction relied upon is a criminal offence, e.g. voicemail interception, or only tortious, e.g. wrongful disclosure of medical details. The seriousness of the infraction is however likely to be relevant to the quantum of damages awarded.

Another aspect of this difference is that where matters alleged are liable to give rise to a criminal offence, I need to be satisfied by cogent and clear evidence (though only on a balance of probabilities) before making such a finding, especially if it involves a non-party who has not had the opportunity to provide their account of the matter. That requirement for caution also applies in relation to alleged knowledge of criminal conduct on the part of members of the board and the legal department and – to the extent that it is in dispute – on the part of the editors and editorial managers of the three newspapers.

The claimants’ case is that it was journalists and editors at each of the three newspapers who had hacked their and their associates’ mobile phones, thereby obtaining private information that in many cases led directly to publication of the information. They seek findings that a number of individuals named in the GenPoC either engaged in VMI or other UIG (including blagging), or obtained information unlawfully through PIs or other third parties, or – in the cases of those in executive positions – were aware of and authorised such activities.

As regards the activities of PIs that were commissioned by MGN, the Claimants say that these fall into five categories, namely:

The different categories comprise different PIs or freelancers who are alleged to operate in different ways (for convenience, I will refer to them all as “PIs”), though in the case of a few PIs there is overlap between categories. The second category includes a variety of different types of PI, who were apparently used by editors or journalists at MGN to provide different types of information. I will consider in detail in Part III below whether the claimants’ case is proved in relation to a number of different PIs, some of whom are central to the allegations.

Although MGN conceded liability before the trial, both in principle that each of the Gulati claimants had been the victims of VMI and that (for the most part) the articles about which they complained were the product of that VMI, there were significant issues about the extent of unlawful activity that the Judge had to decide. This was because there were claims for VMI and other UIG that did not lead directly to publication and because the likelihood of VMI in the disputed cases depended in part on the extent to which MGN was carrying it on generally.

The claimants in Gulati complained about published articles and conduct that did not result in published articles over a period starting in 1999 (in the case of Mr Yentob, who was the earliest to suffer from it) and ending in 2008 (in the case of Mr Roche) and 2010 (in the case of Mr Gascoigne). It is to be noted that MGN had admitted both these end dates by the date of the trial.

Admissions were made first by MGN in amended defences, as the Judge required them to particularise their general admission of liability, and then in further documented admissions before the trial. The cumulative effect was that MGN admitted that:

The principal findings of Mann J in his judgment that are of general significance for me were as follows:

MGN accepts that these findings bind it.

One important question arising from Gulati is whether Mann J had made a factual finding about when phone hacking at the MGN newspapers started and ceased to be “extensive and habitual”. The issue that Mann J had to decide in the light of the admissions was, rather vaguely, the “extent” to which phone hacking and allied UIG was carried on by MGN. That was an issue in the context of 8 individual claims that were tried.

At that time, there were no generic statements of case, though the particulars of claim of each of the 8 claimants did include generic aspects. Nevertheless, there was no clear issue for decision as to when in general the UIG of MGN started and ended. What fell to be decided was whether the individual claimants had proved their claims, which ranged over the period 1999 to 2011, both in relation to published articles and UIG that did not lead directly to an article. In Mr Yentob’s case there were no articles published about him.

It is clear that the Judge did not reach an overall conclusion on when phone hacking or other UIG started and when it ended. He did address and decide, in relation to individual claimants, whose claims (as in this trial) were based firmly on articles about which they complained, whether phone hacking had continued throughout the period covered by the articles, and in the case of Mr Yentob when the evidence established that he was first hacked. In most cases, the articles were within the period 1999 to 2006, though in Mr Gascoigne’s case the articles continued until 2010.

Mann J accepted the evidence of Mr Hipwell that Mr Yentob was first hacked by him in 1999; in the case of all other claimants, the evidence supported a later start date. Mann J had particular regard to the Orange platform call data, as that was some of the most compelling evidence before him. It showed a marked reduction in calls to the platform following August 2006, the month in which Mr Goodman and Mr Mulcaire were arrested. The MGN landline records from mid-2002 enabled calls to this platform to be identified. Mann J found that it was likely that the hacking of Mr Yentob’s phone continued “on a very serious scale until hacking stopped, or was largely cut back, when Mr Mulcaire was arrested in 2006”.

In relation to the claim of Mr Roche, however, where MGN admitted unlawful investigations until November 2008, Mann J found that it was likely that he was the victim of substantial phone hacking during the whole of the admitted period:

The Judge found that Lucy Taggart’s messages had been hacked up to 27 April 2007 and, in the case of Mr Gascoigne, MGN admitted voicemail interception for a period ending in September 2010 and damages were awarded to cover the whole of that period. More limited use of the Orange platform was held to have been made until 2008.

It is clear therefore that Mann J accepted the admission or evidence of VMI continuing in two particular cases up to 2008 and 2010. That is consistent with his conclusion that VMI was conducted by MGN on an extensive and habitual basis from 1999 to 2006 but not with a conclusion that VMI came to an end in 2006. Mann J did not have before him, as I have, a much larger volume of evidence showing what was happening before 1999 and after 2006. In any event, these four claimants are not bound by Mann J’s conclusion that hacking generally was largely cut back in 2006.

With the greater breadth of evidence that I have before me, it seems more likely that phone hacking may have paused for breath in 2006, in shock, perhaps, at the news of the arrests, and apprehensive as to possible immediate consequences for others. It may have stopped for a period of a few months at that time, but then resumed, with the difference that even more precautions would have been taken to avoid detection.

I will make findings as to whether before mid-1999 and after August 2006 VMI was extensive and habitual, or something less than that, based on all the evidence (which is still incomplete) that was before me at this trial.

The Claimants’ pleaded case is, simply, that VMI, blagging and other UIG of private information through PIs was extensive and habitual at all three newspapers from 1991 to 1999 just as much as it was between 1999 and 2006. In that regard, the Claimants indicate that they will rely on: (1) the large number of victims or potential victims, as shown principally by the lists of names in Palm Pilots owned by Mr Evans, Mr Buckley, Mr Scott, Mr O’Hanlon, Mr Harwood and Mr Thomas, as well as the number of successful claimants in the MNHL to date; (2) the large number of calls made to the Orange platform between 2000 and 2007; (3) the volume of instructions and/or payments to PIs or other similar agents acting on behalf of MGN to obtain personal information; (4) the large number of journalists and editors involved in VMI; (5) the volume of articles published between 1991 and 1998 as complained of in claims in this litigation; and (6) the findings in Gulati.

It is unclear how (1), (2) and (4) in that list can assist substantively to prove the case, and the brunt of the evidential case is (3), PI payment records, supported by any published articles between 1991 and 1999 as are in evidence in this trial, and any inferences capable of being drawn from the findings in Gulati. The claimants’ case is that £9.7 million was spent on the PIs identified in the GenPoC in the period 1996 to 2011.

In the Re-Re-Amended Generic Defence (“GenD”), MGN makes admissions about payments to some PIs and advances a positive case in relation to others, as follows:

No clarity has been brought during the trial to what is meant by “a limited proportion of the instructions” to the identified PIs, save that MGN’s case was that it should be inferred that a good number of the instructions to each of the PIs is likely to be have been innocuous and/or lawful requests for publicly available information. MGN pointed out that in the 1990s in particular, lawful information about people was not readily available on the internet in the way that it was by the early years of the 2000s and so physical searches often had to be made. By 2001, all MGN journalists had access to a subscription-based electronic database called “Cameo”, which contained published electoral roll and telephone details, and Companies House online. It appears that these facilities were under consideration by MGN by February 1999 (email John Honeywell to Pat Pilton 9.2.99: see [107] below), but unclear when before May 2001 they were acquired.

After Cameo and similar internet-based search facilities such as Tracesmart were available within MGN, there was no obvious reason for journalists to use PIs for lawful searches. Indeed, by emails sent by John Honeywell, the deputy managing editor of TM plc to editors at each of the three national newspapers on 17 May 2001, the editors were exhorted to ensure that reporters used the online facilities wherever possible, in order to ease costs. I find that it is likely that these instructions were given to journalists and were, largely, followed. Jane Kerr gave evidence – which is completely understandable – that if she could not find on Cameo an address that she was seeking, she would then use a PI. Anthony Harwood gave evidence that he still used PIs, especially when “on the road”, as it was more convenient, and Cameo could be slow and often crashed. He therefore used the Scotts (Commercial & Legal – hereafter “C&L”)) instead.

I accept this evidence in part only. Smartphones did not exist in the 1990s and even by 2010 could not speedily perform the same functions that they do today. It is understandable that “on the road” Cameo would not serve. If Cameo had crashed then clearly another means lawfully to obtain the information would be needed. However, neither Mr Harwood nor any other journalist would routinely have used C&L in the 2000s to obtain publicly available information, certainly not after pressure was applied to curtail such unnecessary cost. If PIs such as C&L were being routinely used by journalists, as they clearly were in view of the extraordinary number of invoices and payment records, it was for the most part because the information sought was not publicly available, or included material that was not publicly available.

I accept that, with most of the PIs, a proportion of requested searches will have related to lawfully available information. That proportion would have been somewhat higher in the 1990s than after that decade. It was nevertheless clear from the undisputed evidence of Mr Whittamore that, even during the period 1995 to 1999, the majority of the instructions he received from MGN were for unlawful searches. Mr Whittamore disputed that only a “limited proportion” was unlawful work. I accept his evidence, which is likely to represent the true position in relation also to other PIs that MGN admits (or I find) were instructed to obtain private information unlawfully. In relation to any given instruction, therefore – even in the 1990s – the likelihood is that it related to unlawful searches.

As will be fully explained in Part III of this judgment and the PI Schedule, my conclusion about Christine Hart/Warner, Rachel Barry, Steve Whittamore/JJ Services, Jonathan Stafford, Severnside (only for the period of 1995 to 1999 and where the relevant operative was Taff Jones), Media Investigations, Law & Commercial and Southern Investigations, in relation to which MGN makes admissions about use in the pre-Gulati period, is that the significant majority of the instructions given to them by journalists on behalf of MGN (or in some cases all such instructions) are likely to have been to provide information or services that were unlawful. Subject to any evidence contained in or relating to any particular instruction or invoice to the contrary, I therefore conclude that the payments admitted by MGN are likely to have been in connection with UIG.

As explained in Part III, I find that the following PIs were instructed by MGN journalists or editors during the period 1995-1999 and that these instructions were predominantly to carry out unlawful information gathering: Southern Investigations (and aliases) (from 1995); Jonathan Stafford (from 1995); Severnside (Taff Jones) (from 1995); Steve Whittamore (from 1995); Rachel Barry (from 1996); Warner (Chrstine Hart) (from 1995); and John Ross (from 1997).

The evidence that any phone hacking was being carried out by PIs, as opposed to journalists and editors, was extremely limited. Further, the fact that PIs were being used from 1995 to blag and otherwise obtain information unlawfully does not mean that, from that time, VMI was being carried out, either at all or extensively. UIG did not take place solely to feed VMI.

The evidence that I heard was the following.

Mr Derek Haslam, who operated as an undercover surveillance officer, was instructed to watch Jonathan Rees (the joint owner and operator of Southern Investigations, with Sid Fillery) with regard to activities with corrupt police officers and an investigation into the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan. Mr Haslam said that Rees boasted of obtaining information by phone tapping and computer and phone hacking, and admitted to him that he had supplied phone hacked information to MGN. He said that Rees had employed BT engineers to tap landlines. However, it is clear from Mr Haslam’s evidence that the majority of Rees’s information was obtained by other illegal means.

Mr Haslam said that Rees frequently met with journalists and corrupt police officers in pubs, bragged about working for the Mirror and the Sunday Mirror, and that he had been introduced by Rees to Gary Jones of the Mirror and Doug Kempster of the Sunday Mirror. He said that both were clearly good customers of Rees and that he spoke about them often, and in particular boasted about having supplied information about Prince Michael of Kent’s bank account, which was unlawfully obtained.

In cross examination, Mr Haslam was able to recall in which pubs meetings with Rees and Fillery would take place, and said that Jones and Kempster would come on occasions. On occasions there was a bank manager called Rob there, as well as policemen, and he was known as “Rob the Bank”. He said that Jones and Kempster knew that unlawful things were being done by Rees.

I accept in broad terms what Mr Haslam said. My impression of him as a witness was that, in advanced years, his memory of detail was not very strong, but he was clear and compelling about the basic story that he told and did have a recollection of some of the pub meetings that took place. In particular, he was able to provide detail about the involvement of Messrs Jones and Kempster and their likely knowledge of what Mr Rees was doing.

Mr Graham Johnson was a witness about whom I shall have to say much more later. For present purposes, his evidence was that Mr Gavin Burrows (proprietor of IIG Europe and IIG Associates) was employed by MGN to tap phones and bug people, as well as carry out voicemail interception. There is one invoice from Mr Burrows dated 21 February 2003, which refers to “Itemisation and voicebox information Gallagher”, which is suggestive of VMI, but otherwise there is no supportive evidence. In any event, Mr Burrows is only suggested to have been operational during the Gulati period, not before it.

Mr Johnson also said that Scott Tillen and Spencer Dove (freelance photographers, proprietors of Unique Pictures and Lenslife respectively), whom he had met in 2001, told him then that they carried out illegal bugging and voicemail interception themselves, and that that was how they found targets to photograph. He says that Mr Buckley told him that Mark Thomas paid them in cash out of his “slush fund”. In Mr Johnson’s book “Hack”, he gives a different account, which was that he suspected that Tillen and Dove were constantly phone hacking, to get photo opportunities, and that they talked to him on that occasion in 2001 about bugging the hotel room of Denise Welch. In his witness statement to the Metropolitan Police Service (“MPS”), Mr Johnson says that he first heard of phone hacking going on around 1999 or 2000, and that it was not part of the Sunday Mirror culture between 1997 and 2001, so far as he was aware. (In cross-examination, he suggested the reason for this was that he was usually out of the office, as he was an investigative journalist.)

In my judgment, subject to two exceptions, there is no evidence that PIs personally (or by a person used by them for the purpose) hacked phones on MGN’s instructions in the period 1991-1999, or at any time, though it is possible that it happened. Mr Burrows’ company’s website advertised that service and Mr Johnson said that he provided it to MGN. Mr Haslam said that Mr Rees bragged of having done it and supplied the product to MGN. There is no reason to think that “Fleet Street” journalists had a monopoly on the art of listening in to other people’s conversations or messages, and it is likely that tapping of phone lines or bugging occurred on occasions, as well as VMI. But the question is whether, before 1999, VMI or other UIG was used “extensively and habitually” by MGN, and if not to what extent either was used.

The Claimants’ case in this regard is built upon relevant findings of Mann J about extensive and habitual use by 1999, the evidence of a few witnesses who were called at this trial (or whose written evidence was not challenged by MGN), certain documentary evidence and – above all – inferences that the court was invited to draw from categories of documents, including MGN contribution requests (“CRs”) from January 1996 and invoices from suppliers dating from April 1998. Microfiche records of invoices pre-dating April 1998 no longer exist, but there are records of payments made on the previous payment recording system, referred to in the trial as the “SAFS” database. It is only the invoices dating from 1998 that contain more than minimal description of the nature of the work that the PI was instructed to do and who instructed them, though in many cases the nature of the work is disguised.

The witness evidence of VMI being carried on before 1999 is limited. Mr Hipwell, who gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry in Gulati, was employed at the Mirror from April 1998 to February 2000, when he was sacked following the City Slickers scandal. He said that he did not believe phone hacking had started by the time he arrived but that it had started in earnest on the showbiz desk by mid-1999, where it was “rife” and “endemic” from that time. He identified 8 journalists, who were only named in a confidential schedule to his Gulati witness statement, because criminal trials were still pending at the time. These were Richard Wallace, then the showbiz editor, Kevin O’Sullivan, then the deputy showbiz editor, Matthew Wright, then a showbiz columnist, Polly Graham and James Scott, who wrote the showbusiness column with Mr Wright, Nicola Methven, the TV editor, and Chris Hughes and Thomas Quinn, other journalists who worked on the showbiz desk during Mr Hipwell’s time at the Mirror. Mr Hipwell said that it was inconceivable that any of them would have been unaware that hacking was a part of daily life on that desk. They did not attempt to hide their hacking from each other or their superiors at the newspaper. He also said that it was inconceivable that Mr Morgan, the editor, did not know that he was publishing stories that had come about as a result of phone hacking.

Mr Seymour, group political editor of the Daily Mirror at the time, said that he had never seen phone hacking being done, but he was not positioned near the showbiz team, and his focus was Westminster. Mr Harwood, who at the time was working on the news desk, and became deputy news editor at the Mirror in 1998, said that he did not see anyone phone hacking, except possibly on one occasion when he saw a journalist holding two phones to his ears and was unsure what he was doing. Mr Alastair Campbell said that he did not see any phone hacking when he worked at the Mirror and the Sunday Mirror, which he left in 1994. Mr Evans explained that, although he did not see any phone hacking going on before he was inducted into the “dark arts” by Mr Buckley in 2003, even at that time considerable care was taken to avoid detection, both within the newspaper offices and from outside.

Since, as has been found, phone hacking was extensive and habitual from at least 1999, Mr Evans’ evidence about concealment must be correct, even if the showbiz desk were rather more open and brazen about what they were doing. However, it is admitted that the finding of Mann J applied across all the desks of all three newspapers during the Gulati period. Mr Evans said it what was happening was “an open secret” when he left at the end of 2004 – so even then it was not being done completely openly; and it is an obvious inference (and consistent with the terms of MGN’s 2017 admission) that it was not being done by all journalists on all desks.

Mr Paul Vickers, formerly the group legal director of MGN and then TM plc, accepted in cross-examination that he was aware from as early as 1992 that practices that were “unlawful” were “routine” in the newsroom, but that was not an admission about phone hacking (which is illegal). What I find that Mr Vickers meant was that actions that might be breaches of confidence or (now) misuses of private information were done, which might or might not have been able to be justified on the basis of a public interest defence.

Mr Whittamore’s evidence similarly accepts that from as early as 1995 he was doing occasional pieces of work for MGN: he wrote to the Sunday Mirror and The People in March 1997, touting for business and indicating the various searches and blags that he offered, some of which were clearly unlawful. He described his work as principally being a blagging service. Most of what he did was unlawful, but this was not necessarily in connection with or for the purpose of VMI, as opposed to blagging or obtaining private information for other purposes.

The documentary evidence relating to Mr Whittamore’s work comprises his company’s books of records, and over a thousand pages of JJ Services invoices and 40 CRs, as well as some SAFS records, which show that there were only a few commissions from MGN before 1997, after which the work increased very considerably from that year. Mr Whittamore had lists of contacts at MGN, which included those identified in the Gulati judgment as being principally involved in phone hacking, as well as Mr Harwood and many others. Mr Whittamore said (and his evidence was accepted by MGN to be honest) that he was in no doubt at all that journalists who used his services on a regular basis knew that the information they sought was obtained by unlawful means, such as blagging, and that he was a practitioner of the “dark arts”.

Mr Whittamore’s business was raided by the Office of the Information Commissioner in March 2003 and he was prosecuted. He was convicted in April 2005 of breaches of s.55 of the Data Protection Act 1998.

Ms Melanie Cantor, a publicist, former friend of Mr Morgan (the editor of the Mirror from 1996 to 2004) and the agent of Ulrika Jonsson and others, gave evidence that when stories broke about Ms Jonsson’s life from 1996 it was Mr Morgan who was able to contact her remarkably quickly and was already aware of private information that only she and Ms Jonsson knew about. She was shown invoices in 2020 relating to her and some of her clients and discovered that she had herself been a victim of voicemail interception. In her claim against MGN, she obtained disclosure of incriminating call data (400 calls, many of which were made by Ms Weaver, Mr Scott, Mr Buckley and Mr Harpin, among others) and PI invoices naming her and her associates. One Southern Investigations invoice showed that they had obtained her phone bill. Her name and contact details were in Mr Scott’s and Mr Buckley’s Palm Pilots. Ms Cantor’s evidence was not challenged by MGN.

One story about Ms Jonsson that the Daily Mirror published was about her relationship with Sven-Goran Eriksson. This was first revealed by the paper’s 3am column. Mr Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, a publisher for the Guardian before he became Prime Minister Blair’s Director of Strategic Communications, gave evidence that he went out for a meal with Mr Morgan during the Labour Party Conference in September 2002 and asked him how he had got the story about the Jonsson/Eriksson affair:

In December 1998, the Daily Mirror published an article accusing Peter Mandelson, then a government minister, of misleading his mortgagee, Britannia Building Society, about the state of his finances. This article was part of a series of stings carried out by Gary Jones, Clinton Manning and Oonagh Blackman, journalists at the Mirror, directed at people with important public roles. They used Mr Rees at Southern Investigations to procure their confidential financial and other information. An article was published in October 1998 revealing the mortgage details of the Governor and members of the credit committee of the Bank of England. The article about Peter Mandelson was published on Christmas Eve 1998. In January 1999, an article was published alleging that Prince Michael of Kent was in serious financial difficulties. In the same month, Mr Jones obtained through Southern Investigations similar confidential information about Mr Alastair Campbell and his wife, Fiona Miller, though nothing that justified adverse publicity was found in their case.

I address the detail of some of these events in Part IV of this judgment and reach conclusions about them. For present purposes, it is sufficient to record that these were occasions on which highly confidential financial information was obtained unlawfully, probably principally by blagging banks and lenders for information. There were various documents in the trial bundles relating to these searches, the product of them, and nearly 100 invoices between May 1998 and March 1999 submitted by Mr Rees, mostly to Mr Jones and some to Mr Mark Thomas. The documents indicate that Mr Rees sub-contracted some or all of his credit searches and blagging. These events marry with the evidence of Mr Haslam about what Mr Rees was doing and the contacts that he had that he boasted enabled him to obtain financial information about anyone, and Prince Michael specifically. Although this is not evidence of VMI as such, it is evidence that unlawful activities that were found in Gulati to have been carried on hand-in-glove with VMI, were well established at the Daily Mirror by the end of 1998.

Mr Johnson gave evidence about an occasion in 1998 when he was writing a story about Ms Anne Diamond and her husband. He was asked by the Sunday Mirror’s in-house lawyer, Paul Mottram, who was “legalling” the story, how he knew the content. He said that he told Mr Mottram that he had “pulled” the phone bills of the two people concerned, which showed that they had been in contact, and showed him the phone bills, which had been blagged by Jonathan Stafford, and a handwritten list of telephone numbers that had been faxed to the news desk. This account, first given by Mr Johnson in a witness statement in 2017, is supported by an invoice of Mr Stafford, which was only disclosed by MGN in 2019 and which Mr Johnson did not have available until then. I accept the truthfulness of his account. The events took place in October 1998.

A year previously, Rachel Barry was convicted of 12 offences under the Data Protection Act 1984 and of supplying protected information to newspapers, including The People. She appears in Mr Buckley’s Palm Pilot as “Rachel Blag”, thereby identifying the nature of the specialist services she offered. She was commissioned from 1996 until 2006, notwithstanding her conviction in 1997, by various journalists at each of the three newspapers, including Eugene Duffy, John Honeywell, Mark Thomas, Richard Wallace, Gary Jones, Tanith Carey (the wife of Mr Harwood), Tina Weaver to a considerable extent in early years, Gerard Couzens and Mark Thomas.

Documentary evidence from the pre-1999 period is limited. There are two invoices from Ms Hart to the Sunday Mirror news desk for the weeks ending 21 and 29 June 1998 relating to the blagging of information about Fiona Wightman’s medical condition. These invoices are admitted by MGN to be connected with UIG.

There are schedules to invoices from Mr Stafford to the Sunday Mirror in May 1998, one of which records 40 different instructions in April 1998 from 6 Sunday Mirror journalists (principally Matthew Bell) to obtain ex-directory phone numbers, telephone bills and lists of numbers and addresses; another records 9 instructions in April 1998 from Mr Dennis Rice, Mr Nick Pisa, Mr O’Hanlon and Ms Kathy Moran for similar services; and a schedule to an invoice from Mr Stafford dated 8 July 1998 showing 31 instructions from 7 Sunday Mirror journalists for subscriber details, ex-directory numbers, telephone bills and even meter readings. These are clearly searches connected with VMI or attempted VMI. One of these instructions is to obtain an ex-directory telephone number for Paul Whitehouse, then the husband of Fiona Wightman, at the same time as Ms Hart was trying to blag medical information about her. Another invoice schedule records 31 instructions in October 2018 of a similar kind.

SAFS records for J Stafford show that from February 1996 to the end of 1998 there were well over 100 different invoices (each of which had numerous individual instructions) submitted by him and paid by MGN. These include brief descriptions such as “Tele Searches” “Traces” “Tele-itemised Charges” “Tele Inqs” and many invoices labelled “Investigation” with the name of the subject of the investigation given. Many are described only as “Professional Services” and some “Special investigations”. The majority of these instructions are attributed as costs to the Sunday Mirror (cost centre 41BA) and most of the rest to the Mirror (cost centre 41AA).

Given the conclusion that I have already indicated about the nature of Jonathan Stafford’s work, it can be concluded that, from 1995, Mr Stafford was conducting UIG on behalf of MGN and, since much of this relates to telephone accounts and numbers, some of it was likely to have been connected with VMI carried on by some MGN journalists.

SAFS payment records show that Severnside Company Services, in the person of its employee or agent, Taff Jones, was used by all three newspapers to a significant extent from 1995 onwards. Many of the invoices relate to perfectly innocuous looking company searches. But from the outset there are references on payment records and invoices from 1998 to a “Special Investigation”, or just “Specials”. Ms Gwen Richardson, who made a witness statement but who was not called by MGN to give evidence orally, stated that the term “Special”, which she also used, was merely an indication that she had had to spend more time on a particular search, or had to do it out of hours, and therefore it was charged at a higher, special rate.

I have no difficulty in rejecting that explanation, which is untrue, even though some of the illicit searches that she conducted (see Part III of the judgment) may have attracted a higher charge. Mr Hawkes, a PI called by MGN to give evidence, said in cross-examination that the word “special” was what newspapers wanted put on invoices. In an email to Mr Buckley and Mr Saville dated 28 October 2005 titled “Abi and Becks”, Gerard Couzens said:

The term “Special” was used as a means of disguising the illicit nature of the instruction, and was used by a number of PIs, including Mr Taff Jones, Mr Hawkes, Ms Richardson, Mr Frank Thorne, and others. In many instances, the amounts charged belie the suggestion that these were especially expensive inquiries to pursue. Other PIs routinely used terms such as “Confidential Inquiries” or “urgent enquiries”. Mr Honeywell referred to these illicit searches as being “of a specialist nature”. In his invoices, Mr Taff Jones sometimes used the tag “Special Investigation Plus”, which may have been a sub-category of “Specials”, but it is not clear what the “Plus” signified.

In his book, The Insider, Mr Morgan records the story of Benjamin Pell contacting him on 13 January 1998 offering bank statements and other documents belonging to Elton John stolen from bins outside the office of his manager. MGN bought the unlawfully acquired material and published a story obtained from it. Mr Morgan makes very clear that “Benji the Binman” was well-known in Fleet Street at that time and that he was well aware of the “seriously unethical” way in which the documents were acquired. The documents are of course stolen by Mr Pell, so they are illegally acquired, not just unethically. Unsurprisingly, Mr Pell offered another batch of stolen documents on 26 January 1998 and MGN bought those too.

The extent to which VMI and UIG was being carried on is likely to be greater than the documentary evidence shows. This is because there is only limited documentary evidence from before 1998. The documents that there are nevertheless show the type, range and volume of work being carried out by certain PIs before 1999, variously from 1995, 1996 or 1997. The claimants suggested that the absence of earlier documents was both surprising and indicative of a systematic attempt to destroy evidence. I find that unsurprising, given the length of time and significant changes in systems that occurred between 1998 and 2011, when MGN was directed by the Leveson Inquiry to ensure that it retained all documents that it had. I am not persuaded that MGN deliberately destroyed documents from the 1991 to 1998 period. But the understandable absence of documents nevertheless probably hides the extent to which serious UIG was going on in 1995, 1996 and 1997.

One email that survives from early 1999 is of particular significance. It was sent by Mr Honeywell to Pat Pilton, a managing editor of The People, on 9 February 1999:

The email shows that UIG was well-established and its methods were well-understood at MGN by early 1999, and to the knowledge of senior editorial management. In emails to editors two years later, urging the use of Cameo and Companies House online, Mr Honeywell admitted that he realised that some of the “searches” (quotation marks used by Mr Honeywell) that were causing each newspaper significantly to exceed its budget, were “of a specialist nature”. It is clear therefore that Mr Honeywell understood that instructions that were being characterised as searches were not lawful searches but were UIG. I will return in Part IV to the significance of this knowledge at senior editorial management level.

The conclusion that I reach, based on all the evidence that I have reviewed above and the impression given by witnesses from whom I heard and those whose witness statements I read, is that some VMI was being conducted from 1996, but probably only by a relatively few journalists at each newspaper in that year. I consider that it was used to a greater extent at the Sunday Mirror in the years 1996 and 1997 and to a lesser (but some) extent at The People and the Mirror in those years. I find that the use of UIG other than VMI was widespread in all three newspapers from 1996, and that VMI was widespread and habitual at all three from 1998. The fact that certain journalists were not aware of it until later does not meant that it was not happening. Before those years, limited UIG and VMI was carried on in each of the three newspapers, but to nothing like an extent that could be described as “widespread and habitual”.

As with the period 1991-1999, the claimants simply plead that VMI and UIG in different forms, conducted by journalists and/or by PIs and other third parties, was widespread and habitual at each of the three newspapers from 1 January 2007 to 31 December 2011, just as much as it was held to be from 1999 to 2006.

In the GenD, there are few relevant admissions about the period after 2006. In para 15.2.3, MGN denies that any desk at any newspaper made extensive or habitual use of PIs save that the Sunday Mirror news desk “made ‘extensive’ use of one third party, BDI UK Consultancy Ltd, which it is not admitted were instructed to unlawfully obtain private information, until 2010.” There is therefore no positive case advanced by MGN as to what BDI was instructed by the Sunday Mirror news desk to do, but otherwise the specific allegations are denied in relation to the period after 2006 (and, by inference, after August 2006). MGN admits that all three newspapers continued to instruct Severnside until 2010, but it denies that any such instruction was to conduct unlawful activities. There are limited admissions that certain identified PIs, e.g. Rob Palmer and Newsreel Ltd, were instructed by MGN journalists beyond 2006, and in a few cases up to 2011, but denials that these were for unlawful activities.

The findings in Gulati do lend some support to the allegations in relation to the later period: see [55] above. Ms Taggart’s and Mr Roach’s claims disclose VMI up to and including 2008 and Mr Gascoigne’s claim up to and including 2010. I have already explained that Mann J’s identification of the period 1999-2006 during which VMI was extensive and habitual did not include a decision that in general it was not extensive or habitual outside that period. The conclusion that VMI significantly tailed off in 2006 was based only on the Orange platform data. There has been very substantial further disclosure of documents since the Gulati trial, including many documents that should have been but were not disclosed by MGN for that trial. These present a fuller picture of the 2006-2011 period, though still only a partial picture of what was happening in those years.

In this trial, 23 articles (out of 100 in total) in issue were published after 2006. The bylines on many of those articles are journalists who are still employed by MGN, such as Dean Rousewell (now news editor of the Mirror), Stephen White, Nicola Methven and Philip Cardy. Others are still active in the press or media industry. Further, senior editors who were employed by MGN or a group company and worked on one of the three titles during the period 2007-2011 are still employed by Reach plc (MGN’s parent company) today, namely Lloyd Embley and Gary Jones. MGN denies (and does not merely not admit) that phone hacking and UIG was extensive and habitual after 2006 and denies that any of the 23 articles was the product of VMI or UIG.

One might therefore have expected to hear evidence called by MGN explaining how, after the arrests of Mulcaire and Goodman, VMI and associated UIG died away and was no longer used (or used extensively) by MGN journalists, and that instructions given to certain PIs after 2006, especially BDI, were all for lawful work. But no such evidence was called. Given that MGN has explicitly denied VMI and UIG, and not merely “not admitted” it and put the claimants to proof, it cannot entirely hide behind the fact that the allegations of VMI are a matter for the claimants to prove. Nicola Methven, the TV editor of the Daily Mirror and byline on one Michael Turner article, made a witness statement and was scheduled to give evidence on 19 June 2023, but without explanation she was not called. One other journalist, Dennis Rice – who left MGN’s employment in 1999 – made a witness statement but then refused to attend court or give evidence remotely on grounds of ill health. Ms Gwen Richardson of Searchline, who was still operating between 2005 and 2011, was not called to give evidence. The only witness called by MGN who could speak to the period 2007-2011 was Anthony Harwood. Until 2008, he was news editor and then became head of news at the Mirror, from which position he was made redundant in 2010.

After the Mirror, Mr Harwood took up a position at the Daily Mail and then became a freelancer in 2015. He therefore has considerable experience of tabloid journalism and presented in the witness box as a calm, thoughtful and urbane man. Mr Harwood had been closely involved in the preparation for the trial. From 2021, he provided “journalistic support to MGN’s legal department in respect of this managed litigation”. He admitted in cross-examination (but did not state in his witness statement) that he had been paid on behalf of MGN a substantial salary for the period of 18 months leading up to the start of the trial, to assist MGN’s solicitors, RPC, to prepare MGN’s defence of these claims. He was therefore by no means an independent witness.

Mr Harwood’s evidence was surprising. In short, he had seen and heard nothing. During the period 1998-2005, throughout which VMI and UIG was extensive and habitual on all desks in the Daily Mirror, Mr Harwood was first deputy news editor and then (after two years as US editor based in New York City) head of news. He said that he saw and heard not a single occasion on which voicemail interception was used, or a story published that was the product of UIG. And that was so even though, as a news editor, he was responsible for authorising contributor payments for news stories (he said he was generally too busy to check most of them).

At para 11 of his witness statement he says:

Given the findings in Gulati, and the fact that, as Mr Green KC emphasised at the start of his closing submissions, in the light of the “excoriating” judgment of Mann J MGN had by June 2023 paid out about £105 million in compensation and costs to about 600 claimants in the MNHL, it is surprising that Mr Harwood should take offence, rather than express regret for what was done for years in the department (among others) in which he held senior editorial positions; unless of course the focus of his evidence is not what was happening at MGN but only whether he personally had hacked voicemails.

There was no direct allegation of phone hacking against Mr Harwood in the GenPoC or in the Duke of Sussex’s particulars of claim. The only reference to Mr Harwood in the GenPoC is at para 8.1(d), where the large number of individuals whose names appear in Palm Pilots belonging to Mr Harwood, and a number of admitted or proven phone hackers, is relied upon as evidence of the large number of victims of phone hacking. In the Duke of Sussex’s claim, Mr Harwood is a joint byline with Graham Brough on one of the articles in issue, which is alleged to be the product of VMI. To be fair to Mr Harwood, the GenPoC can be said to be an indirect allegation of involvement in phone hacking, though an allegation of criminal conduct should never have been pleaded in that indirect way by Counsel. I do therefore accept that Mr Harwood was entitled to give evidence in his defence, as well as explain how he and Mr Brough wrote the article about the Duke of Sussex.

However, from MGN’s perspective rather than his own, Mr Harwood is the only journalist or editorial witness working at MGN at the relevant time that MGN has called to give evidence at trial in answer to the generic case against it. The only other journalist from its UK offices called by MGN in the whole of the trial was Jane Kerr, whose attendance in the end had to be secured by the issue of a witness summons. Ms Kerr was called to give evidence in response to the Duke of Sussex’s claim. She was the royal correspondent for the Mirror from 1997 to 2005 and then worked on the Mirror news desk from 2007 to 2009 and as a features editor for the Sunday Mirror from 2009 to 2010. She was therefore well-placed to give evidence as to whether there was voicemail interception or other UIG being carried on between 2006 and 2011 at either the Mirror or the Sunday Mirror but her witness statement did not address those matters, save in so far as they impinged on the work that she personally had done.

The allegations in the GenPoC about extensive and habitual use of voicemail interception and UIG before 1999 and after 2006 and MGN’s specific denials in that regard are only addressed in a very limited way by Mr Harwood, based on his own lack of knowledge of any such matters. Mr Harwood gave evidence about how he did his job, about the reason why there were so many names and telephone numbers of famous people in his Palm Pilot, and then states:

Mr Harwood then commented on some names of PIs who were on a list given to him by RPC and which he says he recognises. Some indeed were PIs who appear to have been instructed by Mr Harwood because there are payment records that bear his name as the commissioning journalist. However, Mr Harwood said that he did not remember using them, or giving instructions to any of the picture agencies or freelance photographers on the list. In his witness statement, Mr Harwood then provided a paragraph or two, rarely more, on each of the other names on the list of PIs who were entered on his Palm Pilot (and with whom it may therefore be inferred that he had or thought he might have some business contact), and some others who were not. Some of these PIs in his Palm Pilot, such as Gerard Couzens, Jonathan Stafford, the Scotts (C&L), Severnside, Andy Kyle and Mike Behr, are central to some of the allegations that the claimants make. In relation to each name, Mr Harwood said that he had “no reason to think that they were doing anything unlawful”, or similar words, and that neither did he instruct them to undertake any unlawful activities (or, in Mr Hanks’s and Mr Stafford’s cases, instruct them at all).

One of the names on which Mr Harwood did not comment was TDI/ELI, which had been found by Mann J to be a PI performing UIG for MGN newspapers. MGN spent over £2 million on TDI/ELI alone. In a 5-year aggregate period during which Mr Harwood was deputy news editor and then news editor, either side of his stint in New York City, it was put to him that there were about 250 invoices from TDI/ELI for commissions from news desk reporters or the news desk. (Although Mr Harwood was willing for his authorisation data in this regard to be provided, MGN did not produce it.) Mr Harwood’s answer was that reporters could themselves commission searches and that UIG was not being done on the Mirror news desk. But invoices that were submitted by reporters would have had to be approved by Mr Harwood at those times. In my judgment, Mr Harwood was simply avoiding dealing with the question of news desk use of TDI/ELI, which had been found to be providing mainly UIG services. I find that they probably were used to a significant extent, and that Mr Harwood would have approved many of their invoices, as well as the invoices of other PIs.

In relation to Mr Stafford, Mr Harwood remembered him attending MGN’s offices. He said that on one occasion he was brought up to the news desk and Mr Harwood thought he was there to help with a story, but does not remember knowing anything about what he did. I did not consider that Mr Harwood was being wholly truthful about this. The payment records relating to Mr Stafford and his company demonstrate that from 1995 until 2011 he submitted monthly invoices to each of the three national newspapers for sums usually in the low thousands of pounds. The only surviving schedules to the invoices he sent (before they were not saved, as instructed by Ms Flood) indicate between about 15 and 30 separate commissions in each monthly schedule (for each newspaper). In other words, Mr Stafford was being used on a daily basis by MGN journalists and it is clear that he was one of a few PIs who must have worked closely and regularly with editors and journalists. He was so much part of the information gathering team that he came into MGN’s offices. There are several references in emails particularly at the Sunday Mirror to getting “Staffy” onto a matter where the journalist or editor had not been able to obtain something.

As part of his editorial responsibilities, Mr Harwood signed off payments for work that Mr Stafford had done. Mr Harwood accepted that it was part of MGN’s policy that payments to outsiders should comply with its strict procurement policies, which included no unlawful activities. He asserted in cross-examination that he did not remember Newsreel at all. Despite there being 43 phone calls to or from Mr Stafford recorded on Mr Harwood’s extension between 2005 and 2010, he did not recall ever speaking to Mr Harwood, and said that having consulted his diaries he believes he was away from work when 35 of those calls were made, and at other times he shared his desk with the night news editor.

In relation to C&L, Mr Harwood said that he used them to obtain addresses or telephone numbers from a digital version of the publicly available register, so that a reporter could call or doorstep the subject of the search.

It became clear when Mr Harwood was cross-examined that his evidence in his witness statement was incomplete and not a fair presentation of what he knew. It was also clear that he was not willing to admit or accept the findings in Gulati or MGN’s 2017 admission and did not accept that phone hacking went on across all newspaper desks. His position was therefore denial because, as he claimed, he did not see any of it and so did not believe it was happening. When Mr Hanna, the deputy editor of the Mirror from 2004 to 2010, told Mr Harwood and others in 2006, as directed by the CEO Sly Bailey, that he did not want any use of PIs to do unlawful searches, Mr Harwood assumed that it did not apply to the news desk, as the desk did not use PIs to give it a journalistic edge – even though he accepted there was huge pressure on journalists to get exclusives. He felt that the striking story lines that the Daily Mirror published were obtained from the door steps.

In my judgment, Mr Harwood, through working for MGN’s legal team for 18 months, has been infected with a spirit of fighting off all the allegations. He is in denial about what has already been found and admitted, as it appeared that MGN was too, in the way that it presented its case. I accept Mr Harwood’s evidence to the extent that he did not personally hack a phone or specifically instruct that to be done, but his position that there was no UIG or VMI going on in the news room at the Daily Mirror is untenable, given the findings and admissions that have been made, and in view of his acceptance that it was his role to know what was going on on the newsroom floor. He was prepared to accept that on occasions he would commission a search for an ex-directory telephone number and that he used the Teviots (lawfully) and C&L and Severnside for searches of open registers.

I find that he knew about the UIG that was happening but chose not to involve himself in it. To some extent this is because, as a committed and able journalist, he would not himself have considered descending to that level. However, no one with their eyes open could have failed to see that unlawful methods of information gathering, including voicemail interception and blagging, were being used, enabling the MGN titles including the Mirror to have an edge in publishing breaking stories, and to keep up with other newspapers, in particular the News of the World, that were using such techniques. Mr Harwood said, not very convincingly, that he did not know what phone hacking looked like, and therefore did not see it – but it was not necessary to see it being done for a person in his position to realise that it was being done, or at least that the millions of pounds being spent on PIs that he and others were authorising were not just searches in publicly available registers and the occasional ex-directory phone number. As he accepted, a means of checking a story in 30-45 minutes would be very useful to a journalist; but he denied any knowledge of use of PIs such as TDI/ELI to obtain information in that way.

When shown a number of invoices of Mr Stafford from 2000 (including one addressed to Mr Eugene Duffy, who Mr Harwood said was a good friend on the news desk, which also included an ex-directory search commissioned by Jane Kerr) and from JJ Services (Mr Whittamore) in 1999, Mr Harwood accepted, realistically, that the services described in them were plainly unlawful, and that reporters were using Mr Whittamore to obtain private information. He was then shown invoices from Mr Whittamore which included commissions from his own wife, Ms Carey, for mobile phone conversions, ex-directory numbers and blags. He appeared visibly shocked but accepted that a proportion of this work was unlawful.

In short, Mr Harwood turned a blind eye to a lot of unlawful activity that was happening on the news desk.

As I will demonstrate when addressing the Duke of Sussex’s claim, in case of the one article that bears Mr Harwood’s name as a joint byline, Mr Harwood must have been aware that blagging or some other form of UIG was being used by his colleagues in order to confirm the identity of Chelsy Davy.

What MGN has done in terms of addressing the claimants’ generic case is to call two journalists as witnesses who are able to say – I find truthfully, in both cases – that they personally did not hack phones or instruct phones to be hacked. It has not sought to advance by oral evidence its positive case of denying that there was VMI or UIG during the period 2007-2011 except by Mr Harwood’s and Ms Kerr’s evidence that they saw or did nothing wrong.

MGN’s contention that phone hacking stopped is based on the premise that, after the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire in August 2006, it was recognised to be far too dangerous to carry on using the tools that had been so beneficially and extensively used up to that time. However, no witness gave evidence of any such decision having been reached, either on an institutional or a personal basis. The only relevant evidence was that given by Ms Bailey (and confirmed by Mr Vickers) who said that she told the editors following the publication by the Information Commissioner’s Office of the What Price Privacy? and What Price Privacy Now? reports in 2006 that there was to be no illegal activity, and the editors assured her (then) that there would not be. There was no evidence of any follow up by the editors. Ms Bailey said she would have expected Mr Duffy to tell her if her instruction was being disregarded, but she did not enquire any further.

Mr Vickers said that after the arrest of Mr Mulcaire he did not believe that phone hacking was happening at MGN because of the “one rogue reporter” lie of the News of the World. I think that was a lie. Mr Vickers had been in a senior position in Fleet Street for 14 years by this time, and the idea that someone in his position, an insider, was taken in by a lie of that kind told by another newspaper, is fanciful. Mr Vickers asked Mr Partington (then still head of the Mirror’s legal department) to check up on any use of Mulcaire specifically by MGN and got a negative response. That, he felt, was sufficient. He and Ms Bailey told the editors in 2006 to comply with the criminal law, and his understanding was that “things were tied down very tightly” after those meetings. He did not explain why he had that impression, save that he said that Gary Jones told him once in a taxi that the message had filtered down; and that he (Vickers) had a disagreement with Tina Weaver about whether Jonathan Stafford was a private investigator. However, it is clear that that was a mistaken recollection so far as 2006/2007 was concerned and would have happened in 2011, when MGN prohibited use of PIs other than a few specifically authorised ones.

The arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire would have sent shock waves through the world of tabloid journalism, given the extent to which VMI had been used in the preceding 8 or more years. It is understandable that such activity would have dipped or even stopped while those who were involved in practising it waited to see what would happen (or, at least, ensure that traceable means of conducting it, such as MGN’s landlines and personal mobile phones, would no longer be used). On 29 November 2006, Goodman and Mulcaire pleaded guilty to offences under s.1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. They were sentenced to short terms of imprisonment on 26 January 2007. The facts on the basis of which they were sentenced were limited and involved 12 victims: three Royal Princes, three politicians, three people involved with professional football, a supermodel, a publicist and, ironically, a newspaper editor.

The guilty pleas were shortly followed by the publication by the Information Commissioner of What Price Privacy Now? (13 December 2006), which identified that 120 MGN journalists had been users of the services of Steve Whittamore, providing private information about data subjects unlawfully. The initial report dated 10 May 2006, “What Price Privacy?”, had identified an “illegal trade in private information”, based in part on the Operation Motorman investigation into the business of Mr Whittamore of JJ Services. That report had identified (and demonstrated with a graphic) how various persons, including private detectives, tracing agents and blaggers, were able illegally to extract confidential information from the Police, phone companies, call centres and the DVLA and supply them to the Press. Mr Whittamore had been convicted of offences under the Data Protection Act 1998. The May 2006 Report clearly alleged illegal breaches of the Data Protection Act and other legislation intended to protect private data.

What Price Privacy Now? identified the individual newspapers who had been involved with Mr Whittamore and to what extent, uncluding the number of individual journalists and the number of commissions. This report therefore showed that illegal information gathering was potentially going on on a large scale at all MGN’s national titles.

This would not have come as a surprise to any of the journalists who were making use of PIs like Whittamore, but the immediate consequence of the Commissioner’s report was a modest degree of executive involvement at MGN. The editors of the three nationals were called to a meeting with Ms Bailey, the CEO, Mr Vickers, the group legal director and company secretary, Mr Vaghela, the finance director, Mr Partington, the deputy group legal director and senior lawyer at the Mirror, and Mr Duffy, and were told that it was not acceptable for criminal acts to be carried out at TM plc’s newspapers. Ms Bailey’s evidence (to the Leveson Inquiry as well as in this trial) was that it happened after both the first ICO report and the second. I am somewhat doubtful about that but it was not specifically challenged and I shall assume that it did happen twice. What that does show is that Ms Bailey was alert to such matters, or had been alerted to them, as one would have expected. She considered it necessary to admonish the editors about illegal conduct. According to the evidence of all 3 executive directors, these meetings (which were not minuted and had no agenda) would have been a rare intrusion of the directors of the company onto the editorial floor. I accept that evidence and consider that Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers did not get involved in editorial matters, and relied on Mr Partington (and other lawyers at other papers) and executive managers such as Mr Duffy to tell them what was happening.

The message (which Ms Bailey said was the same message repeated) at the January 2007 meeting presented the editors and those working closely with them with a dilemma: either cease the unlawful practices, take several steps backwards in the effectiveness of their harvesting of newsworthy stories, and risk being outdone by rivals and lose prestige and market share; or continue more cautiously.

I am in no doubt, in the light of all the evidence, that the editors and those working beneath them, to the knowledge of editorial management, took the second option. Despite what the executive members of the board had told them, they decided to continue, though perhaps more circumspectly than in the halcyon days of 2003-2006, and with a greater emphasis on covering up what was going on. It is notable that no document (including an email) has been disclosed by MGN showing that any editor or editorial manager or junior editor on any of the newspapers communicated to its journalists the instructions of the board. Nor (and I will address this in detail in Part IV of this Judgment) did any member of the board follow up to find out the extent to which journalists had conducted VMI or used PIs to conduct illegal or unlawful activities, and to investigate whether the instruction given at the January 2007 meeting was being complied with.

As Mann J found, phone hacking had become “habitual”. The abandonment of VMI in 2006 would have greatly changed the way that tabloid newspapers obtained many of their stories. The old-fashioned way in which journalists pursued lines of enquiry and stood up stories, which Mr Harwood described as if it had never changed, had been supplanted to a substantial extent by a quicker and easier (and in some ways more reliable) method, making use of new information technology. From the findings in Gulati, it is clear that VMI did not end in 2006. Given that it continued, to some extent at least, the question is whether the three claimants in Gulati were special cases, whose voicemails exceptionally were intercepted after 2006, or a limited category of victim where the practice continued, or whether in reality VMI resumed after a break, and if so to what extent.

Turning to the evidence on which the claimants rely, this was mainly documentary, though one witness was able to give evidence of the demand from British newspapers for UIG in America in the relevant period.

Mr Daniel Portley-Hanks (“Mr Hanks”), an American private investigator of 40 years’ experience, said that prior to 2012 UK tabloid newspapers were his main customers and they commissioned him either directly or via US-based freelancers or “stringers”. When instructed indirectly, he would sometimes invoice the end user rather than the agency, though in other cases the agent would pay him. His main UK clients were the Mirror and the Sunday Mirror. He said that he believed strongly that journalists at those papers knew that the methods that he used were not legal (in America). It was illegal because he had privileged access to full databases, as a licensed private investigator, but not for the purpose of selling information thereby obtained to newspapers or others. Those using his reports could see that they contained privileged material such as full address, date of birth, phone number, voter registration and social security numbers.

Mr Hanks said that over the years the British newspapers had asked him to “wash” his product to give more of an appearance of legitimacy. That started in about 2000 and then increased significantly in 2011/12, though the illegal content of the product never changed. In light of the phone hacking scandal, he was asked (but could not recall that it was MGN who asked) to change the name of his business and his email address, to something innocuous. He said that the tabloids seemed to be panicking about the use of PIs but only wanted the appearance changed, not what was being supplied.

Mr Hanks said that Big Apple News (prop: Annette Witheridge) was a New York agency that hired him to provide unlawfully obtained information for their media clients. He denied that Ms Witheridge had ever asked for reassurance about the lawfulness of the content of his searches.

MGN did not seriously challenge Mr Hanks’ evidence and accepted that he was an honest witness, despite his 20 or more convictions in America (none for offences of dishonesty, as Mr Hanks stressed). It is clear from Mr Hanks’s evidence that demand for the services he provided continued up to and even after 2011.

From the individual claims based on articles that I have had to consider in this trial, it is clear, for the reasons that I give in Part V of the judgment below, that three articles postdating August 2006 of which the Duke of Sussex complains are without any real doubt the product of voicemail interception. I deal with all the articles complained of in Part V but for present purposes the three articles published by The People on 16 September 2007 (“Davy Stated”), 19 April 2009 (Harry’s Date with Gladiators Star”) and 26 April 2009 (“Chelsy’s New Fella”) demonstrate clearly that phone hacking was still used at MGN at those times. There is also a large volume of payment records to PIs during the period 2006-2011 relating to the Duke’s associates (as well as many relating to him personally), just as there is in the period 1999 to 2005, which are self-evidently part of a system for trying to obtain information about him from his associates, and to an extent from him, including VMI. The fact that many such payment records do not give rise to claims for misuse of the Duke’s private information does not mean that they do not evidence an effective and extensive system of UIG with the aim of extracting information and then publishing stories based on it.

The generic documentary evidence shows that Jonathan Stafford (Newsreel) continued to be used by MGN until September 2011, principally by large numbers of editors and journalists at the Mirror and the Sunday Mirror. There are numerous Mirror CRs for Newsreel (some of which were authorised by Mr Harwood, including one titled “CB Sienna Miller Inqs” and another “Heather Mills Excl”) between the end of 2006 and 2009, and many Sunday Mirror CRs (some of which were authorised by Mr Scott, Mr Saville and Mr Buckley) up to October 2011. Of these Newsreel Sunday Mirror CRs, there are over 40 CRs for 2011 alone and 78 CRs for 2010, and similar numbers for 2009 and 2008. Because they are CRs rather than invoices (the change being made after the convictions of Goodman and Mulcaire), there is no description of the services provided.

Mr Stafford originally sent invoices on a monthly basis, in his own name, with a schedule showing the commissioning journalist, the subject of the enquiry and the nature of each instruction. A few of these survive from 1998 to 2000 and demonstrate that the instructions related mainly to UIG, including “pretext” (i.e. blagging). On 26 August 2001, Louise Flood, a manager at the Daily Mirror, requested that the accounts team only scanned onto the payments system and retained the first page of an invoice of JJ Services and removed the second page. I consider that this was a deliberate decision not to save highly incriminatory documents, which was applied also to others’ invoices, including Mr Stafford’s. Like Mr Stafford’s invoices, JJ Services provided the details of the instructions on the second page. From around 2001, there are very few schedules retained for Mr Stafford’s invoices. One surviving schedule dated 20 December 2002 contains a large number of entries and 21 that are designated as “pretext”, including in connection with the holiday whereabouts of Mr Beckham, Ms Hurley, and airline travel for Charlotte Church.

In 2006, the system used appears to have changed so that Newsreel rather than Mr Stafford personally use CRs (as if they were contributors to articles) rather than submitting invoices for services. The change of name and system are, I find, part of attempts that were made in 2006 to make it harder for unlawful information gathering to be identified. For these various reasons, there is little descriptive data as to the work that Mr Stafford and Newsreel were doing for MGN from about 2001 until 2011.

However, the gaps are filled to some extent by the content of emails that have been disclosed by MGN:

These glimpses of the work that Mr Stafford was performing for all three newspapers show how integral a part of the information gathering he was, as also proved by the huge volume of instructions he received from the mid-1990s to 2011. It is also clear that Mr Stafford was used to blag confidential information. Both Mr Johnson and Mr Evans gave some evidence about the use of Mr Stafford in this respect. The work that Mr Stafford did was also – but not always – to provide data that would then be used by the phone hackers.

BDI is alleged by the claimants to be the successor to TDI/ELI and run by the same people, Suzie Mallis and Lloyd Hart, which MGN disputes. James Scott’s Apple database records the same telephone number for TDI and BDI. BDI was created in October 2006, shortly after the publicity given to Mulcaire and Goodman’s arrests. Records of telephone calls from MGN landlines show that the final call to the landline number for ELI was made on 5 October 2006, and the first of about 1300 calls to a new number, 07003 418456, was made on 10 October 2006 from an extension that is said to be that of Mr Saville. That extension also made one of the last calls to the old TDI number. Over 1,300 calls to BDI were made from MGN landlines between October 2006 and August 2011.

By an email dated 5 October 2006, Mr Buckley told Mr Scott, Mr Saville, Mr Hamilton and Mr Martin “There is a new tracing agency we can use, run by someone called Susie, as of next week: 0700 3418456”.

MGN admits many payments to BDI between 2006 and 2011, as alleged, but denies that they were payments for bugging or phone call interception and otherwise does not admit that the payments were in connection with UIG. It denies that BDI was the successor of ELI or that BDI had anything to do with Mallis or Hart. MGN could have called evidence in support of its positive case to explain who BDI were, what BDI was being instructed to do over that period, and why it contends that BDI was not the successor of ELI or connected with Mallis or Hart, but it has not done so.

In my judgment, the claimants have done just enough to prove that BDI was probably the successor to ELI. The email is obviously one written to recipients who know what it is about and understand its significance, and the reference to “someone called Susie” would have been understood as an ironic reference to an old friend, Suzie Mallis. If the new agency with a new phone number were indeed unconnected, the recipients of the email would obviously have expected more explanation from Mr Buckley as to why they should use it and what its credentials were. The end of connected calls to ELI on the same day and the very substantial use of BDI’s new number from the outset support the claimants’ case. It seems to me inherently likely that this change in identity was part of measures being taken by the chief phone hackers at the Sunday Mirror and one of their best suppliers to create a greater level of concealment of their activities. The invoices say only “Professional Services Carried Out” and contain a project name and the name of the commissioning journalist. This is evidence that the serious hackers at MGN were intending to carry on, Goodman and Mulcaire notwithstanding.

The significance of that (and the reason for MGN’s non admission) is obvious. TDI/ELI were found by Mann J to be one of the main PIs working for MGN in connection with its extensive voicemail interception activities between 1999 and 2006. BDI provided extensive services – almost 800 invoices - from 2006 right up to August 2011. The invoices were all addressed to Mr Buckley at the Sunday Mirror News Desk. It is therefore inherently likely that BDI continued to do the same work that TDI/ELI did for MGN up to August 2006. MGN has no positive case (other than in relation to bugging and interception of telephone calls) that these invoices were not connected with UIG. I find that they predominantly were, and were a continuation of the TDI/ELI service.

Another PI whose identity as presented in payment records changed in 2006 was Rob Palmer, previously trading as Avalon and the subject of adverse findings in Gulati. The claimants maintain that Mr Palmer was a blagger of telephone, medical and financial records, among other things. From January 2007, no further invoices came to MGN from Avalon; instead, Mr Palmer personally was paid through the CR system.

MGN admits that an unquantifiable but substantial number of Avalon inquiries in the period 2000-2007 represent UIG but does not admit that Rob Palmer himself carried out UIG, and denies that anything he did included bugging or live call interception or recording. Disclosed emails between journalists and avalonenquiry@btinternet.com (the email address consistently used) between 2009 and 2011 prove that this was the address used by Rob Palmer. Many emails are signed off “Rob”.

98 invoices from Avalon refer only to “enquiries” in respect of specific individuals. As regards Mr Palmer personally, there are 497 CRs showing instructions from each of the three newspapers. Being CRs, they contain no detail about the nature of the instruction. Disclosed phone data for several landline and telephone numbers reveal a formidable number of calls from Lee Harpin in particular, with whom much of the email traffic is too.

MGN points to a few of the emails and argues that they are consistent with lawful passing of information from sources to a journalist. However, these are not journalists’ sources but Mr Palmer’s sources (“my usual Cheryl source”), so they are far from conclusive as to the lawfulness of the information obtained. Other emails present a rather different picture of Mr Palmer’s activities. One, from Gary Jones to Richard Wallace dated 15 May 2009 states:

On 28 May 2010, Mr Harpin forwarded to the avalonenquiry email address without any comment the following email that had been sent to Mr Harpin by an undisclosed source, under the heading “helen newlove”:

On 13 July 2010, Mr Harpin sent Mr Palmer an email under the heading “Re: Becks” stating “wot about the adoption line? Prefer that”, to which Mr Palmer replied “I’ll chase him up now”.

On 7 October 2010, Mr Palmer sent Lee Harpin a break down of a £21,000 bill for “an election thank you dinner hosted by Tory treasurer Michael Spencer for party leadership at Simpsons restaurant in Birmingham”, which Harpin then forwarded to Gary Jones and Lloyd Embley, commenting “Cameron et al all there. Spencer brought along 24 bottles of his own Petrus for which they were charged 720 corkage”.

On 15 March 2011, Katie Hind at the People sent an email to the avalonenquiry address without a heading, which simply said:

Although there was no evidence about it specifically, the claimants’ legal team have calculated, by adding up the value of all the disclosed SAFs, invoices and CRs, the amount expended by MGN on PIs over the extended period in issue – some £9.7 million in total (the figure is not agreed and MGN contend that it is just under £9 million). The precise figure does not matter: the order of magnitude is clear. The breakdown, year by year, calculated by the claimants shows that 2003-2005 were the peak years, at over £1 million for each year, and then the following total figures for expenditure and number of invoices/CRs:

These figures support a conclusion that there was only a brief pause in PI unlawful activity in 2006, following the arrests of Mulcaire and Goodman, and that the level of activity reduced, year by year, but by no means came to an end, before the start of the Leveson Inquiry in 2011. Direct evidence of phone hacking and associated UIG is harder to identify, in part because, even more so than in Mr Evans’s time at the Sunday Mirror, I am satisfied that those practising the ‘dark arts’ at all three newspapers took more care after August 2006 to avoid detection. This is highly likely to have meant increased use of burner phones and much less use of traceable phones, including MGN landlines.

As part of this increased control, the volume of use of PIs reduced, but only gradually. But, as before August 2006, and as found and explained in the Gulati judgment, PIs were used as an integral part of the process of VMI and other means of obtaining information unlawfully. They obtained the data that enabled editors and journalists to be able to identify PINs and access messages. It doubtless got more difficult over time, as some people became aware of their need for security and mobile phone networks increased the security available to subscribers, but I have little doubt that it still went on.

The notion that it did not go on at all after August 2006 is impossible to support, as it has already been found that it went on to some extent in respect of three of the Gulati claimants, and I have indicated a finding that it clearly happened in respect of the Duke of Sussex. Further, it is evident from the invoices on which the Duke relies (see UIG Episodes Schedule) that a very large number of searches were still being conducted by MGN, particularly at the Sunday Mirror, during the years 2009 to 2011, with a view to finding useful information about the Duke’s then close companions, such as Florence Brudenell-Bruce, Natalie Pinkham and Caroline Flack. Although basic searches made by C&L do not involve unlawful gathering of the Duke’s private information, they do demonstrate that MGN were still taking active steps to find ways of extracting such information from his associates. C&L’s searches were the first stage in a process that led to attempted VMI.

There is nothing to support an inference that the four claimants I have identified were the only special cases in which VMI continued. VMI was an exceptionally useful (but not the only) tool and it had produced sensational scoops for MGN’s newspapers and (ironically) made the strong reputations of editors. Those found in Gulati to have been principally involved in conducting VMI – Ms Weaver, Mr Buckley, Mr Wallace, Mr Thomas, Mr Saville, Mr Scott, and Mr Stretch to a more limited extent – all remained at MGN until 2011 or afterwards, in senior positions, as did others who, it is evident from emails and other evidence in this trial, were also involved in UIG, including in particular Mr Harpin, Mr Jones and Mr Bell (before he left to set up Ferrari Press as a freelancer).

Further, in the Gulati trial and other managed claims pending at the same time, admissions were made that a large number of articles were the product of VMI. 118 articles out of 129 relied on by those claimants were admitted or found to have been the product of VMI, which would not have been published but for the product of the VMI. All but 4 of these were before 2006. There are 64 different bylines for these admitted articles. A large number of admitted articles were written by Suzanne Kerins (21), Eva Simpson (10), Jessica Callan (10), Caroline Hedley (6) and Polly Graham (5), all journalists on the Daily Mirror’s “3am” (showbiz) column, and they remained at the newspaper well after August 2006. None of these journalists or other members of the showbiz desk has given evidence that there was a sea change and VMI was abandoned as a journalistic tool after 2006. Neither is it likely that it would have been, absent strong editorial enforcement – of which there is no evidence whatsoever. MGN was in daily competition with The Sun and the News of the World in particular; it is improbable that editors and journalists would have given up the tool that had enabled them to compete with those better-funded newspapers for the headline stories that its readers desired.

If, as MGN contends, there was no further VMI and associated UIG after August 2006, it is difficult to understand why it failed to disclose something like the truth to Parliament in 2007 and to comply with the requirement of the Leveson Inquiry for it to disclose payment records to PIs and similar third party suppliers from January 2005. MGN could then have made a forceful case that, whatever might have happened prior to August 2006, steps had already been taken by the TM plc board following the arrests and the publication of What Price Privacy Now? to root out any improper use of PIs.

In fact, in March 2007, Eugene Duffy, a senior editorial manager at TM plc, gave evidence to the Media, Communications and Sport select committee of the House of Commons, having been prepared for that task by Mr Marcus Partington, who was about to become TM plc’s deputy group legal director. Mr Duffy told the Committee something that was not true and that MGN must have known was not true, namely that MGN was in no position to identify the individuals who were making use of unlawful services of PIs. I will deal with that in more detail in Part IV of the judgment. But what this demonstrates for current purposes is that there was concealment of the illegal and unlawful activities that were going on. If the chastening effect of the guilty pleas of Mulcaire and Goodman had resulted in the abandonment of VMI and UIG, there would have been no reason for Mr Duffy not to be frank and open about practices that related to what the Commissioner had already discovered, or indeed for Mr Vickers to cause the extent of the unlawful activities to date to be fully investigated. Instead, the lie was told that there were no unlawful practices other than in relation to the use of Mr Whittamore that MGN could identify.

In 2011, MGN disclosed only seven PIs to the Inquiry (JJ Services (Whittamore), whose work had already been investigated by the IPO, Southern Investigations (Law & Commercial), Hogan International, ELI/TDI, GlobalNetNews (Grayson), BDI, and Jonathan Stafford (Newsreel), with the records anonymised and much of the detail shown on the records redacted.

Mr Vickers, the group legal director, said that Mr Partington and various other members of the finance department had put together the schedules of PI invoices, but could not remember who redacted them, or why. He accepted that he would have been asked to identify the records. Mr Partington was not able to say what advice he gave about those schedules.

What is clear is that MGN did not want Sir Brian Leveson to have a full picture of the extent to which PIs were being used by its newspapers. All relevant PIs used from January 2005 onwards could have been identified and disclosed in the way that only 7 were. 4 of the 7 disclosed did not make supplies to MGN at all, or to any significant extent, after the end of 2006, so a very misleading picture was given of the extent to which PIs were being used after January 2005, which is what the Inquiry notice related to.

With several important PIs, including Jonathan Stafford, Rob Palmer, BDI, Searchline and C&L, invoicing continued up to December 2011. Tillen and Dove continued to be used until October 2012 by The People and the Mirror. It is not however possible to identify in respect of every instruction whether it was for lawful or unlawful activities. The claimants have advanced their case on the basis that all the activity carried out by all PIs was unlawful, with only a few exceptions, such as the Teviots, but that is too ambitious. It is clear enough – and a matter of common sense – that not every instruction to PIs who also provided basic search information would have involved unlawful means, or been for the purpose of then using the information for further unlawful searches. Some of it would have reflected journalistic laziness – a matter that editorial managers were aware of: they sent out emails instructing journalists to make use of other free (or cheaper) sources for the publicly available information that they wanted.

However, I have found that a significant proportion of all use of the PIs identified as operating after the Gulati period (as to which, see Part III below) were likely to have been acting at least in part in connection with UIG, and many of these are likely to have involved unlawful searches or garnering of information such as call data for the purpose of VMI. Some of the most important and most extensively-used PIs continued to do large volumes of work up to and including 2011.

Although use of VMI clearly remained extensive after 2006 and it probably continued across all the desks at the newspapers, it is obviously right to conclude that the use gradually reduced compared with what was probably the busiest period, 2003-2005. There was no evidence that any particular desk or desks had given it up, however. I find that VMI was used more cautiously after 2006, and steps were taken to increase the concealment and reduce the risk of being caught. Particular care was probably taken, at least in the immediate aftermath of the events of 2006, in the case of high risk celebrities, such as the Duke of Sussex. VMI was probably not as “habitual” after 2006 as it was in the years 1999-2006, and was probably done thereafter by fewer journalists. The editors, who were told by Ms Bailey to eschew all illegal activity, did no such thing: they ensured that it was able to continue, as and when needed, and did their best to hide it from the main board executives. However, they would not have been able to hide it from editorial management and the in house lawyers. My conclusion is that VMI remained an important tool of the kind of journalism that was being practised at all three newspapers up to and to a limited extent even during the Leveson Inquiry, and it was fed by extensive UIG. It was still used to a significant extent, but not quite as habitually as before August 2006.

In summary, the evidence that supports my conclusion that VMI and UIG continued extensively but on a reducing basis from 2007 until 2011, is the following:

MGN emerged largely unscathed from the Leveson Inquiry. The decision was obviously taken at a high level that MGN’s interests were best served by keeping a lid on as much as possible of what had happened. I shall return to that in Part IV. It was only when that objective became impossible, on account of Police investigations and persistent disclosure applications in the MNHL, that the admissions began to emerge. Even today, MGN is not being open about the extent to which VMI and UIG went on at its newspapers.

It is part of the claimants’ generic case that very large numbers of instructions were given to many PIs to obtain private information unlawfully and provide it to MGN journalists. Moreover, it is alleged that MGN had “standing arrangements” for a number of years with certain PIs to carry out searches that were unlawful, to identify personal details such as phone numbers, dates of birth and family members, with a view to cracking PIN codes on mobile phones or otherwise discovering or accessing private information. In addition it is part of the claimants’ case that MGN had standing arrangements with a number of freelance journalists (many ex-MGN) or freelance photographers to obtain private information with which to target individuals of interest to its newspapers.

There is no doubt that the use made of many PIs and freelancers was very extensive, over many years. There are said to be more than 31,000 payment records from 1995 to 2011, with the peak years being 2003-2005, when there were respectively 3403, 4368 and 5014 invoices or contribution requests paid by MGN, at a total cost for those three years of almost £4,500,000. Over the years, a number of PIs were given hundreds and some were given many thousands of separate instructions. C&L received nearly 33,000 individual instructions (which were billed in small groups).

As the claimants have emphasised throughout, those numbers are based on the instructions that have been disclosed by MGN. MGN has only given disclosure throughout this litigation when the claimants have been able to identify and plead the name of someone against whom there is a credible case that they were acting unlawfully in this way. I refer to MGN’s obstructive approach to disclosure below. It is therefore quite possible that there are other PIs, whose actions have not yet been discovered, or other trading names.

Despite what has been disclosed to date and the evidence of systemic and habitual use of PIs, I reject the allegation that there were “standing arrangements” in place between MGN as a corporate entity and any individual PI or freelancer – or even between a particular newspaper and a PI or freelancer – if by that is meant a contractual retainer or a non-contractual but formal and permanent relationship. There was no documentary or other evidence to support a finding that any PI had a standing arrangement in that sense. However, there is evidence that some PIs, such as Jonathan Stafford, ELI/TDI/BDI, Mr Palmer and the Scotts at C&L, were regularly and routinely, indeed almost constantly, it appears, used by many journalists at all three newspapers. Mr Stafford used to come into the MGN offices. The editors and journalists may well have felt that PIs such as these were permanently available to instruct, and the PIs may have felt that they had a constant flow of work, but that does not create a “standing arrangement” – just a mutually beneficial and continuous relationship.

In closing, Mr Sherborne effectively conceded that there was no “standing arrangement” in the strict sense: he said that what was meant was that there was “regular use of [a PI] by one or more journalists … to do the kind of work set out in the [GPoC]”. I would characterise that as “regular use”, not a “standing arrangement”. In some instances, though, Mr Sherborne’s paraphrase does not do justice to the degree of use: Mr Stafford, TDI/ELI/BDI, Mr Palmer and the Scotts were used to an extraordinary degree, day by day and month by month – so much so that it is surprising that they also had time to work for other newspaper publishers – which they did.

The evidence as a whole presents a clear picture of individual editors and journalists, at each of the newspapers separately, having their own preferred regular contacts for PI work, and some approved names at individual desks in newspapers to consider for overseas investigatory work. Those that I have already identified were the most commonly used, though there were also others used very extensively, and some were specialist blaggers rather than PIs who conducted searches.

Many overseas contacts, such as Mr Couzens, Ms Witheridge, Mr Thorne and Mr Pisa, were previously journalists at MGN who had gone freelance abroad, e.g. in the US, Spain, Italy and Australia. The most frequently used PIs were used by a number of different journalists and editors. Some journalists used a large number of different PIs, presumably for different work (or in different countries or areas of the UK). On occasions, according to Mr Harwood and Ms Kerr, individual journalists who were not regular users would seek approval of their chosen PI from an editor or manager, when needed, or seek guidance from others when uncertain whom to use for a particular purpose.

The findings that the claimants otherwise sought in closing submissions are that the use made of a large number of identified PIs in relation to each of three periods, 1991-1999, 1999-2006, and 2006-2011, are examples of UIG by VMI, blagging and other unlawful obtaining of information by PIs. For each period, the claimants have a long list of alleged PIs, in respect of which they seek findings. The finding sought is, however, general and vague.

The pleaded case of the claimants is more detailed and somewhat different.

The case advanced by the claimants is therefore, essentially, that:

It is therefore necessary for me to make findings, so far as the evidence permits me to do so, about:

In making my findings, I bear in mind that none of the PIs is a party to this claim or (with only a few exceptions) has given evidence about the nature of their work. Only Ms Annette Witheridge, Mr Tom Worden and Mr Paul Hawkes were chosen by MGN to provide a witness statement and were then willing to come to court and expose themselves to cross-examination. With only three exceptions (Mr Morgan, Mr Honeywell and Mr Duffy), MGN chose not to waive privilege to explain in its closing submissions why other potential witnesses who did not make witness statements were not called.

My approach is only to make findings of unlawful conduct against these PIs (and indeed editors and journalists) in relation to a case that is adequately pleaded and where it is necessary to do so in order to resolve a pleaded issue between the claimants and MGN. I will reach a conclusion adverse to the PI about the lawfulness of their activities only if there is clear evidence to support it. Non-parties (except the other claimants in this fourth wave of the MNHL who adopt the same generic case) are of course not bound by my findings. Nevertheless, where a finding is appropriate, the standard of proof is the balance of probabilities, however serious the allegations: Birmingham City Council v Jones [2023] UKSC 27; [2023] 3 WLR 343. I have already noted that, with few exceptions, there is no evidence at all that any of the named PIs themselves hacked telephones, intercepted live phone calls or bugged rooms or cars.

MGN does not contest in principle that I should make findings where appropriate to do so, but its case is that findings should only be made in relation to pleaded allegations against each PI (and indeed against MGN journalists). I agree with that approach. It cannot be right to make findings against non-parties in relation to serious allegations of misconduct where there is no pleaded issue between the claimants and MGN in relation to them. Further, I will not make a finding of criminal conduct in relation to a PI where there is no particularised plea of criminal conduct by that person. In relation to each PI that I address, I will therefore start with the pleaded allegations.

The claimants’ generic case in relation to PIs has evolved since 2014 with tranches of disclosure given by MGN. As I have explained, this has only happened piecemeal because the claimants needed to have a name and some evidence of a particular PI having provided services to MGN before disclosure could be obtained (though, even then, MGN generally contested the applications): an exercise that Mr Sherborne repeatedly likened to a game of “battleships”. Disclosure in the MNHL followed the following path:

Taking the failure to make full disclosure to the Leveson Inquiry, the failure to give proper disclosure in Gulati and the attempts to prevent further disclosure in the third and fourth waves of the MNHL together, it is obvious with the benefit of hindsight that MGN has been trying to prevent claimants from obtaining a full picture of the nature and extent of use of PIs by MGN’s editors and journalists.

This conduct sits extremely uncomfortably with the assurances given by senior executives at TM plc from time to time, such as Mr Vickers and Mr Grigson, that they were concerned to ensure that all wrongdoing was openly acknowledged and that claimants were compensated for it. As just one example, Mr Vickers, as TM plc group legal director and a board director of MGN, made a witness statement on 22 October 2014, in opposition to a disclosure application in Gulati, and said:

It is now clear that that was quite untrue and that there has been a serious and culpable failure to give disclosure. MGN had not even disclosed in Gulati the redacted material that it confidentially provided to the Leveson Inquiry.

As Ms Gulati’s unchallenged witness statement in this trial demonstrates, incriminating documents that are highly relevant to her claim were not disclosed, including in her case three BDI invoices in late 2006 and 2007 referring to “PROJECT SHOBNA” and “PROJECT FORD” (Kate Ford being one of Ms Gulati’s associates), and Mr Scott’s Palm Pilot, first located by MGN in May 2014 but not disclosed until June 2020, in which Ms Gulati’s and Ms Ford’s name and mobile telephone number were contained. There were also a Unique Pictures CR relating to Ms Gulati and two JJ Services invoices and one Starbase invoice relating to Ms Ford that were not disclosed.

The claimants prepared, as an exhibit to the 49^th witness statement of James Heath, a table listing all the documents relating specifically to the individual Gulati claimants and their associates that have subsequently been disclosed by MGN but which were not disclosed prior to the Gulati trial. There are:

The facts, which were not disputed by MGN, evidence a shocking failure by a large organisation with in-house lawyers and a leading external firm of lawyers to comply with their disclosure responsibilities. Mr Vickers and Mr Partington were both constrained to admit that MGN had failed to give proper disclosure in Gulati but could not explain how or what errors had been made that caused the failure.

Mr Vickers said that as far as he was aware at the time, they were:

Mr Partington similarly claimed to be unaware at the time of the Gulati proceedings that PI material disclosed to the Inquiry had not been disclosed to the Gulati claimants, even though he accepted that he was involved with external solicitors in preparing the material that was supplied to the Inquiry and that he was the internal lawyer in charge of the litigation I find it incredible that disclosure of 4 out of the 7 sets of PI records that had been supplied to the Inquiry was overlooked, because 3 of the 7 were disclosed, and BDI (which was not disclosed) was the successor company to ELI/TDI, which was disclosed.

There was no difficulty at any time for Mr Partington, Mr Vickers or external lawyers instructed by them in searching MGN’s databases to identify invoices and CRs commissioned by journalists and editors. Had they only gone back to the allegations made by Mr David Brown in his 2007 witness statement (which I deal with in more detail in Part IV below), which by late 2013 they knew were likely to have been true, and searched for invoices bearing the names of the celebrities that Mr Brown named as being victims of phone hacking, they would have found invoices from the following PIs in addition to the 4 that they disclosed in 2014: C&L, Unique Pictures, Starbase, Lenslife, Warner, Rob Palmer, as well as specific invoices to back up Mr Brown’s allegations of phone hacking.

If, as MGN contended in this trial, it was using PIs outside the Gulati period only for proper and lawful journalistic purposes, it is not obvious why it has spent so much time and money to prevent the full picture being brought before the court. The inference to be drawn from this conduct is obvious, namely that a lot of the PI payments related to UIG and, further, that MGN concealed the extent of use of PIs, not just from Parliament and the Leveson Inquiry but then from the Court too.

The inference about use of PIs in connection with UIG is supported by the documentary evidence of large numbers of PI invoices and CRs and a few emails that were eventually disclosed. When some of the references and annotations are explained, as they were in oral evidence, it is apparent that these are predominantly not innocuous payments for searches of public registers, though some of the individual payments may well be for information that either was or could have been obtained lawfully.

The oral evidence that supported the claimants’ case came principally from Mr Whittamore’s confessions about JJ Services’ activities; Mr Haslam’s evidence about Jonathan Rees, Sid Fillery and their companies, Southern Investigations, Law & Commercial and Media Investigations; Mr Hanks’ evidence about what he was asked by MGN or other PIs to do; Mr Evans’ original evidence in Gulati about ELI/TDI (which was accepted by Mann J to be true) and his evidence at this trial about Mr Hinchcliffe and MSH; Mr Hawkes’s intended exculpatory evidence; and much of the evidence of Mr Graham Johnson. I have already referred to some of this evidence in Part II, above. There were also some answers given by Ms Witheridge and Mr Worden, and points on which they were unable to provide an innocent explanation, on which the claimants rely as further supporting evidence of UIG.

Evidence about PIs was called by MGN from Ms Witheridge, Mr Antony Bassett (witness statement supported by a hearsay notice and not in the end challenged by the claimants), Mr Worden, Mr Hawkes and Mr Harwood. I have already considered Mr Harwood’s evidence in detail in Part II.

Ms Witheridge gave evidence about her work in the US for Big Apple News, a news agency based in New York that she established. She was effectively the Sunday Mirror’s regular US correspondent: she said that she would speak to the news desk 5 days a week. She gave evidence about how she worked, which was “good old-fashioned journalism”, involving knocking on doors, speaking to people and interviewing them, and looking in public phone directories. As the internet developed, she used that to search for information. She sold Big Apple News in 2005 and then worked as a freelancer from 2007 to 2019.

Ms Witheridge said that she used private investigators to conduct searches to find addresses and telephone numbers when she could not find them, up to three times a week. One such was Mr Dan Hanks. She claimed (wrongly, as it emerged) that she only ever received basic searches and had never seen a higher level search that provides additional (confidential) information. She claimed (again, I find, falsely) that Mr Hanks assured her that everything he did was legal and said what information he was allowed to pass to her as a freelance journalist. Finally, she said that she had never engaged in VMI or used the services of a PI to obtain private information unlawfully, and never obtained information by blagging.

Ms Witheridge was asked in cross-examination in particular about her dealings with Dan Hanks and his PI agency, which she used to obtain information about subjects of interest to Sunday Mirror reporters. Mr Hanks had explained that, as a PI in the US, he was able to get privileged access to restricted subject data (higher level searches), and that he passed all this on, unfiltered, to Ms Witheridge or to anyone else who commissioned him. Ms Witheridge suggested that Mr Hanks at some stage ceased to filter the results that he sent her, and Mr Hanks agreed that he was too lazy to do so. Nevertheless, Big Apple News, or the Sunday Mirror, paid a price that reflected a full, unfiltered search, and Ms Witheridge did indeed receiver higher level searches. Ms Witheridge said that she did not ask for data that could not lawfully be sold by a PI in the US and had no use for social security numbers and other restricted data. But she nevertheless received it and passed it on to the journalist who had engaged Big Apple News.

She expressed surprise about the amount of information in a data search from Canada that she had passed on to her client. I was not convinced by her expression of surprise. She was clearly a very experienced operator and knew exactly what she was requesting and getting. She was asked about two particular cases in which she had been involved, in which she had used the word “blag” in emails, and referred to spoof phone calls relating to Prince Michael of Kent. She was at a loss to explain these, but suggested that she did not use the word “blag” to mean blag in the sense in which it is used in this litigation. I’m afraid that I was not persuaded: she knew exactly what blagging or (to use the American equivalent expression) spoof calling was.

I of course can make no finding about the legality of what Big Apple News or Ms Witheridge were doing in the US, in the absence of reliable evidence of state or federal law in the US; but what Ms Witheridge was doing – procuring and selling restricted confidential information for profit – would be a data protection offence in the UK. I do not accept her protestations that she had not blagged private information or obtained restricted higher level searches. I am satisfied that those at the Sunday Mirror using Ms Witheridge to obtain information would have known what they were paying for.

Mr Bassett made a witness statement and then a hearsay notice was served on grounds of his ill-health. The claimants initially applied for him to be required to attend for cross-examination but then withdrew their application. Mr Bassett’s evidence was that he was on the part-time staff for The People from 1980 to 2002 and then a freelance until 2015. He described how he did old-fashioned searches at registries from the 1980s until 2008, when everything was put online. MGN used him quite regularly for that work. He never did anything unlawful and knew nothing about VMI.

The claimants accept that what Mr Bassett himself did was lawful, but the product of his work, e.g. mothers’ maiden names and dates of birth, were then used to crack PIN codes or other security passwords. Interestingly, Mr Bassett (who had 283 pages of his invoices in the trial bundles) was commissioned by, among others, Mr Stretch, Mr Couzens, Mr Saville, Mr Coutts, Mr Edmondson and Mr Weatherup, all closely involved in phone hacking, which lends support to the claimants’ case in that regard. The claimants provided six examples where an invoice of Mr Bassett for Mr Stretch, Ms Boniface and Mr Saville was followed within a day or two by a further commission of ELI in the same subject name by the same journalist. I consider that case about MGN’s modus operandi to be sufficiently proved, as it was too in the use that was made of Census Searches’ and C&L’s work products, but still the UIG was that of ELI and the journalists, not Mr Bassett or the Teviots.

Mr Worden worked for The Sun between about 2000 and 2004, as a staff reporter on the news desk, and then moved to Madrid in August 2003 specifically to follow the career of David Beckham at C.F. Real Madrid. He stayed in Madrid becoming the paper’s de facto Spain correspondent, and met Gerard Couzens while covering the David Beckham story, but then he went to South America. He went into partnership with Mr Couzens on his return to Madrid in 2005.

In his witness statement, Mr Worden said that the partnership (“TAG”, although this name was only used later) provided stories to all the national newspapers, dealing with all sorts of journalists, travelling throughout Spain and building up contacts. Some of these contacts knew a number of celebrities. Stories TAG found were either filed on spec to all papers, or sold as an exclusive to one paper, or they were done on commission. TAG used contacts and did open-source research, Mr Worden said. He said that he had never engaged the services of PIs or third parties to engage in unlawful information gathering activities, and that TAG never did so either, and that he did not believe that Mr Couzens carried out UIG or commissioned any either.

Mr Worden was shown a number of invoices bearing his name from his time working at The Sun. He claimed not to recall his use of Starbase and said that any work that he asked Gwen Richardson to do was above board. He did not recall that he had asked Ms Richardson to do a “special” or an “Ex D” search, and said that he did not see Searchline’s invoices. His claim in his statement that he did not use PIs in connection with any unlawful activity is clearly wrong. It is evident from the documents produced that he did use PIs in the UK, including C&L (by its trading name, System Searches), and that on occasions PIs were used to do searches that appear to be unlawful. I was not persuaded by his claim that if Ms Richardson or anyone else had told him that what she was going to do was unlawful, he would have said “don’t do it”.

Mr Worden clearly developed connections with the Sunday Mirror, no doubt as a result of the partnership with Mr Couzens. He worked for Mr Buckley but claimed never to have known that he was involved in unlawful activity. He spoke to James Saville a lot and had no idea that he was doing unlawful things. He claimed to have no idea that Mr Couzens had been interviewed under caution in Operation Glade and that he had carried out unlawful activities. He said that Mr Couzens did not tell him what he did before he came to Spain. If that were true, Mr Worden must have been perplexed by the amount of contact between Mr Buckley and Mr Saville and TAG.

After joining Mr Couzens, Mr Worden became a co-director and co-owner of TAG (presumably “TAG” for Tom and Gerard). Despite that, Mr Worden claimed to have little understanding of what Mr Couzens was doing – he was based in Madrid and then Barcelona, and Mr Couzens in Malaga. He claimed that the two of them never discussed the use of PIs. He was unaware that TAG was using Newsreel and Mr Stafford, JJ Services and Christine Hart.

When shown some of the things that Mr Couzens was involved in on behalf of the company, Mr Worden expressed surprise, even in cases in which he had been copied into relevant emails. He was copied into an email to Mr Buckley dated 28 September 2010 that obviously contemplated blagging Mr Nulty’s address in Spain from a car rental firm. Mr Worden said that perhaps Mr Couzens copied him in so that he was aware of what Mr Couzens was doing, in case he was out of the country. This explanation sat uneasily with Mr Worden’s suggestion that he and Mr Couzens really did different work and generally did not discuss with each other what they were doing. There are, besides, cases where it is clear that the two of them were working together, including a proposed blagging of a hotel in an attempt to track down Francisco Marco in Barcelona, and pursuing Mr Nulty in Andalucia. He was “unaware” of why Mr Couzens was passing on Ingrid Tarrant’s mobile telephone number to James Saville in November 2005.

Mr Worden chose his words very carefully when being questioned about his statement and often emphasised that his answers were given “to the best of my recollection”. Unlike his witness statement, which was expressed in strong, clear assertions, in his oral evidence he had considerable difficulty remembering matters that he was asked about, and answers that he gave were carefully considered. I had a distinct sense of things being kept under wraps by Mr Worden. He became very defensive and quibbled with why he was being asked questions about Mr Couzens’s activities, when Couzens had been his business partner of 8 years at TAG and his own witness statement had given Couzens a clean bill of health.

I express conclusions about TAG Media’s work in the PI Schedule to this judgment. It is sufficient to say in relation to Mr Worden that I do not accept his evidence about the wholly innocent nature of the engagement that he had with phone hackers such as Buckley and Saville (though I make clear I make no finding of anything illegal having been done by Mr Worden himself), or his explanation that he had no idea what Mr Couzens was up to, or what he was earning. It was particularly unpersuasive as regards those matters on which Mr Worden was copied into emails or otherwise obviously working with Mr Couzens on a particular engagement.

Mr Hawkes, who modestly described himself as an “internationally award-nominated private investigator and forensic psycho-physiologist”, came to give evidence, as he said, to correct the outrageous allegations that had been made in relation to unlawful work done by him and his company for MGN. MGN had in fact admitted that some of the work that Mr Hawkes’s company, Research Associates, did was unlawful, and Mr Hawkes wanted to explain why that was incorrect.

He claimed to be deeply offended at the suggestion that he acted in the same way as investigators who were paid to act unlawfully, though he admitted that what he used to do before the Data Protection Act came into force would be illegal now. He said that he adapted his methods following its coming into force, and said that he went out of his way to ensure that all his methods were lawful.

He was renowned in his industry, he said, for being able to work cleverly rather than illegally – there was a certain clientele, he explained, who would only instruct PIs that they were sure would act within the law. He pointed in this regard to Mr Graham Brough at the Mirror, one of his customers, as being “a born-again Christian” who would never have been willing to instruct a PI who did not act entirely lawfully, and said that Brough was nervous about instructing him for this reason and asked if everything was above board. Although he could not recall the details of any instruction he received from the Mirror or the Sunday Mirror, he said in his witness statement:

Mr Hawkes tried to explain that for data that is generally accessed unlawfully, there were lawful means of obtaining it in many cases – which took more time and therefore was charged at a higher cost to the customer. He said that part of the problem he encountered was that newspapers were unwilling to pay the higher cost. That particular statement is inherently credible, as was his admission that the word “special” in his invoices, relating to engagements, was put in at the request of the newspapers. The other problems for Mr Hawkes’s leisurely but lawful service was the speed with which newspapers required information, and the fact that, as he accepted, the lawful methods often did not work – he said that there was only a 20% chance of matching a car registration with one previously sold on ebay or Autotrader. Mr Hawkes impliedly admitted that speed was an issue for journalists, as he said that “for newspapers, what I often do is verbal, so that it is quick”. This did not, however, explain how the methods that Mr Hawkes explained he used could be done verbally and quickly.

These were some of the methods that he described:

Mr Hawkes’s accounts of these methods were laboured and at times confused, such that it did not appear that they were routinely used methods. Further, the methods were so obviously slow and unreliable that no tabloid journalist wanting to stand up a story would be likely to have been willing to pay more for that kind of slow service.

When unable to answer difficult questions, Mr Hawkes asserted his greater knowledge of open source databases and suggested that questions that he was asked were wrong, and he became quite aggressive about it. He had no convincing explanation for the invoice for £150 for Hugh Grant computer hack (or the payment of £500 on the same date to Gavin Whitfield, who had introduced Mr Hawkes to Dan Evans – Mr Hawkes claimed not to know him at all well) and which Mr Johnson had given evidence about. I consider this was probably material that had been obtained by someone else, possibly someone working for him, and then passed on by Mr Hawkes at a small profit.

In the final section of his witness statement, Mr Hawkes included a lengthy description of the nature of open-source intelligence. He said that this was in the nature of a “brain dump” of what he knows about that subject. Unfortunately for Mr Hawkes, it then transpired that he had simply copied and pasted the content of the Pangea Group LLC website and had not been honest about its provenance. I find that he had done this, and described himself as a forensic psycho-physiologist, in order to aggrandise the nature of the work that he did, in an attempt to distance his work and methods from those of other PIs who act unlawfully.

His attempt did not succeed because I feel unable to place any reliance on his evidence (save as indicated above), which I consider was riddled with untruths. He did at least admit that it was no surprise that he blagged information out of people, because he was a private investigator. I prefer the evidence of Mr Johnson and Mr Evans on the Hugh Grant story where it conflicts with what Mr Hawkes said. I deal with their evidence below.

MGN also intended to call Ms Gwen Kent (formerly Gwen Richardson) of Searchline Ltd, and Mr Dennis Rice, a journalist with the Sunday Mirror from 1996-1997 and again from 1998-1999, then a freelance journalist and television producer. Neither was willing to come to court to give evidence, on claimed grounds of ill-health.

I had made clear at the pre-trial review that I considered that all the evidence in this highly contentious case should be given from the witness box, not remotely, unless there was a very good reason why a witness could not attend. I refused an application for Sly Bailey to give her evidence remotely from Spain. Both Ms Kent and Mr Rice contended that they were too old and too ill to attend court. In view of what Ms Kent said about her heart condition, I indicated that I was minded to allow her evidence to be given remotely, in view of her age (82), living in Dorset and her state of health, subject to receiving a statement from a doctor explaining why her condition meant that she could or should not attend trial to give her evidence. A satisfactory statement was never produced: the doctor’s letter that emerged did not match Ms Kent’s description of her condition and was clearly just written at her request, without a proper (or any) face to face consultation and assessment taking place.

In Mr Rice’s case, he lived in East London, did not rely on age-related infirmity, but said that he suffered from high blood pressure and “ha[d] .. no faith in our civil justice system at all” in view of previous experience in which he was a party in a libel arbitration. His witness statement announced that he would not be appearing to give evidence. He was originally willing to give evidence remotely but then decided that he would not do that either, and no satisfactory medical opinion was produced. Neither witness was therefore called by MGN. Although I have read their witness statements, which are largely exculpatory, I do not in the circumstances feel able to give much if any weight to what they say, save that I accept the factual content of paras 14-18 of Mr Rice’s statement (not the exculpatory assertions) as a description of the old style of investigative working in the mid-1990s – Mr Rice was only at the Sunday Mirror between 1996-1997 and 1998-1999. Mr Whittamore said that he considered those paragraphs to be a fair description of that type of work.

The important witness I need to address at this stage is Graham Johnson, on whose evidence the claimants strongly rely. He is now an author and investigative journalist, and producer of and consultant to television documentaries on organised crime. He was employed by the News of the World as a junior reporter in the features department from 1995 to 1997 and then at the Sunday Mirror, becoming its investigations editor from 1999 to 2005. He wrote a book, Hack, detailing his experience of tabloid journalism and has written many articles on the subject of illegal news gathering techniques, for bylineinvestigates.com among other online publications.

Mr Johnson accepts that, to a very limited extent, he conducted some phone hacking in 2001, on the instruction of Mark Thomas and to the knowledge of his editor, Ms Weaver. When the editors of the Daily Mirror were arrested in 2013, Mr Johnson came forward and admitted “a few days of voicemail interception”, even though he was not under suspicion. He was convicted on admissions in 2014 and received a community service sentence.

Mr Johnson said that although when at the News of the World he acted as a dishonest blagger trying to deceive people and wrote articles that he knew were untrue, he decided to become honest in 2007. Significantly, he has for some time been assisting the claimants’ legal team unpaid to assemble evidence, alongside Dr Evan Harris, who has been working as a paralegal throughout this litigation, which he strongly supports. Mr Johnson said that not only is he unpaid in his role but he has spent substantial sums of his own money, and in one case guaranteed a potential costs liability of a deponent, to seek to obtain documentary evidence or affidavits sworn by those involved in wrongdoing. He said that he has received threats from some of those implicated in his investigations and threats about his intention to give evidence at this trial.

It was as a result of Mr Johnson’s evidence at an earlier stage of these proceedings (from about 2017) that the claimants were able to make applications for disclosure in relation to identified PIs. Mr Johnson had made 7 interlocutory witness statements before his first trial witness statement in March 2023, which itself was followed by two further witness statements. As the claimants have demonstrated in Annexe 12 to their closing submissions, the information that Mr Johnson gave in his Police witness statements and his interlocutory witness statements relating to the unlawful use of PIs and other third party suppliers by identified editors and journalists has consistently been proved correct when documents were subsequently obtained on disclosure. The claimants give examples of this as regards the use and activities of Tillen and Dove, Mr Hanks, Ken Cummins (Capitol), Jonathan Stafford, Greg Miskiw, Mr Mulcaire and Mercury Press, Mr Hawkes and Research Associates, Paul Samrai, Kenrick Associates, George Rickman and Sid Creasey, Coleman Rayner, and Big Apple News.

Notwithstanding this, Mr Johnson came under sustained attack in cross-examination about his background as a confessed liar and deceiver, the accuracy of the account that he gave about particular events, including his own involvement in phone hacking, and the truth of his evidence that he had obtained from various potential witnesses signed statements or affidavits, or had made detailed notes of what they said. Mr Johnson then later produced the signed statements and notes to which he had referred, and the allegation of lying about this was properly withdrawn. However, the suggestion that he had lied about what he was told by Paul Smith on the Sunday Mirror sports desk remained.

Mr Johnson’s motive for acting unpaid over some years to assist the claimants became clear as his cross-examination progressed. His interest is not in the vindication of the current claimants but in being able to obtain credible evidence about and then publish the story of an organised crime network centred on MGN, and make money out of it. He said that he was trying to categorise MGN as an “organised crime group”, and it appeared to me that - as the Leveson Inquiry and the investigations of the MPS did not make findings about or secure convictions proving the existence of a criminal network - Mr Johnson sees this trial as an opportunity for him to do so, in the form of a court judgment. It is for that reason that he has been assisting the claimants to secure the generic evidence that he considers will prove the case.

These matters give rise to obvious and quite serious concerns about the reliability of some at least of Mr Johnson’s evidence. He is far from an independent witness. There seem to me to be obvious risks that Mr Johnson:

My overall impression of Mr Johnson was that he was very straightforward and matter-of-fact in the way that he answered questions; and that he answered all the questions that were put to him and did not dissemble or attempt to avoid them. He readily admitted his crimes and misdemeanours of the past, but regarded that as being so far behind him that it was almost an irrelevance, save in so far as it gave him an understanding of what other journalists and PIs were doing.

However, some of the explanations that he gave for what he had done were not wholly convincing, for example why he did not make his confession between his conversion to the truth, which he asserted was in 2007, and the arrests of four others at MGN in 2013. I was not convinced either by his explanation of why he did not admit at least in outline his own illegal conduct in his book Hack. I was not persuaded by what he said about the very limited extent of his own involvement in the attempt with Tillen and Dove to capture evidence about Denise Welch, and how it was that he could be sure that all the phone calls to the Orange platform from his extension were made by Mr Evans and not him. I was not, in short, persuaded that his involvement was as limited as he claimed.

In other respects, his witness statement (and notes of conversations that he had with potential witnesses) do tend to overstate some of the matters that they deal with, as if being written as a “red top” column. I consider that this over-enthusiasm, rather than any attempt to deceive, when added to the likely reticence of Mr Paul Smith to incriminate himself and others in his witness statement, is the reason why Mr Johnson’s draft second witness statement in the MNHL and Mr Smith’s signed witness statement differ in their accounts of the matters relating to the sports desk that they had discussed.

There were important matters that were omitted from Mr Johnson’s witness statement – however, as a result of a detailed cross-examination, his evidence was probably complete by its end. He did, generally, have impressive apparent recall of the detail of events, many of which were first described in earlier witness statements before the documents that substantiated them were available, though it is likely that sight of the documents since then has influenced his account of events in his evidence in court.

As regards Mr Hawkes, Mr Johnson’s account of how the Hugh Grant hacked emails had come to MGN was given in his book Hack, which he set out in his witness statement. He says that Mr Hawkes approached MGN with the story, and said that he worked for a group of hackers and he was their frontman. He said that Mr Hawkes provided the hacked emails to Mr Buckley, who gave the story to Ms Kerins to help to disguise its origin, and that the acting editor, Richard Wallace, was told that the story had come from hacked emails. He said that the payment made to Research Associates was not the whole of the consideration for the information provided, and that the rest probably went to a middleman.

Overall, I consider Mr Johnson to be broadly reliable in what he says about PIs, save in relation to the points that I have mentioned above. I have however considered carefully in each case where it is important the reliability of evidence that he gives that is not supported by another witness or by documentary evidence. This includes evidence that he gives on the basis of unidentified journalistic sources.

Mr Evans’s evidence is principally important to the issues in Part IV of this judgment and I deal with it there. He was found to be a witness of truth by Mann J in 2015, but since then (despite denying it in his evidence) he has become a campaigner aligned with the Hacked Off movement and with this managed litigation. He struck me as being somewhat complacent and sometimes evasive. He has been closely involved in the claimants’ preparation for the generic trial, so he is not independent either. I do not accept his assertion that he was not heavily invested in this case and was ambivalent about it. While the specific evidence he gave about particular PIs was not challenged, and I accept it, I am cautious about accepting all his evidence, in view of the extent to which he is aligned with the claimants. Some of his evidence appeared to me to be overstated and agenda-driven.

As for Mr Hinchcliffe and his company MSH Security Ltd, Mr Evans said that he carried out UIG and that he worked with him occasionally, including on helping to blag a well-known TV personality. He said that Ms Weaver told him that Mr Hinchcliffe was the “go to” blagger for Mr Thomas, and that he should stop using him because he might leak tips, stories or information to Mr Thomas. I accept this evidence of what Ms Weaver told him.

Mr Evans explained in a second trial witness statement how he first met Mr Hawkes in the Notting Hill area of London, in about 2005 (by which time he was at the News of the World). He explained how he quickly became comfortable talking to Mr Hawkes “on the same level” about voicemail interception he was doing for his newspaper, as Mr Hawkes was clearly “in the game”, by which I understood him to mean using the “dark arts” rather than VMI specifically. Mr Evans said that he went to see Mr Hawkes again in about 2015, after he had confessed his VMI activities, with a view to seeing if Mr Hawkes would support Mr Grant’s claim against MGN. He said that Mr Hawkes claimed to have no recollection of a case where he was paid in connection with hacking of Mr Grant’s emails and did not recognise Gavin Whitfield, who was paid £500 by MGN in connection with that article, though he did vaguely remember a case involving Eimear Montgomery. Mr Whitfield confirmed the payment to Mr Hawkes and said that he knew Mr Hawkes well.

Mr Evans said that when he confronted Mr Hawkes with the facts, Mr Hawkes became aggressive. Mr Hawkes gave a different account, suggesting that when Mr Hawkes said he was unable to help Mr Evans, Mr Evans said that if he did not help they would destroy him and Research Associates through costly litigation. The “they” was not identified, nor was any reason why Mr Evans or anyone associated with him would want to destroy Mr Hawkes. No doubt Mr Evans was keen to secure Mr Hawkes’s cooperation, but Mr Evans’ account of the meeting is inherently more plausible that Mr Hawkes’s and his evidence generally was more reliable.

In relation to other important parts of Mr Evans’ evidence, I deal with those in Part IV of this judgment, to which they relate.

I turn now to the individual PIs that the claimants allege were involved in UIG. At the final case management conference in late 2022, I was told that MGN had suggested to the claimants’ lawyers (sensibly, it seemed to me) that only the PIs who were actually involved (or alleged to be involved) in the cases of the four trial claimants should be the subject of findings, and that that suggestion was rejected by the claimants. That being so, the claimants must bear the burden of proving to a sufficient standard the matters alleged against each and every one of the PIs, who are non-parties and who mostly did not give evidence. To the extent that the burden is not discharged at this trial, there will be a finding exonerating the PI in question.

In some cases, PIs against whom serious allegations are pleaded in the GenPoC were barely mentioned during the trial; some were not addressed in closing submissions at all, and many others only by a page or two of written allegations and references to documentary evidence set out in a schedule to the claimants’ closing submissions. The attempt by the claimants to cover cases against more than 50 PIs in a single trial, whether or not they were involved in the individual claimants’ cases, was far too ambitious. But it was the claimants’ choice and they must abide by the consequences.

Although a substantial number of the 51 PIs did feature to some extent in the evidence, a good number did not, and I am left with schedules of allegations, with references to documents in a vast electronic repository of documents, and a helpful response to the case against each PI in MGN’s closing written submissions. Except in relation to the PIs who feature most in the individual claimants’ cases, there was no consideration given to them in evidence or in oral submissions. I have therefore, in effect, been given a significant number of written cases to determine on paper. That is not an appropriate way to try such serious allegations. But I will make such findings as I properly can. In some cases, this will be a short and summary process; and in a number of such cases my conclusion is that the claimants have simply not discharged the burden that lies on them to prove their serious allegations.

What became very clear, as the claimants’ case was presented, was that not all PIs are alike in terms of what they did. Some PIs, such as Jonathan Stafford, ELI/TDI, Avalon and Christine Hart, were specialists in blagging confidential information from third parties, such as banks, telephone companies and hospitals. Others, such as C&L and Searchline, carried out searches for often mundane details, such as dates of birth, relatives and up to date addresses, but did so using databases that were not open and without the consent of the subject. Others specialised in finding out details from telephone companies, such as a subscriber’s name, where the number was known, or the number of a known individual, or call data that would reveal others’ telephone numbers. Whether this was done by blagging or by using a corrupt contact is often unclear. Other PIs did Companies House and Land Registry searches, which were likely to have been legal searches of public registers. Lord and Lady Teviot and Mr Tony Bassett seem to be in a category of their own as being acknowledged lawful genealogists, but whose researches were then used by the journalist or another PI to obtain further information unlawfully and attempt to crack PINs.

Mr Sherborne explained in opening, and it becomes clear from studying the payment records that are relied upon in the individual claimants’ cases, that the PIs were often used sequentially, so that C&L or Searchline or another PI in the claimants’ search agent category (see PI Schedule for an explanation) did the initial search and then, often on the same day, a further PI in the claimants’ hacker, blagger and/or information supplier category, such as ELI/TDI, Jonathan Stafford or Rob Palmer (Avalon), was commissioned to carry out “extensive and urgent enquiries”, using the data that had been produced by the first search. This was not the invariable practice, as sometimes the DOB search done by C&L would provide the journalist with the one piece of information needed to crack a PIN, and sometimes the UIG involved was a blag facilitated by subject data that had previously been obtained and no VMI was involved.

As I have indicated, where VMI was carried out it was – with very few exceptions – carried out by the editors or journalists, not by the PIs themselves, and so the all-important telephone number, once obtained, was then used by MGN to listen to voicemails. But not all the UIG was VMI: a good deal was obtaining confidential information, such as banking details or medical records, that would then be used to write or stand up a storyline, or flight, holiday or hotel information that would then be used to enable a compromising or invasive photograph to be taken and published. Sometimes this information was obtained by blagging of third parties, using deception to induce the third party to divulge the information, such as call records for a mobile phone account or flight details; sometimes it was obtained by doing illicit credit reference searches, which certain PIs specialised in doing. The critical thing for MGN was to obtain information that was either newsworthy in its own right, such as the location of a celebrity and who they were with, or which provided the opportunity to conduct its widespread and habitual phone hacking activities, which would then provide the newsworthy information.

The picture, in other words, is not one-dimensional, in terms of what PIs were being used to do, and in many instances it is quite complex.

Ultimately, in closing submissions, the complexity of the pleaded case reduced to four different categories of PI:

I deal with each of the PIs against which the claimants seek findings in the PI Schedule to this judgment. After an introduction, the PI Schedule deals (in alphabetical order) with those PIs against whom there are specific generic allegations pleaded or who are involved in the claims of one or more of the four claimants, and then in a third part with the PIs against whom there are only generic allegations in the GenPoC.

I summarise briefly here my conclusions in relation to the PIs, dealing first with those who were most significant to the UIG that was being conducted at MGN. I am satisfied that journalists using these PIs would know very well the nature of the unlawful work that they offered and would expect the work to be done in that way.

The dates that I give in brackets after the name(s) of each PI are the years in which I find that they were conducting at least some UIG.

TDI/ELI/BDI (1999-2011) (Lloyd Hart and Suzie Mallis). TDI/ELI and BDI conducted UIG, including blagging, on a very substantial scale and regularly for all three newspapers, such that the substantial majority of all instructions of those companies is likely to have been for unlawful work. It was not proved that Code 10 was the predecessor of TDI.

JJ Services (1995-2005). The majority of the work done by Mr Whittamore’s company for all three MGN titles during this period was unlawful. He worked for MGN to a significant extent. For the last year (2005-06), after his conviction, it is likely that the majority or all of work that he did was lawful.

Avalon/Rob Palmer/Abbey Investigations (2000-2011) Mr Palmer was one of the key blaggers and information providers at the centre of a lot of the unlawful operations and was regularly used. The substantial majority of all Avalon and Rob Palmer instructions were for or in connection with UIG, but Abbey Investigations was not controlled by Mr Palmer and there is insufficient evidence that it conducted UIG.

C&L/System Searches (1995-2011) (Malcolm and Jackie Scott). These were search agents, often a first port of call when some personal data was needed. They were used on a vast scale by many journalists at all three newspapers. A substantial amount of C&L’s/System Searches’ work – well in excess of half of all the searches done for MGN – were unlawful because the searches done were illegitimate use of data that was only available for restricted purposes, and not for sale to journalists.

Southern Investigations/Law & Commercial/Media Investigations (1995-2006) It is very likely that each instruction of Southern Investigations (and its admitted aliases) was for UIG, save where the invoice describes something obviously innocuous, like a Companies House search. Southern had connections with the criminals and corrupt Police Officers. It is likely that the activities of Southern, whether acting itself or though its subcontractors, such as Mr Gunning, were unlawful to the knowledge of those at MGN who were commissioning them, including in particular Mr Jones and Mr Thomas. MGN made admissions about Law & Commercial and Media Investigations in Gulati which explains the end date of 2006.

Newsreel (Jonathan Stafford) (1995-2011) Mr Stafford was one of the key blaggers and information providers at the centre of a lot of the unlawful operations and was very frequently used by many journalists. The very substantial majority of Mr Stafford and Newsreel’s work for MGN was UIG. That conclusion applies for the whole of the period during which he was active, which appears to extend from about 1995 to September 2011.

Rachel Barry (1996-2006) At about the time of and from the date of Ms Barry’s conviction in late 1997, the majority of the work that she did for MGN is likely to have been, or been in connection with, UIG, in particular blagging of sensitive information.

Tillen and Dove/Unique Pictures/Lenslife (1996-2011). These two men and their photographic agencies were involved in UIG and on at least one known occasion with arrangements to bug a target’s hotel room. Mr Tillen was very close to Mr Mark Thomas and therefore operated in proximity to VMI conducted by Mr Thomas and his colleagues. However, there is no proof that Tillen and Dove themselves conducted VMI. A significant proportion of Tillen and Dove’s work was unlawful but not the majority of it.

Searchline (Gwen Kent) (1997-2010) Very substantial use was made by MGN journalists of Searchline throughout this period and some of this use was UIG: there are 1,553 separate invoices disclosed. Most of these are not indicative of UIG and it is not possible on the evidence to conclude that the majority of such invoices were for UIG, particularly in the earlier years. “Specials” were, however, instructions for unlawful searches that were concealed by the use of this description.

Warner News/Warner Detective Agency (Christine Hart) (1996-2004) It is likely that a significant majority of the instructions given to Warner by MGN were in connection with UIG, often blagging of highly sensitive information.

Severnside (Taff Jones) (1995-1999) The majority of the searches identified by the claimants during the period 1995 to 1999 are unlawful searches, but it cannot be assumed that Severnside invoices or CRs as a whole were probably unlawful. Apart from the time when Mr Taff Jones was employed there and acting on instructions, there is no evidence that Severnside itself was acting unlawfully.

All of the above PIs were used very substantially by MGN journalists in connection with their extensive, or extensive and habitual, UIG and VMI. They were an integral part of the system that existed at all three newspapers to collect private information unlawfully and then publish it.

In addition to them, there are the following further PIs who also did a significant amount of UIG work but were somewhat less significant to MGN in terms of the volume of work that was done in that capacity (some were extremely important as picture agencies). I am satisfied that in many cases, when they were used, the journalist using them will have known that the work commissioned was unlawful in nature.

Big Pictures (Darryn Lyons) (1997-2011). This was a very large photographic agency. On certain occasions, Big Pictures probably obtained information unlawfully, however there is no evidence as to the extent of such activity or MGN’s knowledge of it, and no assumption can be made, without further evidence to support it, that a particular invoice from Big Pictures was necessarily in respect of photographs obtained by UIG.

Starbase/Celebrity Searcher (Secret Steve (Hampton)) (1999-2006). Some of the work done by Starbase was probably lawful, but a significant proportion of it was unlawful. There is insufficient evidence, however, to conclude that the majority of all instructions were for unlawful work.

Mercury Press (Greg Miskiw) (2005-2006) During this short period, when he was operating freelance, Mr Miskiw was offering unlawfully obtained material, for the most part, and those handling him, in particular Mr Jones and Mr Bucktin, would have known that.

Gerard Couzens Media/TAG News Media (Tom Worden and Gerard Couzens) (2003-2011). A substantial part (but probably significantly less than half) of the work that the company (acting by Mr Couzens and Mr Worden) did would have been UIG had it been done in England and Wales. There is no evidence that either of them personally hacked phones or did anything that was illegal in Spain.

London Media Press (Rick Hewitt and Andy Buckwell) (2003-2011) It is probable that a substantial proportion of LMP’s work during the period in question was UIG, and that those commissioning LMP from MGN would have known that it was. It is not possible to conclude that a majority of their work was UIG during this period.

Martin Coutts (2001-2003, 2006-2011) As with LMP, the right conclusion is that a significant part of Mr Coutts’ freelance work was probably UIG, but not a majority of that work. Mr Coutts was employed by the Sunday Mirror in 2004 and 2005.

Mark Hinchcliffe (MSH Security Ltd) (2001-2006). He was active during these years and was conducting a significant quantity of UIG for the Sunday Mirror and The People, but there is no sufficient evidence that a majority of his work was unlawful.

IIG Europe /Assured Legal Investigations (Gavin Burrows/Angie Woodford) (2000-2004) the majority of the work that IIG and Assured Legal did for MGN was probably unlawful and included some phone call interception and VMI. No case has been proved in relation to Angie Woodford.

John Ross (1996-2009) Mr Ross probably was providing a substantial amount of unlawfully obtained information to MGN journalists and it is likely that many or all among those commissioning him would have known about his particular specialities in providing information. There is no sufficiently strong case for a conclusion that the majority of all work done over a 14 year period was UIG, though the majority of the work done between 1996 and 2003 was probably unlawful.

Lee Harpin (2003-2005) The majority of his payments from MGN from 2003-2005 are likely to have been in respect of UIG.

Research Associates (Paul Hawkes) (1999-2009). It is likely that the majority of the work done by Research Associates during the period 1999-2009 was unlawful.

Dan Hanks (aka Daniel J.Portley-Hanks) (Backstreet Investigations/British American News/Investigators Support Services) (1991-2011) Mr Hanks admitted that all the work that he was doing for MGN and agencies acting for MGN was unlawful under US law.

Benji Pell(Langley Management Services) (1998-2002). Mr Pell was the leading bin spinner between 1998 and 2002. Whoever at MGN was instructing Mr Pell (and many journalists and editors did), or was receiving and then using material that he provided, knew how the information was obtained and that it was theft by Mr Pell that provided the data.

I have also made findings in the PI Schedule that some other PIs on the list of 51 did some work for MGN that appears to involve UIG, but not to such an extent that I can conclude that that there was a large volume of work that was unlawful. These are: Trackers UK (Andy Gadd); Code 10 (UK); Globalnet News (Steve Grayson); Gavin Whitfield; and Fraser Woodward.

There is then a residual category of cases where I have found that there was no sufficient evidence that a named PI was conducting UIG at all, or in more than an isolated case. These PIs were the following: AJK Research (Andy Kyle); Legal Resource and Intelligence Research (John Boyall); Cruise Pictures; JS3/Tyler Williams; TM Media; Austin O’Brien Communications; Simon Lloyd; Hogan International; Jen Paul, Paul Hardaker; Paul Samrai; Dennis Rice; Andy Tyndall, Census Searches.

There is then a category where the conclusion I reached was that although some of the activities being done (or in a few cases, all of them) would have been unlawful in England and Wales, there was no evidence that what the PI was doing abroad was unlawful. The PIs in this category are: Mr Behr, Capitol Inc (Mr Cummins), Big Apple News, Coleman Rayner, Frank Thorne, Splash News, Nigel Bowden, Nick Pisa, Ian Sparks and Franco Rey.

It might be thought that the numbers in the last two paragraphs are surprisingly high, given the strength of the conclusions that I reached about extensive phone hacking and UIG activities over an extended period. In many of the cases in these paragraphs, however, the conclusion I reached was that the claimants had simply failed to prove their case, because no sufficient evidence or analysis was brought to bear upon them. However, they are stuck with the finding that I have made.

I will not repeat here the individual conclusions reached in the PI Schedule.

There was a hard fought series of issues at trial about whether the board of TM plc or individual board members, in particular the CEO Sly Bailey (2003-2012) and the company secretary, head of group legal services and director, Paul Vickers (1999-2014, and before that a director of MGN from 1994-1999), and the in-house lawyers acting for MGN and TM plc (in particular, Marcus Partington, who moved to the Mirror in 2002 and became the deputy group legal director in 2007) knew about and condoned widespread and habitual use of VMI and other UIG activities and then concealed them from victims, shareholders and the public.

In terms of the claimants’ damages claims, these issues are only directly relevant to the claimants’ claim for aggravated damages, but self-evidently they are matters of considerable public importance and are generic issues. I nevertheless remind myself that I should only decide those matters that are necessary to enable me to determine the pleaded issues. Despite what Mr Johnson appeared to think, this is not a judicial inquiry.

The claimants’ pleaded generic case is that:

MGN denies these allegations in full. Further, it denies that the knowledge of Mr Partington would be of any relevance to the claimants’ claim for damages, since, as an employed lawyer, he had no independent duty or power to stop any UIG and could not make any public disclosure about matters that were confidential. However, as a lawyer, Mr Partington (and indeed the other employed lawyers) would have been expected to advise their client of the fact that unlawful and illegal activities were taking place, when they were aware of them, and to advise the head of group legal, the CEO or the board what they should do. The claimants did not advance any case that the commission of crimes entitled Mr Partington to override MGN’s privilege in their communications.

MGN admits that the existence of UIG was only revealed to third parties by the Board after 2011:

MGN then pleads that concealment from its board continued after August 2011 and relies on two matters:

MGN does not expressly plead the names of the individuals who deliberately concealed the UIG from the Board and the Legal Department, nor was a request for further information made in that regard by the claimants. The reader is left to infer from the case that is pleaded that it must necessarily be the three editors, Mr Wallace, Ms Weaver and Mr Thomas, to whom Ms Bailey spoke in 2006 and 2007 following the Information Commissioner’s reports, who did not disclose that they knew that VMI and UIG was being conducted, and those of the 43 senior editorial executives (unidentified) who countersigned Mr Vickers’ 2011 questionnaire who knew that VMI or other UIG was being conducted by journalists or editors.

As regards Mr Vickers’ knowledge of phone hacking at MGN newspapers, MGN pleads that:

Legal privilege is pleaded in relation to the state of Mr Partington’s knowledge. Ms Bailey left TM plc in June 2012. Nothing is pleaded about when Mr Vaghela, the Finance Director and the only other executive board member after 2004, first became aware of phone hacking having been carried on at MGN, but he denied in evidence that the markets had been misled at any time because “we told the market when we had clear evidence” in 2013 or 2014. His reference to “clear evidence” echoed the line being taken by Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers, that at no time was there evidence of wrongdoing available to the board.

It is remarkable that MGN, in seeking to exonerate TM plc’s board of knowledge and concealment of extensive and habitual VMI at its national newspapers, itself complains that the truth was concealed from the board but does not state who concealed it. It is remarkable because of the seriousness of the allegations against the board and because MGN must now know, if there was such concealment, who was responsible for it.

In this regard, Ms Bailey, in her witness statement said that “a number of people on the editorial side concealed their unlawful activities from me”, and in cross-examination she said : “despite our robust governance systems, a number of people on the editorial side of the national titles concealed their unlawful activities from me and from other colleagues”. When asked who these people were, she said that she only discovered recently that there was VMI and UIG but that she does not know who concealed it from her. Her witness statement reflected what she was told by RPC, she said (though it did not say that her knowledge was limited to what RPC had told her), and Mr Mathieson of RPC told her that the identity of the persons in question was “a matter of client privilege” and did not tell her.

Following the evidence given at trial, there is still no clarity about who is said by MGN to have concealed from the board until December 2013 the extensive and habitual VMI and UIG conducted over a 14-year period, which resulted in Ms Bailey, Mr Vickers and Mr Vaghela all assuring Sir Brian Leveson that there was no evidence of phone hacking at the MGN national titles, and that they were all taking a “forward looking” approach to ensure that it did not happen. The only reasonable conclusion about MGN’s case is that, although it does not want to accuse the editors or the senior editorial managers, it was they who misled Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey (since they reported directly to Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers) and therefore the board into believing that there was no criminal activity at MGN, despite What Price Privacy Now?.

The claimants’ case, on the other hand, is that Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers did know and that the TM plc board as a whole must have known what was happening. This was because of, first, the number of “board-adjacent” individuals – identified in closing submissions as Mr Morgan, Mr Wallis, Ms Weaver, Mr Wallace (the editors), Mr Duffy and Mr Honeywell (senior editorial managers) and Mr Partington (principal group in-house lawyer and deputy legal director) – who were close to board members, and who would have told them; and second, because Mr Partington and other members of the legal teams at each newspaper would have known perfectly well, as a result of “legalling” articles for publication or dealing with complaints about articles published, that the sources in many cases were intercepted voicemails, and would have reported that to Mr Vickers.

In support of their case, the claimants rely on various documents and oral evidence, which support a case that these board-adjacent individuals knew about illegal activity, and on 14 specific incidents, storylines or complaints from 1999 onwards, which they say demonstrate that the board-adjacent individuals or lawyers (or indeed Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey themselves) must have known, and did know, about phone hacking or other UIG. These 14 incidents are the following:

During case management conferences, in which disclosure applications were pursued right up to a few months before the start of the trial, the claimants seemed to me to be trying to establish a close connection between Piers Morgan and Sir Victor Blank, the chair of TM plc from 1999 until May 2006, and then with Ms Bailey from 2003 until Mr Morgan was sacked in May 2004, as the means by which knowledge of phone hacking was imparted to the Board. In the event, there was little evidence about such a relationship of Mr Morgan with either, other than the following: occasional lunches hosted by Sir Victor that Mr Morgan as editor would attend; the existence of a formal reporting line between Mr Morgan and Ms Bailey; and two appearances by Mr Morgan at board meetings in 2002 to address strategic issues.

Although the editors reported to the CEO, there was no evidence that there was a close relationship between them and Ms Bailey involving disclosure of what they or their journalists were doing; on the contrary, the only evidence was that there was a clear divide between executives and editors – what Mr Vickers referred to as “church and state”. Both he and Ms Bailey explained how their presence on the editorial floors was unwelcome, and that they did not go there or interfere except when necessary to do so. Mr Vaghela similarly did not go there.

I will turn to the 14 Incidents shortly, on which the claimants focused in their closing submissions. Several of the Incidents felt like trials within trials, so microscopically was the evidence examined. When I address them, I will summarise the essential facts and my conclusion about what each proves, having regard to the question with which this Part is concerned, which is limited to board and legal department knowledge at various times. I have, however, read and considered all the evidence relating to the Incidents, even if I do not refer to it all.

Before turning to them, I need to consider the other evidence that I heard about the way that the journalists, editors, managers and board operated and what to make of the absence of other oral evidence if it was available but was not brought to the court.

I heard a substantial volume of evidence about how the journalists and editors worked, and something about how they were managed by senior editorial management staff. I did not hear much evidence about how the newspaper editors interacted with the board. Indeed, I did not hear evidence from an editor of any of the three newspapers during the period in issue, such as Mr Morgan or Mr Wallace at the Mirror, Mr Wallis, Mr Thomas or Mr Embley at The People, or Ms Weaver at the Sunday Mirror, or indeed from any deputy editor during that period, such as Mr Gary Jones, Mr Conor Hanna or Mr James Scott.

The claimants say that adverse inferences should be drawn against MGN for not calling some or all of these witnesses, but I am unclear exactly what adverse inference should be drawn that would strengthen the claimants’ case that the board and the legal department knew about VMI. The four people alleged to have had knowledge on the board and in the legal department were all called as witnesses, and denied knowledge of any UIG (in the case of Ms Bailey and Mr Vaghela) and of any illegal conduct, such as phone hacking (in the case of Mr Vickers and Mr Partington), with the implication that it was concealed from them until December 2013. To add weight to the case of board knowledge, the inference to be drawn would have to be that, if called, the editors would have admitted that they knew about illegal behaviour but disputed Mr Vickers’ and Ms Bailey’s account that this was concealed from them. Mr Honeywell and Mr Duffy both passed away before witness statements were prepared for the trial so could not give evidence.

There was in fact no specific case put to Mr Vickers, Ms Bailey or Mr Vaghela in cross-examination, or pursued in closing submissions, that Mr Wallace, Ms Weaver or Mr Thomas, or their predecessors, were the close connection with the board and the means by which knowledge of VMI was imparted to its members. There was no evidence beyond the existence of a formal reporting line to Ms Bailey, but what was reported and what was not reported was not explored in evidence. I am not willing to draw an adverse inference from the fact that these three editors were not called to give evidence when the case that they would have told Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers about VMI was not put to the directors. It seemed that the claimants’ focus instead was on Mr Morgan, close connections with senior editorial managers such as Eugene Duffy, Mr Honeywell and Mr Hollinshead, and even more so, upon the detailed knowledge that Mr Partington (and his colleagues) would have had from their jobs on the newsroom floor and that they would have shared with their immediate boss, Mr Vickers, and through him with Ms Bailey.

In the case of Mr Morgan, the evidence relied on is limited, as I have explained. It appears from what MGN volunteered about not calling Mr Morgan that he was not invited to give evidence on MGN’s behalf to avoid a “side show” distracting from the key issues at trial, though MGN’s pleaded case does state that MGN had obtained evidence from Mr Morgan about the allegations. Mr Morgan has stated publicly on several occasions that although he knew about phone hacking, he has never hacked a phone or instructed anyone to hack a phone or made use of phone hacking. It is therefore possible that he might have said that he told board members about it: he did talk about it in front of the then chairman at lunch.

In the event, in view of the oral evidence that was given, the documentary evidence and the conclusions that I have reached about the 14 Incidents, it is unnecessary to rely on any adverse inference from the absence of Mr Morgan from the witness box in reaching conclusions about board and legal department knowledge of VMI. I turn first to the oral evidence.

Dan Evans said that lawyers always had a presence in the news department and that they were integral to the editorial process. He said that he tended not to discuss phone hacking sources with Mr Mottram (who was the lawyer at the Sunday Mirror) because he felt that Mr Mottram did not want to know or discuss them. However, he had a clear recollection of Mr Mottram “routinely walking slowly around the newsroom scouring pages of subbed and laid-out pages”.

Mr Evans said that on one occasion, early in his tutelage into the dark arts of phone hacking (so in early to mid-2003), he was in the Sunday Mirror office one Saturday morning, sitting near Mr Buckley, when Mr Partington walked by and said to Mr Buckley “Hello Nick - have I got any messages this morning?” Mr Evans said that Mr Partington said it while staring directly at him, smiling, and there was laughter. Mr Evans said that he felt surprised then that Mr Partington knew about his phone hacking role.

Mr Evans was challenged about the truthfulness of his story, by reference to previous accounts of it given in an MPS interview in July 2012 and a police witness statement dated September 2013, which were somewhat different. In the former he said that Mr Partington said “have I got any messages this morning, or something like that” and he could see it was said with a knowing look and a smile, and he knew it was meant as a joke about listening in to voicemails. In the interview, he said that Mr Partington was exchanging pleasantries in a mischievously humorous way and Mr Buckley responded with a knowing look and smile, and he took it to be an in joke.

Although I consider the references in his trial witness statement to Mr Partington looking at him and to laughter are embellishments to the story that Mr Evans has added, I accept the essential truth of the account.

I do not accept Mr Partington’s attempt to explain away the exchange as being either a facetious response to an article published in October 2002 or as being a genuine inquiry about whether anyone had left a message for him that morning at work. The two alternative explanations are forced, and inconsistent with each other, and indeed Mr Partington said in cross-examination that he was “doing my best to come up with an explanation which is my position”. It is telling that the story of the joke did the rounds in Fleet Street. Mr Basham said that in making inquiries about MGN, he learned of the “Partington quip”, although he was mistakenly told that it was said to Mr Scott, not Mr Buckley. He included the story in his note (getting Mr Partington’s first name and Mr Buckley’s identity wrong) and gave the account to Mr Grigson in 2012. The Partington quip shows that Mr Partington knew about phone hacking by Mr Buckley at the Sunday Mirror (which was not his newspaper) by no later than about mid-2003.

Graham Johnson said:

Mr Partington did his best to distance the in-house lawyer’s role from the source for the stories, emphasising that he was only there to advise, not decide. When pressed about his statement that it was not true that the legal department had to be sure of the provenance and reliability of stories, he said that it was a question for the editor whether they were happy with the source, and that he could give legal advice based on what the editor thought about the source. Sometimes the identity of a confidential source was kept from the legal team, in case a court order was made against MGN for disclosure. However, he agreed that a cash payment to a source had to be countersigned by a senior editorial lawyer and that, when paying a source, it could be a factor what the nature of the source was. When dealing with a complaint, he wouldn’t necessarily have to know what the source was, e.g. if the complaint was about a factual matter.

In my judgment, Mr Partington went too far in trying to minimise the degree of knowledge and involvement of the in-house lawyer. I prefer the other evidence that I heard, including from Mr Vickers, that with certain stories the lawyer would need to know, and would know, the nature of the source. (Mr Vickers said that on rare occasions he gave pre-publication advice himself, where the expected impact of the story meant that the executive directors were involved.) The editors would also clearly need to know the nature and reliability of the source before deciding to publish (as Mr Vickers accepted), with the benefit of in-house legal advice. So, e.g. in the Prince Michael story considered below, Mr Vickers said that he would have thought that the sources were known to the editor and discussed with a member of the editorial legal team. He would have expected Mr Cruddace to have known the source for that story.

An article was published by The Guardian on 14 October 2002 entitled “Celebrity ‘phone hacking’ on the increase”, which said, quoting Mr Hipwell among others, that voicemail espionage had become an epidemic and was common practice in Fleet Street. Mr Partington confirmed that he was aware of this article.

Mr Omid Scobie, a journalist with a particular interest in writing about the lives of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, gave evidence that, when a student of journalism, he spent a week on the showbiz desk of The People and a week with the Mirror’s “3am” team. At The People, he said that he was given a list of mobile telephone numbers and a detailed verbal description of how to listen to voicemails, as if it were a standard newsgathering technique. He said that on one day at the Mirror, Mr Morgan came over to discuss an article being written about Kylie Minogue and James Gooding and asked how confident the team were in the story. He was told that the information had come from voicemails. There is an article about Minogue and Gooding dated 11 May 2002 bylined to James Scott, who was one of the showbiz journalists and a known phone hacker. There is an invoice from TDI to Mr Scott dated 7 May 2002 for “extensive inquiries carried out on your behalf” (for £170) and the mobile telephone numbers of both subjects were in Mr Scott’s Palm Pilot. These documents bear out Mr Scobie’s recollection.

Mr Scobie was pressed hard about the likely veracity of these accounts, about some evidence that he gave in the Duchess of Sussex’s litigation, and about his motive in giving evidence on behalf of the claimants. He said that he remembered the incidents very well because it was at such a formative stage of his education in journalism and he was shocked by what he learnt. I found Mr Scobie to be a straightforward and reliable witness and I accept what he said about Mr Morgan’s involvement in the Minogue/Gooding story. No evidence was called by MGN to contradict it.

Melanie Cantor, who worked as an agent and publicist at the time, gave evidence about Mr Morgan. Her evidence was not challenged by MGN. She said that she had a close and trusting professional relationship with Mr Morgan and was aware that he had obtained confidential information about her client, Ulrika Jonsson. She said that Mr Morgan always seemed to be the first person to know about events that had recently happened, on a repeated basis. She later discovered that there were PI invoices naming her and her associates and over 400 calls to her mobile phone from Ms Weaver, Mr Scott, Mr Buckley and others who have been convicted or found to have been involved in phone hacking. Her name was in Mr Scott’s and Mr Buckley’s Palm Pilots. The inference is an obvious one: Ms Cantor’s phone and the phones of her associates were hacked and the obviously confidential and sensitive information obtained was passed to Mr Morgan, who must have known how it had been obtained and made use of it.

Benjamin Wegg-Prosser provided two witness statements. He was a publisher for The Guardian between 2000 and 2005 and then Director of Strategic Communications at 10 Downing Street.

He attended the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool in September 2002 and remembers going out for a Chinese meal with Mr Morgan present. He asked Mr Morgan how The Mirror had obtained the story about Mr Eriksson and Ms Jonsson. He said Mr Morgan responded by asking which network provider he used for his mobile phone and then what the default PIN code was for that network. He said that default numbers were rarely changed and that was how phone messages could be accessed remotely. Mr Wegg-Prosser said that Mr Morgan then said: “That was how we got the story on Sven and Ulrika”, or words to that effect, with a smile. The evidence was not challenged by MGN and speaks for itself.

In a similar vein, the Leveson Inquiry heard evidence on oath from Mr Jeremy Paxman about a lunch that he attended with Mr Morgan and Ms Jonsson present, in September 2002. It was hosted by Sir Victor Blank, then chairman of TM plc. He said that at the lunch Mr Morgan admitted that it was easy to access people’s voicemail messages and teased Ms Jonsson about her messages that he had heard.

Mr Wegg-Prosser also disputed the account that Mr Morgan gave in his book, The Insider, which suggested that he was the source that confirmed the story about Mr Mandelson’s borrowings. He was not challenged about that either.

Mr Campbell’s evidence and that of his wife, Fiona Millar (which was not challenged by MGN), is wholly credible and establishes that Southern Investigations were instructed by Gary Jones to obtain confidential information about Mr Campbell’s finances, specifically his mortgage with his building society, Cheltenham & Gloucester. This was at the same time as the sting on Mr Mandelson’s financial arrangements. I find that the manuscript note containing detail of Mr Campbell’s accounts was passed to Mr Jones by Southern Investigations. It is obvious that anyone instructing Southern Investigations to obtain information about various accounts at different banks or building societies would know that the information would not be obtained lawfully, which it was not. It was obtained by blagging the information from someone who worked there, and quite likely by obtaining first other details of the victim by unlawful searches, so that some semblance of plausibility could be created. This activity was similar to the stings on the Bank of England credit committee and Mr Mandelson, which was published by Mr Morgan, and he would have known about the Campbell attempted sting too.

David Seymour, who was group political editor of the Daily Mirror from 1993 to 2007, gave evidence about his dealings with Mr Morgan. He said that he witnessed him at close quarters and had a close working relationship with him. He came to learn about some of the dubious methods being used to get stories in the Mirror. He said that he regarded Mr Morgan as “unreliable and boastful [and] apt to tell untruths when it suited him”.

Mr Seymour said that on one occasion in 1996 Mr Morgan showed him a video of a pack of paparazzi pursuing Princess Diana in the street and causing her distress by harassment, which belied a recently published article that suggested that the Princess was distressed upon leaving the building of a therapist. He recalls Mr Morgan saying: “If this gets out, we are finished”.

On another occasion, Mr Seymour said that he was walking through the newsroom, probably in March 2001, and Mr Morgan was standing in the middle holding a tape machine, with reporters around him. He said “listen to this” and played a recording of Paul McCartney, who was singing a Beatles song to Heather Mills in a voicemail left for her. Mr Seymour said that he later learnt that that the recording had been made or acquired by Neil Wallis, who had lent it to Mr Morgan.

Mr Seymour had a colleague who was also at the lunch with Sir Victor Blank in 2002. He said he was well known to him and a reliable source, a City journalist. He reported to Mr Seymour that Mr Morgan had taunted the CEO of BT plc, who was also present, telling him that he would need to tell his customers to change their PINs from factory settings, and that everyone else at the table, including Sir Victor, heard what he was saying. He said the colleague expressed a mixture of shock and the wry amusement that people had about the way that Mr Morgan behaved.

Mr Seymour was challenged about this evidence, with the suggestion that it would have been the last thing that Mr Morgan would have done if he was involved in phone hacking, to let on to a phone company in front of the chairman of TM plc and other journalists. Mr Seymour gave a telling reply to that:

Mr Seymour struck me as a man of intelligence and integrity. I accept his evidence without hesitation.

In April 2007, Mr Morgan made an admission of knowledge of phone hacking in a GQ interview with Naomi Campbell. He said that loads of newspapers were doing it, but felt that it would not continue – a reference and reaction to the arrest and sentencing of Mr Goodman and Mr Mulcaire. In that prediction he was wrong, as I have already explained.

Mann J found “convincing” the evidence that Mr Hipwell gave about Mr Morgan’s knowledge of hacking at the Gulati trial.

So far as knowledge of and involvement in phone hacking is concerned, Ms Weaver was directly implicated by Mr Evans’ evidence to the police and in the Gulati trial that “the people who certainly had specific knowledge and were involved in tasking, funding and driving my activities were Weaver, Thomas, Buckley, Scott, Weatherup and to a lesser extent Stretch”. Mann J found in Gulati that Ms Weaver specifically instructed Mr Evans to hack and to cover his tracks and that emails containing telephone numbers were sent to her so that she could conduct hacking activity herself. There is no need for further findings in relation to Ms Weaver. Mann J concluded that the evidence about her involvement demonstrated that knowledge of and participation in phone hacking existed at the highest level on the journalistic side of the business.

Mark Thomas had been Tina Weaver’s deputy editor at the Sunday Mirror from 2001 to 2003 before he moved to become editor of The People in 2003, in succession to Neil Wallis. He is implicated by evidence from Mr Johnson and by documents that show his association with Mr Rees, Mr Tillen and Ms Barry, and emails such as those sent by Polly Graham to him in 2002 and 2003, including one on 21 March 2002 relating to Lucy Benjamin and Steve McFadden – “might be something interesting on their phones”, and further emails asking Mr Thomas for mobile phone numbers, which he supplied by return.

Mr Thomas moved into The People’s editor’s chair, following Mr Wallis, having left behind the phone hacking that was rife at the Sunday Mirror. As Tina Weaver noted with regret when instructing Mr Evans how to be become a phone hacker, Mr Thomas had taken with him his huge database of names and mobile phone numbers. It would seem inherently improbable that there was a change of culture under his leadership at The People and the evidence shows that there was not.

The assistant news editor and then assistant editor under Mr Thomas was convicted phone hacker, Ian Edmondson. Lee Harpin, the “Dauphin of hacking”, was senior news editor and then deputy news editor and head of news over the period 2005-2012; James Saville, found by Mann J to have been a phone hacker, was news editor of The People from 2004 to 2012. In Gulati, the involvement of staff of The People in phone hacking was not denied, and an email in that regard from Mr Edmondson to Mr Thomas dated 2 July 2003 was noted by Mann J. Mr Thomas was a recipient or sender of emails relating to phone hacking in the Alcorn, Ashworth, Taggart and Roche cases tried in Gulati. Moreover, there is a vast quantity of payment records commissioned by journalists at The People. It is inherently likely that Mr Thomas knew what was happening at his newspaper.

There can be no doubt, therefore, that the editors of the newspapers knew about the VMI and UIG and were in a position to tell Ms Bailey or the board about it, but they obviously did not do so.

Eugene Duffy became a Daily Mirror journalist in 1986 and was news editor by 1995, head of news and an associate editor by 2000, and then became group managing editor in 2004. In that role, he reported to Mr Hollinshead and was responsible for cost management for the editorial function. He would therefore have been aware of the budgets and expenditure for the editorial departments of each newspaper. Ms Bailey told the Leveson Inquiry that Mr Duffy was responsible for ensuring that human resources policies and procedures were followed.

Although not a member of the Executive Committee (“ExCom”), Mr Duffy was involved in the meetings with the editors following What Price Privacy? and What Price Privacy Now? He was closely involved in MGN’s response to the convictions of Goodman and Mulcaire in 2007, giving evidence to Parliament, and again following the phone hacking scandal in 2011 in helping to prepare MGN’s case to the Leveson Inquiry. Mr Vickers regarded him as being “in the journalist camp, but also in management and able to straddle the two”. Although Mr Vickers did not say so, that clearly made him a useful conduit for information about what was happening on the news room floors. It is evident that Mr Duffy was trusted by the executive directors.

When a journalist, Mr Duffy had used PIs himself, including Jonathan Stafford in 2000 to find subscriber details for a landline number, and he was the person at the Mirror to whom Mr Stafford sent his invoices in 2000. There are 43 LRI invoices addressed to Mr Duffy and he authorised 34 Southern Investigations, 13 Law & Commercial invoices, 20 Rachel Barry invoices and CRs and 9 Unique Pictures CRs. Mr Vickers said Mr Duffy’s own use of PIs was not surprising, as he was news editor and use of PIs was not illegal. However, as I have found, most of the invoices of Mr Stafford, Southern Investigations and Rachel Barry related to illegal or serious unlawful activities, such as blagging, as anyone commissioning them would have known. Mr Duffy would clearly have known the nature of the PI work that was being commissioned by journalists.

The documentary evidence relating to Mr Duffy is strangely limited, considering his central role at MGN. An email he received from Mr Honeywell dated 22 September 2005 shows that he had been chasing for figures on what was being paid for individual searches (including illegal credit reference checks) and the annual payments to major search agencies, such as ELI and C&L. Mr Honeywell promised to send the information the following day. It is therefore likely that Mr Duffy was aware in September 2005 (in so far as he was not already aware) of the nature of the searches that journalists undertook and the rates that were paid, the identity of the major search agencies and the aggregate cost (and so the extent of use).

He would therefore have been aware of those matters at the time (December 2006) when he was involved with the board in considering its response to What Price Privacy Now? and the convictions of Goodman and Mulcaire. What is unclear is whether he told the board about what he knew. I consider it unlikely he reported it to the board as such, but quite likely that he shared some of what he knew with Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey. Mr Duffy was given a good deal of responsibility on behalf of TM plc and I do not consider that he would have been without the confidence of Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey. Mr Duffy then played a substantial part in denying on behalf of MGN what he knew to be the truth, namely that VMI was being conducted by MGN on an extensive and habitual basis.

I have already referred to the evidence that Mr Duffy gave to Parliament in March 2007. He was asked there about the 95 People and Mirror journalists who had been found to have instructed Mr Whittamore on hundreds of occasions. Mr Duffy said that since Mr Richard Thomas, the Commissioner, had not provided TM plc with the names of the journalists and invoices, he could not examine individual journalists and transactions, and that TM plc had taken a “forward looking approach”.

Mr Partington accepted that what Mr Duffy told the Committee was untrue and said that no one at MGN had subsequently corrected it. Mr Vickers agreed that it was incorrect and that MGN could have investigated. Regrettably, MGN misled Parliament. It is not credible that Mr Duffy did not understand his or the board’s ability to examine payment records for JJ Services to find out what Mr Whittamore had been instructed to do, by whom and for what purpose. Indeed, he already knew the sorts of thing that that JJ Services would have been doing for journalists.

Shortly after Mr Duffy’s appearance before Parliament, the Press Complaints Commission wrote to the editors of the Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and The People about compliance with the PCC Code and the law. Mr Duffy replied on behalf of all of them, as Group Managing Editor of MGN, on 5 April 2007. He said that he had taken steps to disseminate PCC guidance to all journalists, and that:

The letter of Mr Duffy establishes what could not sensibly be disputed, namely that in-house lawyers were regularly involved in considering whether articles should be published and in dealing with complaints about publication. In the course of doing that work, lawyers would need to know the sources of stories, in order to be able to advise on legality and risks of publication. Mr Vickers accepted that with high-profile front page stories, such as the Rio Ferdinand story, the legal departments would have been involved. Ms Bailey said that she would expect that in-house lawyers would be told the nature of journalists’ sources, if they asked. Mr Evans said that the lawyers would often want to know what the evidence was for a particular story. Mr Hipwell, whose evidence was not challenged in this respect in the Gulati trial, said that it was:

Mr Duffy remained involved at the highest level in MGN until after the Leveson Inquiry. He was part of the team that prepared TM plc’s response to the questions from the Inquiry. Whether he shared all that he knew with Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers is unclear. Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers were not asked about the general standard or content of reporting by Mr Duffy, except in relation to the investigation of what David Brown had done before he was sacked. It was not suggested to them that Mr Duffy had reported all the abuses that were going on at the newspapers. It is obvious that Mr Duffy did not formally report them to be board. In my judgment, it is unlikely that Mr Duffy reported in detail to Ms Bailey or Mr Vickers all that he knew about VMI and UIG but likely that he shared some of what was happening with Mr Vickers, as it is clear that Mr Vickers, Mr Partington and he were “operating on the same wavelength”.

Mr Vickers tried to portray John Honeywell as a drunk and as having an insignificant and unimportant role. Mr Vaghela accepted that Mr Honeywell reported to him, though operational overspend on budgets would not have reached board level (Mr Parker confirmed that, and I accept that evidence). The truth about Mr Honeywell was given by David Seymour, who said that he was the deputy production editor or deputy night editor and then became the deputy editorial manager at TM plc. “He was Mr Reliable”, Mr Seymour said, and he explained a number of important tasks that Mr Honeywell performed in those roles.

Mr Honeywell knew exactly what was going on in terms of the nature and extent of illicit searches being commissioned from PIs. From 1998 to 2003, he authorised 145 payments to PIs such as Jonathan Stafford, Avalon, Warner, JJ Services, Starbase and TDI/ELI.

In an email to Pat Pilton, a managing editor, dated 9 February 1999, Mr Honeywell acknowledged that a number of invoices that were attached were for illicit searches for ex-directory numbers, to reverse phone numbers to obtain subscriber details, and for vehicle registration details. In further emails dated 17 May 2001, Mr Honeywell complained that the news desk and features desk at the Sunday Mirror had greatly exceeded their budgets on searches and investigations, with large sums being paid to TDI, Warner, Gwen Richardson and C&L, among others. The email says: “I realise that some of these ‘searches’ are of a specialist nature”. On 1 May 2002, Mr Honeywell noted that he was receiving a “frightening” volume of invoices for authorisation from the Sunday Mirror, mostly TDI and Stafford. On 20 September 2005, Mr Honeywell emailed James Saville asking what he would expect to pay for “Credit checks, CCJs, Reverse phone look-ups, Ex-directory phone numbers, Electoral roll checks, BMDs, And any other legitimate searches that you can think of. Don’t worry about the dodgy stuff.”

It is therefore clear that unlawful activity and – by inference – the purpose of the activity, namely to assist in phone hacking, was known about at highest level of editorial management. There is no evidence that this knowledge was formally reported to the board, however, and I find that it was not. If it had been, Mr Vaghela would have known about it and the board would have addressed it. However, again, I think it likely that Mr Honeywell did tell Mr Vickers some of what was happening.

It is evident that TM plc was not operating properly in accordance with its corporate constitution. Matters that should have been formally reported to the board were only passed, as thought appropriate, through a filter to those who really needed to know. Mr Vaghela said that Mr Duffy had not brought to him the evidence of spending on unlawful or “illicit” searches, a breach of the company’s procurement policy, of which he and Mr Honeywell were aware, as he should have done. I accept that evidence.

As I have said, no adverse inference is necessary to resolve the question of whether the editors knew about phone hacking and related UIG. It is clear that they did, and it would have been astonishing if they did not, given the scale on which it was being carried on in the 2000s and the remarkable story lines that it produced. It is also clear that the senior editorial management were fully aware of the fact that PIs were being used at great expense to conduct illegal searches and of the extent of such use.

There was, however, no evidence that the editors or the managers told Ms Bailey or Mr Vickers exactly what was happening. It is clear that the editors and senior managers were not being open with board members about the extent to which VMI and UIG were going on at their newspapers. If they had been, the editors would have said something when Ms Bailey summoned them in 2006 and 2007 and warned about illegal practices; and Mr Hollinshead, Mr Duffy and Mr Honeywell would have reported the extent of the breaches of the company’s procurement policy to ExCom, or formally to Mr Vaghela. The only way in which information about these matters reached members of the board was through Mr Vickers, and these matters were not put before the board as a whole by him.

I turn now to consider the 14 Incidents on which the claimants specifically rely to establish board and legal department knowledge of VMI and UIG. These Incidents are principally important for whether and when the legal department had knowledge of UIG and VMI, and if so whether their knowledge was shared with Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey.

Prince Michael of Kent

On 26 January 1999, the Mirror published a front-page story entitled “PRINCE’S BANK CRISIS” (bylines: Oonagh Blackman and Gary Jones). This disclosed information about the Prince’s financial position with his bankers, Coutts & Co (“Coutts”), alleging that his business’s account (Cantium Services Ltd) was frozen after he ran up an unauthorised overdraft of £220,000 and a debt of more than £2.5 million, as a result of failed business dealings. It was published without any prior notice to the Prince of the allegations.

On the following day, the Mirror published a follow-up (bylines: Blackman and Jones) saying that Prince Michael had been given 5 years to sort out his financial problems, and that he had to repay £222,000. They reported that the Prince had issued a statement denying that his business bank accounts were frozen or overdrawn. The article contended that his accounts were suspended on January 7, 1999 after going £222,000 into the red.

There then followed correspondence between Biddle & Co, acting for the Prince, Mr Morgan, as editor, and the Press Complaints Commission (“PCC”). Biddle wrote to Mr Morgan on 26 February 1999 contending that it was untrue that the Prince’s accounts had been frozen, that there was any overdraft “and still less that there was or is a debt of £2.5 million”. It alleged that any information obtained by The Mirror was a breach of confidence and may also be a breach of the criminal law. The letter enclosed a letter from the Deputy Chairman of Coutts confirming various matters asserted by Coutts as at the time of and immediately before publication.

Mr Morgan replied on 2 March 1999 denying inaccuracy and stating that an allegation of breach of the criminal law was “a poor and thinly disguised threat that I will not dignify with comment”. He said that the total debt information came from “an impeccable source who has an intimate knowledge of your clients’ financial state”, and pointed out that the Coutts letter did not deal with the position as at 7 January 1999 or deny that there was any debt. He said that the Prince’s accounts and borrowing had been restructured. He refused an apology but offered a right of reply, which The Mirror would publish.

Biddle replied on 9 March 1999 disputing Mr Morgan’s interpretation and demanding an apology. Mr Morgan did not reply. Accordingly on 29 March 1999, Biddle wrote to the PCC complaining about the publications. They said, among other things:

The evidence now available shows that Mr Jones commissioned Mr Rees of Southern Investigations to obtain the confidential information, which was done by using someone called Mr Gunning. Call data disclosed by the MPS from their investigation into Mr Rees shows frequent telephone calls leading up to the publications, from Southern Investigations to Mr Jones and to Mr Gunning. It is possible to identify (as the claimants did in Annexe 1 to their closing submissions) a sequence of many calls over about 3 weeks passing between Southern Investigations, Mr Gunning, the MGN newsdesk and Mr Jones’s mobile and office landline numbers, showing the course that the obtaining of Prince Michael’s confidential information took.

Southern Investigations invoiced the Mirror (F.A.O. Gary Jones) on 25 January 1999 in two separate invoices for sums of £175 and £290 “To making enquiries of confidential contacts and reporting our findings in detail” in respect of “Cantium Services Ltd” and “Mr and Mrs Cantium” respectively. On the same day, Mr Rees wrote to Mr Jones providing information about Cantium’s accountant and the three bank accounts at Coutts and stating: “Balance (as of 07.01.99) £222,000 over drawn UNAUTHORISED Account is suspended … file with legal department for recovery. Subjects personal account is with senior financial advisor whom will thoroughly investigate/audit Kents finances, advise on financial recovery plan over set period possibly five years.”

This information is clearly the source of the article and Mr Morgan’s written denials. MGN advances a positive case that the information was obtained from a confidential contact at Coutts. But no invoice or CR from a different source has been disclosed by MGN. It relies on the fact that the invoices refer to “confidential contacts” and the fact that information contained in Mr Rees’s letter shows that the source apparently had inside knowledge. MGN’s case is hopelessly unrealistic and ignores the context. Southern Investigations was conducting criminal activities and Mr Jones was a regular customer of Mr Rees. Naturally, the invoices carried an apparently innocuous description of what was being done: that was part of the cover up of unlawful activities.

The sting on Prince Michael was one of a series of similar operations conducted through Mr Rees against the Governor and members of the credit committee of the Bank of England, Mr Mandelson and Mr Campbell, using the same technique. I find that the confidential financial information (whether correct or erroneous) was blagged from banks and others by operatives on behalf of Mr Rees, in Prince Michael’s case by Mr Gunning. Mr Jones would have been under no illusion at all about the unlawful methods being used. If despite all appearances, there is an innocent explanation for all the call data involving Mr Gunning and the use of Southern Investigations, MGN could have called Mr Jones to explain: he still works for Reach plc. Mr Jones did not make a witness statement.

Southern Investigations continued to do further work for Mr Jones while the complaint was progressing: there are further invoices to Mr Jones for company computerised credit searches and confidential inquiries dated 1 March 1999, 20 April 1999 and 22 April 1999. Further documents disclosed by the MPS from their investigation into Mr Rees and Mr Kempster (see below) show several Experian and Equifax searches in relation to Cantium Services and other invoices, leading to an investigating officer’s conclusion:

Mr Morgan was notified of the Prince’s complaint on 31 March 1999. That evidently caused MGN to conduct further investigations. The MPS recorded a conversation of Mr Rees on 16 April 1999 saying that he had been asked by Mr Jones to meet the Mirror’s legal team to verify information he had given them concerning Prince Michael’s bank account and how it was obtained. Mr Rees refused the meeting. On 16 April, Mr Rees made six calls to Mr Jones’s landline. This corroborates that the “impeccable source” referred to by Mr Morgan was not a direct source of Mr Jones or Ms Blackman.

MGN’s response to the complaint then comes in the form of a letter from Mr Morgan, formally maintaining his position on the question of the accuracy of the articles and asserting “two sources intimately connected with Coutts” whose reliability is not in issue. He suggests that the Prince might make limited disclosure of evidence to support Biddle’s position, without himself or Martin Cruddace (the Mirror’s in-house lawyer at that time) seeing it. Mr Morgan stated that the allegation of soliciting information by misrepresentation was completely unfounded and that the primary source had been known to the journalist for 10 years, which rendered hoax calls “unnecessary and of little consequence to us”. He suggested that such unsubstantiated allegations were an attempt to prejudice the PCC against the Mirror. He also offered to discuss through the PCC the terms of a publication that would settle the matter.

Two days later, Mr Rees was instructed by Mr Jones to conduct further enquiries on Cantium Services and the Prince, and on 26 April 1999 Mr Cruddace had a conversation with the PCC to seek to explore a means of settling the matter. On 19 May 1999, Biddle sent Mr Cruddace a letter from the Deputy Chairman of Coutts confirming that there had never been an account frozen or an unauthorised overdraft and that agreed indebtedness had been eliminated in December 1998. In the light of that, Mr Cruddace confirmed to Biddle that the Mirror would publish an apology. Wording and terms were agreed on 11 June 1999. These included that an apology would be published on p.7 of the next day’s newspaper or an earlier page, starting above the fold, and that £12,500 for costs would be paid by 18 June. In the event, to the anger of Prince Michael, MGN published the apology on p.9, below the fold.

The payment was authorised by Mr Vickers. He said that the story was not discussed with him but that the editorial legal department (i.e. Mr Cruddace) would have known the type of source before publication, and that the editor would have wanted to know what the source was: “I would have thought that the sources were known to the editor and would have been discussed with members of the editorial legal team”. It is therefore clear that Mr Jones, Mr Cruddace and Mr Morgan would very likely have known (and Mr Jones certainly knew) that the source for this confidential information – whether right or wrong – was Mr Rees of Southern Investigations or someone engaged by him, and that there was no direct legitimate source. The suggestion that there were “two sources intimately connected with Coutts” was invented, unless what was meant was Mr Rees and whomever he commissioned to extract the information, in which case it was inaccurate and misleading.

Mr Partington said in cross-examination that Mr Vickers and Mr Cruddace were dealing with the complaint. Mr Vickers claimed that he would not have been interested in investigating why an apology was required, if Mr Cruddace said that the story was wrong. As Mr Vickers accepted, the Mirror had to settle the complaint because it could not reveal the use of Jonathan Rees – even before he was arrested by the MPS. There was no legitimate confidential source who got the information wrong. I find that Mr Vickers would have been told that at the time by Mr Cruddace or Mr Morgan, even if at such length of time he cannot recall it. It was too big a story for the reasons for withdrawal not to be explaind to Mr Vickers. Even though the settlement sum was relatively small and Mr Vickers had a busy year with the merger of Trinity plc and Mirror Group plc, something would have been said to him about the reason for paying out on such a headline-grabbing story.

This episode therefore demonstrates that the editor, a member of the legal department and Mr Vickers, a board member, knew in 1999 that journalists in the Daily Mirror were conducting UIG, using very dubious PIs - something different in character from information provided in breach of confidence by an unexpected source or established contact, where there might be a public interest defence. It is not clear that any criminal offence was committed in obtaining information about the Prince’s finances, though it might have been, as the investigating officer concluded; but on any view VMI does not appear to have been involved on this occasion.

Arrest of Doug Kempster

The arrest of Mr Rees followed shortly after the Prince Michael matter was resolved. At the same time, Mr Kempster, a senior Sunday Mirror journalist, was arrested in connection with investigations into corrupt police officers and the unlawful distribution of confidential police documents. Two officers from the MPC’s anti-corruption unit attended MGN’s offices on 24 September 1999 to discuss the investigation. It was Mr Partington whom they met. He was, at the time, The People’s in-house lawyer, but he explained that they might have seen him simply because he was a lawyer who was there and available.

Mr Partington’s subsequent letter demonstrates that the two officers gave the background to the investigation and wanted to speak to Gary Jones in connection with Mr Rees’s and Mr Fillery’s companies, Southern Investigations, Planman and Law & Commercial. A telephone conversation with Mr Partington followed and then he wrote to D.I. Burke on 28 September 1999.

The letter was on MGN notepaper (headed “Mirror Group” and “FROM THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT”). Mr Partington was therefore not writing only on behalf of the Sunday Mirror newspaper. Under the heading “Doug Kempster/Jonathan Rees”, Mr Partington said:

Mr Partington therefore answered the Police enquiries but on a very narrow basis. He confirmed that the Sunday Mirror did not have the Police Gazette on its systems and that the Sunday Mirror had not paid anything to Law & Commercial, Southern Investigations Ltd or Planman Ltd. DI Burke would have read the letter and been led to believe that there was no record of a connection between Mr Kempster and the Sunday Mirror on the one hand and Jonathan Rees and his companies on the other. In his witness statement, Mr Partington said that having been shown the letter, he had no recollection of the meeting or writing the letter. But in cross-examination he said that until he was shown the letter he had no recollection.

Mr Partington was challenged about his investigation and the terms of his response. What Mr Partington could say was restricted by MGN’s privilege. It appeared that he did have a recollection about the circumstances of the meeting and that he reported the meeting afterwards to somebody above him, but not Mr Vickers. He said he did not carry out a proper investigation, only a quick enquiry. He felt that as the requests had been made at a meeting rather than in a letter they were informal. But nevertheless he said that he investigated payments made to Mr Rees, though he could not remember now what he looked at then. The Police could have come back to ask more questions, he said.

There were in fact over 100 payments between 1996 and 1999 to Media Investigations (an alias of Southern Investigations, in whose name the Sunday Mirror was billed by Mr Rees) made by MGN on behalf of Sunday Mirror editors and journalists. Further, although the Sunday Mirror did not pay Southern Investigations, MGN (which organised the payments for all three newspapers) did, mainly on behalf of the Daily Mirror, in particular Gary Jones, with whom the Police wished to speak. Mr Partington justified his response on the basis that it was literally true, and said that his letter was “a carefully worded letter”.

In my judgment, the letter was carefully worded to avoid giving the Police the information that they were interested in. Even cursory investigation would have shown Mr Partington that MGN was making many payments to Mr Rees’s companies, even if the Sunday Mirror itself was not making payments to Mr Rees personally or to Law & Commercial (as MGN made them on behalf of its newspapers). It is likely, in my view, that Mr Partington’s report to his client would have drawn attention to the large number of payments made to a PI that had been arrested by the Police on criminal charges, including some made by Mr Kempster, particularly as the MPS were showing interest in speaking to another journalist who clearly used Southern a good deal. It would have been negligent of Mr Partington not to do so.

That report in my judgment was probably made to Mr Vickers, who accepted that he had a close working relationship with Mr Partington and a “no surprises” rule in terms of reporting. Mr Partington accepted in cross-examination that if he had been aware of unlawful activity before 2004 (which is when he admitted that he was aware of it) he would have told Mr Vickers about it. Mr Stephen Parker, a board member until 2004, said that he would have expected that the information would have been shared with the chief executive and possibly also the chairman, but it may not have been formally referred to the board as a whole. Mr Vickers claimed to have no memory of the arrest of Kempster or the request to speak to Jones and, unconvincingly, that he had never seen Mr Partington’s letter to the MPS before.

The notion that Mr Partington first could not remember the meeting with the Police or writing the letter at all, and then specifically remembered that he did not report it to Mr Vickers but to someone else that he cannot identify, and recalls now that he was not aware at the time in 1999 of all Mr Rees’s aliases, is wholly unpersuasive and I reject that evidence.

Mr Vickers said that he had no memory of the matter or of being involved, but accepted that Mr Partington would have looked into it properly before replying. He said that he was not shocked by Mr Partington’s “accurate” reply – he might have taken the same approach – but felt that it was wrong if it was relying on the fact that it was MGN that paid Mr Rees rather than the Sunday Mirror. He also said that Mr Partington should certainly have said to editors that Mr Rees should not be used in future. But Mr Partington apparently did not, and therefore all MGN journalists were able to continue to use the various companies that Mr Rees had set up to carry out unlawful investigations – even if Mr Rees himself was soon in prison. Mr Jones and Mr Thomas continued to use Law & Commercial until March 2002.

What this episode does demonstrate is that, even as far back as 1999, Mr Partington was aware that MGN journalists were carrying on information gathering activities that were likely to be unlawful; and that there was a real possibility – subject to what came out of the Police investigation into Mr Rees and his companies – there was criminality involved. This, in my judgment, is supported by the defensive approach that he took to the willingness of MGN to make Mr Jones available to answer questions (though it was entirely fair to want to know whether he was to be questioned as a suspect). There was however no indication at that time in this matter that VMI was being used. It also shows that Mr Vickers knew (though he did not dispute it in general) of unlawful (not criminal) activity by MGN journalists. It does not however establish that anyone else on the board knew about it. I am not persuaded that Mr Vickers did tell Sir Victor Blank or the then chief executive of these matters, though he should have done.

On 24 March 2001, the Daily Mirror published an article about Amanda Holden and her husband, Leslie Heseltine (stage name, Les Dennis), “Amanda’s fury over her friend’s fondness for Les” (byline: James Scott). The friend in question was Emily Symons, a soap star. The article claimed that Ms Symons had got “too close” to Mr Heseltine and said, quoting an unidentified “friend”, that Ms Holden was “paranoid about Emily”. Much of the content was then re-published in the Daily Mirror’s 3am column on 2 April 2001.

Ms Holden’s and Mr Heseltine’s solicitors wrote to Mr Morgan, as editor, and Mr Partington, on 3 April 2001. Mr Partington was sent a copy because he had been dealing with the same solicitors in relation to an unconnected matter at The People shortly before. Mr Cruddace was still the Daily Mirror’s in-house solicitor, who dealt with the matter. The letter complained that the information was inaccurate and that there had been no attempt made to check the accuracy before publication. An apology and retraction was sought.

The letter was not replied to, despite a chaser a week later, and the lawyers had to send a further letter on 20 April 2001, warning of a formal complaint. This letter also referred to an interview with Ms Symons published on 11 April in SunWoman, in which Ms Symons contradicted the Mirror’s allegations.

On 30 April 2001, the Daily Mirror published a retraction and apology. A modest payment towards legal expenses was agreed by Mr Cruddace and made in June 2001.

Ms Holden and Mr Heseltine each brought a phone hacking claim in 2015. Each relied on the original article as being the product of UIG. In the Defences in both claims, MGN admitted that the article was the product of VMI or blagging (without saying which). The statement of truth on each was signed by Mr Partington, but, curiously, he was not willing to accept in cross-examination that the article was the product of UIG until he was shown the pleaded Defences. He was not personally involved in the matter in 2001; nevertheless, his instinct to deny what could not sensibly be denied was revealing. Like MGN in its attitude to the allegations in this trial as a whole, there was an unwillingness to accept the implications of the findings or admissions that had previously been made.

Even now, MGN denies that the story was the product of (or verified by) phone hacking, but without explaining how Mr Scott, who was found in Gulati to be a leading phone hacker, got the story otherwise. Mr Scott has not given evidence. MGN contends that the information was wrong and that the retraction was made as a result of the SunWorld interview showing the information to be false. But no evidence to that effect was given: it is simply an inference that I am being invited to draw from the denials by Ms Symons and solicitors acting for Ms Holden and Mr Heseltine.

I am unable to draw the inference. The evidence that is much more compelling is (i) the six invoices from TDI for work commissioned by Mr Scott between 26 February 2001 and 27 March 2001, all described as being for “enquiries made on your behalf” or a similar description, and all with a subject of “Symons”, “Holden” or “Haseltine” [sic] – invoices to a journalist found to have been a leading phone hacker from a PI found to have carried out work in connection with phone hacking and admitted by MGN to have been so involved during the Gulati period; (ii) the presence of Mr Heseltine’s name in the Palm Pilots of James Scott and Dan Evans (albeit the Evans records relate to a slightly later period); (iii) a substantial volume of unexplained call data (from the time that call data records exist, 2002) from MGN landlines to the mobile phone numbers of Mr Heseltine and his associates, including Ms Holden, showing that both were targeted by MGN journalists; and (iv) the unchallenged evidence of Mr Heseltine in his witness statement about the previous publication of private information about him by MGN in 2000, which was unexplained.

There is also the evidence of Mr Basham, who made a detailed note in June 2012 of what he was told about the prevalence of phone hacking at MGN by an unidentified source. This included that the later story of Ms Holden having an affair with Neil Morrissey was obtained by phone hacking. As I shall explain later, I accept the evidence of Mr Basham, and this piece of evidence establishes that Ms Holden was a Daily Mirror phone hacking target.

I do not find convincing the argument that MGN withdrew and settled (remarkably) quickly because of Ms Symons’ comments in SunWoman that the allegations by the Mirror were wrong. Ms Holden and Mr Heseltine had already said that, through their solicitors – and the Mirror had had the confidence in the story to publish it without bothering to put the allegations to any of those involved. It is hardly surprising if those who are caught in compromising or embarrassing circumstances deny the accuracy of the allegations, where there is no clear proof of what is alleged. A newspaper would expect such a response, which the public hear and see on a daily basis.

The reason for the swift retraction, in my judgment, was the result of the 3 weeks of investigation that probably took place before there was a reply to the complaint, namely discovery that the source of the information (or corroboration of it) was one that could not be made public or admitted to the complainants or the PCC. Mr Vickers accepted that Mr Cruddace would have wanted to know from Mr Scott how the story was put together and would have looked at the invoices. Mr Vickers said that Mr Cruddace would have had authority to settle his case without referring to him but that he would have raised with Mr Vickers anything illegal that he discovered. Mr Vickers was not asked in terms, in cross-examination, whether he was told by Mr Cruddace that there was evidence of VMI by Mr Scott. I therefore am unable to find that Mr Vickers was told that at this time. He may well have been told nothing about this incident.

This episode therefore proves that Mr Cruddace, a member of the legal department, would have been aware that Mr Scott was using TDI to conduct UIG to assist him with voicemail interception. It is not clear, however, whether that knowledge went beyond Mr Cruddace.

Mr Partington was very closely involved in this matter, which was a kiss and tell story about a married footballer’s love affairs. Mr Vickers accepted that he talked about it a lot to Mr Partington. The claimants contend that it proves that Mr Partington, still then the in-house lawyer for The People, knew that MGN had (or he himself had seen) an unlawfully obtained copy of Mr Flitcroft’s mobile phone call data. They also contend that the settlement of the phone hacking claim brought by Mr Flitcroft many years later shows that MGN knew at that time that the story was obtained or stood up by UIG and so could not be defended at trial without admitting unlawful conduct.

The People was preparing to publish a story about Mr Flitcroft’s adultery but he obtained a “super injunction” on 27 April 2001 to prevent publication and his identification. Mr Flitcroft’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, asserts and gave evidence that it became obvious that Mr Partington knew that Mr Flitcroft’s call data would undermine his case, by showing that he had misled the court by presenting an inaccurate account. Mr Partington accepts that, prior to the return date, he pressed for Mr Flitcroft’s call data, but he says that he did so because the story told by one of the two women involved included an allegation that Mr Flitcroft had continued to call her frequently. That was put into writing by her and became evidence on the return date. (The injunction was continued but eventually set aside by the Court of Appeal and the story published by The People with some relish, but that is not directly relevant to the issues that I have to decide.)

The story of the affairs was provided to a People reporter on 18 and 19 April 2001 by the two women themselves, independently. The reporter referred the matter to her news editor, James Weatherup, later convicted of phone hacking at the News of the World. Both women were interviewed, and there was an attempt to record a phone call of one of them with Mr Flitcroft, to obtain confirmation of her story, which failed. There was then some contact between one or both of the women and Mr Flitcroft which tipped him off, resulting in an ex parte injunction application.

The pleaded allegation is that the legal department of The People was in possession of Mr Flitcroft’s telephone call records at the time when it contested the continuation of the injunction. It is alleged that these were obtained by Starbase for Mr Weatherup, on the strength of an invoice relating to Flitcroft addressed to Mr Weatherup. MGN’s case is that Mr Partington was keen to obtain the mobile phone data from Mr Flitcroft because of the assertion by one of the two women that Mr Flitcroft had continued to be in regular contact with her, a matter not acknowledged in Mr Flitcroft’s evidence in support of his application.

The Starbase invoice is dated 13 August 2001 and headed “Consultancy RE: FILTCROFT G” [sic] for £150. The tax point for the services provided is stated to be 16 July 2001, and the invoice bears the reference “JW/20-4/DCS”. There are ten other unconnected Starbase invoices dated 13 August 2001 with similar style refences to work said to have been in April 2001. The claimants contend that this shows that the work was done for James Weatherup on 20 April 2001 and was “Detailed Call Schedule” or “Data Call Schedule”. The style of reference, using the day and the month separated by a hyphen, is used on many other invoices, e.g. “IE/28-3/DCSMOB” on an invoice with a tax point of 28 March 2000 and “IE/28-8/DX” on an invoice with a tax point of 2 September 2001. These show that the initial following the date reference are an abbreviation for the type of service commissioned.

Mr Lewis said that on the evening of 26 April 2001, after the ex parte injunction was granted and before the return date the next day, Mr Partington spoke to him and asked for production of Mr Flitcroft’s telephone records, a request that was loudly repeated outside court the following day. By then Mr Partington and one of the women had made witness statements in opposition. The woman in question had said that Flitcroft continued to text and call her. Mr Partington continued to demand the telephone records in correspondence with Mr Lewis following the hearing on several occasions, and eventually Mr Partington sent Mr Lewis the telephone records of the two women.

Mr Partington made a further witness statement in the proceedings on 18 May 2001, raising points about stays in hotels during the two affairs. There are two Warner invoices that have been disclosed with reference to Mr Flitcroft, including one dated 1 May 2001 charging £195 for “Edmondson. Gary Flitcroft enqs”, and another dated 6 April 2002.

Mr Partington said in evidence that he knew nothing about the invoices at any time until they were disclosed in this litigation (July 2019), and did not know about Mr Flitcroft’s call data. He said that he was very angry about the allegation that he knew the content of Mr Flitcroft’s phone records already and was pursuing disclosure of them for that reason.

I am not persuaded that Mr Partington had, or knew about, Flitcroft call data at the time suggested by Mr Lewis. I did not feel that Mr Lewis was convincing in the way that he gave his evidence about this, nor are the inferences that he seeks to draw compelling. Indeed, the inference that he himself was the target of UIG by MGN is pure supposition. It is evident from the witness statements that were prepared in connection with the return date of the injunction application that Mr Partington worked at high speed on preparing a response to Mr Flitcroft’s evidence, and in order to do so obtained the comments from one of the women on Mr Flitcroft’s evidence. Her account was very different from Mr Flitcroft’s. This would have suggested to Mr Partington that Mr Flitcroft’s account was untrue and that his (or her) telephone records would prove it. Indeed, even without that prompt, an able solicitor, as Mr Partington clearly is, might well have thought that the account given by Mr Flitcroft of the history of his relationships with the two women might well be undermined by his mobile phone records. I consider that this possibility, and the account given by the woman, are more likely to have been the reason why Mr Partington was pressing for disclosure by Mr Flitcroft in April and May 2001. If the woman’s account was proved correct, the injunction would very likely be discharged.

The Starbase invoice is from a PI that I have found to have conducted a significant amount of UIG. Even accepting, as I do, that the reference on the invoice relates to the date on which the instruction was given by Mr Weatherup – the same day that the storyline was provided to him – the tax point suggests that the work that MGN was being charged for was not done until months later (unless the tax point is erroneous). This invoice is therefore not a wholly safe basis for a conclusion that Mr Weatherup had the call data by the return date, or that Mr Partington knew about that or had seen it. Indeed, it later emerged from Mr Lewis’s firm that Mr Flitcroft himself had difficulty obtaining the relevant data from Orange (not that that necessarily means that others could not do so).

The presence of the Warner invoice too does, however, suggest that Mr Weatherup was using PIs unlawfully to obtain information about Mr Flitcroft. In a later witness statement made in 2013 in support of an application to strike out Mr Flitcroft’s phone hacking claim, Mr Partington said that in order to deal with the legal action (sc. Mr Flitcroft’s 2001 privacy claim), he asked Mr Weatherup to get the reporter, Alison Cock, to provide him with information about the story. A memo by Ms Cock was disclosed but this says nothing about what Weatherup had obtained via Starbase or Warner.

MGN’s attempt to strike out Mr Flitcroft’s phone hacking claim failed, though the Judge commented that his claim appeared to be weak. Notwithstanding this, MGN later paid Mr Flitcroft £20,000 and his reasonable costs to settle the claim. MGN argues that this was a case of tidying up unnecessary litigation and that others claims were settled at the same time. However, Mr Vickers acknowledged that Mr Partington would not have wanted to settle this case, given his antipathy to Mr Flitcroft and his lawyers. There must therefore have been a good reason why the claim was settled at that stage, despite the Judge’s indication that the claim might well fail. And Mr Partington would not, I consider, have suggested or supported settlement without considering all relevant material.

I consider it probable that, despite his denials, Mr Partington was aware of the UIG through Starbase and Warner in 2014, at the time that the claim was settled, and he would at that stage have seen the information obtained by each, whatever it was. The claim was settled shortly before MGN was required to make disclosure. Starbase and Warner were not among the PIs whose invoices were disclosed by MGN during the Gulati proceedings. MGN decided to settle the Flitcroft claim and others because they knew that to defend these claims would require disclosure of proof of more extensive UIG, which would open up two more PIs.

Mr Vickers would have been aware of the settlement because it was at a level that he would have had to authorise, as he accepted. Although he said that he could not remember, I consider it highly likely that Mr Vickers was told exactly why the case was being settled at that level.

This incident therefore establishes that MGN used UIG in relation to Mr Flitcroft in 2001 and that MGN, to the knowledge of the senior in-house lawyer conducting the litigation and a senior board member, settled the case in 2014 to avoid the need to disclose incriminating evidence about possible VMI or other UIG having been conducted in 2001 and 2002.

On 19 October 2003, the Sunday Mirror published two articles about the Manchester United and England footballer, Rio Ferdinand, that suggested that he had used his mobile phone to contact various people, including his doctor, between the time of a missed random drugs test and the time that he had claimed to have realised his error. The lead article was under the joint bylines of James Saville and James Weatherup, both proven phone hackers; the second article was under the byline of Sara Nuwar. Both made explicit reference to the times and content of calls, text messages and voicemails.

It is not denied by MGN that these articles were the product of UIG though they formally “not admitted” it in the GenD and it remained “not admitted” in closing submissions. MGN therefore does not have a positive case that there was no UIG involved. The front page article was admitted to be the fruit of VMI by MGN in Ms Alcorn’s claim at the Gulati trial (she was one of those telephoned by Mr Ferdinand in the immediate aftermath of the missed test), so once again this is a case of MGN ignoring a concession previously made. The UIG is clearly evidenced by large numbers of invoices from PIs established to have been conducting UIG for MGN, the combination of which and the identity of the byline for the principal article leads to a strong conclusion that VMI and UIG were probably involved. The content of the article is also strongly indicative of VMI or other UIG, or both.

MGN’s reliance on the language used, the sources claimed in the article and the content of publications by other newspapers to cast doubt on unlawful activity by MGN’s journalists and PIs is in my view wholly unrealistic in this case. Mr Parker, who was unaware of the matter at the time, nevertheless accepted that it was obvious that unlawfully obtained material was how the article was put together, and Mr Vickers agreed that MGN must have had access to Mr Ferdinand’s phone records; but he said that he would not have been interested in that, as it did not demonstrate illegal conduct, as opposed to a civil wrong.

The central issue is whether the legal department and the board were aware that that UIG and/or VMI was involved in this incident.

Among MGN’s disclosure are draft versions of the story (shared with Mr Stretch and Mr Buckley at the Sunday Mirror), showing greater or lesser reference to the detail of calls, texts and voicemails. The claimants’ case is that it is obvious that for such a sensational headline story the legal department would have been intimately involved prior to publication, and it would have understood the sources. Mr Partington admitted that high profile stories like this were routinely “lawyered”. The publication version contained lesser, but still clear, references to the above matters.

On 23 October 2003, The Guardian reported that Mr Ferdinand’s lawyers suspected that the Sunday Mirror and the News of the World had obtained his mobile phone records prior to publication. It said that the PCC had been contacted and that a complaint to the Police had not been ruled out. The Sunday Mirror declined to comment.

Ms Bailey said that she did not remember the story, even though her portfolio management role included ensuring that Sunday Mirror and The People lead stories were sufficiently differentiated. She accepted that in this role she would discuss the leading exclusive each week with the editors. She did not remember the Guardian article either. I find this surprising. Mr Vickers said he was not aware of the story before publication and knew nothing about its source, but accepted that MGN must have had access to Mr Ferdinand’s phone records and that the legal department would have been involved in the publication. Mr Parker said that he did not recall any discussion of the fallout from the article at board level but that he would not be surprised if Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey had discussed it.

Mr Partington was not the Sunday Mirror lawyer at the time; Mr Mottram was. Mr Partington said that he was not involved in the publication of the article, which is understandable, but that he was probably aware of the story at the time, though unaware of the press reports that a complaint had been made to the PCC. Mr Partington did however receive the pre-action letter from Mr Ferdinand’s lawyers in 2011 explaining why they contended that he had been the victim of VMI and UIG. Mr Partington accepted that the letter contained sufficient information to enable the legal department to investigate by considering invoices relating to the article and those named in it.

Given that the article would have been “lawyered” and that it went through several drafts, with specific detail of phone calls and texts being omitted, it is an inevitable conclusion that Mr Mottram must have been aware of the source.

Mr Vickers accepted that when the claim came in in 2011, Mr Partington would have talked to him about it, and that he would have wanted Mr Partington to check whether MGN had used Mr Mulcaire and Mr Stafford, who were named in the letter of complaint, and be told what the outcome of the investigation was.

In the light of this evidence, I consider that in 2011 Mr Partington would have looked into the nature of the complaint, by reference to the 2003 article, and would have discovered and told Mr Vickers then that there was evidence of UIG to source or stand up the story. I consider it probable that Mr Partington would have concluded and told Mr Vickers that there was evidence of illegal VMI.

This matter therefore demonstrates that the legal department of the Sunday Mirror would have known in 2003 that UIG, including VMI, had been used to source or stand up the story line in the article. With such a sensational story line, which ran and developed for several days, and in view of the Guardian coverage of alleged unlawful and possibly illegal conduct, I consider that it is unlikely that Mr Vickers was not told about it at the time by Mr Mottram. The legal department and Mr Vickers would have been aware of it again in 2011. The claim brought by Mr Ferdinand was ultimately settled as part of a set of broader issues between him and MGN.

Operation Glade was an MPS investigation into disclosure by MPS employees to PIs of criminal record histories and registered keeper details of private cars. The PIs investigated were Steven Whittamore and John Boyall. Various newspaper journalists were interviewed under caution in relation to these matters, including Euan Stretch and Gerard Couzens, former Sunday Mirror journalists (Mr Stretch returned to MGN in 2004, Mr Couzens went to Spain), and Michael Greenwood, a Mirror journalist. Two policemen were charged and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office; Mr Whittamore and Mr Boyall pleaded guilty to offences under s.55 of the DPA 1998, and none of the journalists was charged in the end.

MGN admits that Mr Partington was informed of the arrest of three men and knew that these included Mr Whittamore and Mr Boyall, and further that three current or former MGN journalists had been interviewed. MGN admits that Mr Partington told Mr Vickers orally and in writing about these matters. This demonstrates that Mr Partington reported appropriately to his immediate boss, Mr Vickers, matters of which he became aware regarding possible illegal conduct involving MGN’s journalists. (MGN claimed privilege for the detail of the communications based on the potential prosecution of the journalists.) Mr Partington accepted that it was incumbent on him to advise the editor if he saw something illegal and that he did advise Mr Vickers at the time of Operation Glade. The communications with Mr Partington would therefore obviously have involved the MPS’s suspicion that journalists had paid the PIs for the information illegally obtained, i.e. that there was illegal, not just unlawful, conduct involving MGN journalists or former journalists. This was not, however, a VMI case.

In cross-examination, Mr Partington accepted that it was in 2004, as a result of Operation Glade, that he realised that journalists at MGN were acting unlawfully. He did not say what it was that revealed that to him. He said that he conducted “a degree of investigation” into the matter, but privilege was claimed for the detail of what he learnt as MGN’s lawyer.

A check of MGN’s payment records for JJ Services would have revealed thousands of payments up to 2003 (the exact number was not the subject of evidence but the SAFs, invoices and CRs are in evidence) for a variety of dubious services, commissioned by several prominent journalists in addition to the three who had been interviewed, many of which services were likely to have appeared to be unlawful or illegal. Checks against Mr Stretch, Mr Couzens and Mr Greenwood would have revealed the use of other PIs too. Mr Partington must have discovered – and I find that he did discover – some at least of this information, and this would have been shared with Mr Vickers. Despite that, MGN journalists continued to use Mr Whittamore until 2006 (he was convicted in April 2005).

MGN denies that these matters were reported to the board and asserts that Mr Vickers did not inform the board of what he had been told by Mr Partington. When pressed in a request for further information, MGN responded that Mr Vickers cannot recall whether he informed any director or the risk and audit committee.

Mr Vickers said in evidence that he remembered the interviews of the journalists, which was out of the ordinary, but that to the best of his recollection he did not think that he needed to inform the board about it. He said that he would have informed the board about any charges brought against them, but there were none, and he took a degree of comfort from that. However, at the time of the interviews and for some considerable time afterwards, Mr Vickers could not have known whether any of the journalists would be charged. Neither Ms Bailey nor Mr Vaghela nor Mr Parker remembered Operation Glade or any board discussion about the matter.

Mr Vickers clearly should have reported this matter of potential criminality at MGN newspapers to the board as a whole. Had he done so, I consider that Mr Parker (prior to his departure in 2004) and Mr Vaghela would have adverted to it and would remember it. The claimants say that it is to be inferred that the board, or at least Ms Bailey, were told. That raises a very important question of the extent to which Mr Vickers shared with his CEO or the board information that he was given by Mr Partington, or what he knew already about unlawful or illegal practices at the newspapers. I accept that the evidence of Mr Parker and Mr Vaghela about what was reported to the board was honest and that they had no recollection of any formal report relating to Operation Glade. That means that Mr Vickers did not share it with the board. It is interesting that he did not do what he obviously should have done. There are two possible reasons: he did not want to bring the weight of the board down on the journalists’ and editors’ practices; or he wanted to be in control of those matters himself, rather than hand it over to the board; or both. Whether he probably shared any of this with Ms Bailey is something that I will deal with later in this Part of the judgment, after reviewing his and her evidence about the events of 2003 to 2011.

Operation Motorman was a continuation of the Operation Glade investigation conducted by the Office of the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. It resulted in the publication of What Price Privacy? in March 2006 and a follow-up, What Price Privacy Now? in December 2006. The latter was an analysis of the extent to which various newspapers had been using Mr Whittamore’s illegal or unlawful services. Both Mr Partington and Mr Vickers said that they were not informed of Mr Thomas’s reports other than by their publication. I accept their evidence on this point: there is really no contrary evidence, but what matters is not how they found out about the ICO reports but what they did about them.

Before turning to the ICO reports, there were other developments in 2005 that are relevant to the case of legal department and board knowledge of extensive and habitual phone hacking and other UIG.

Abbie Gibson was David and Victoria Beckham’s nanny and she left their service in 2005. In April 2005, she signed a deal with the News of the World to tell her story. This fact was publicised in advance. Despite attempts by the Beckhams to prevent it, the story was published on 24 April 2005.

On 10 July 2005, The People published an article “Becks Phone Fury” alleging that Mr Beckham had left a series of abusive voicemail messages on Ms Gibson’s mobile phone. The article referred to the content of the messages and quoted one, referred to their timing, and included comments of “sources close to Abbie” and “a friend”, saying that she had been left “shocked and confused” and comments about what Mrs Beckham believed and was going to do. The article said that Ms Gibson confirmed having received the voicemails but was unable to discuss them for legal reasons.

MGN denies that the entire story, and does not admit that any part of the story, was obtained by MGN journalists through voicemail interception.

The Beckhams’ lawyers made a legal complaint to Mark Thomas, the editor of The People on 12 July 2005. They also issued libel proceedings against Ms Gibson in relation to the News of the World article. Ms Gibson brought a constructive dismissal claim against them.

In the letter of complaint, lawyers asserted that no such phone calls were made and that Ms Gibson’s lawyers had said that she “is happy to make it clear that she has not received abusive messages”. The letter called for a full retraction and apology, among other things.

Documents disclosed by MGN show that Lee Harpin (news desk) commissioned ELI on 15 April 2005 in relation to “A Gibson” and that his extension (3206) then called Ms Gibson’s mobile phone 29 times between 19 and 23 April 2005 – after the publicity of the News of the World deal but before its article was published. I agree with the claimants that the obvious inference here is that Mr Harpin was hacking Ms Gibson’s mobile phone in order to obtain a story before the News of the World published.

There were then 20 further calls to Ms Gibson from a different extension at The People between 30 June 2005 and 9 July 2005, the day before publication of its article. There is a transcript of a conversation between Mr Harpin and Ms Gibson dated 2 July 2005, in which Ms Gibson tells him that she cannot speak about the matter for legal reasons, and Mr Harpin reassures he that he does not need her to confirm the story because The People already had a source. Ms Gibson’s lawyers warned The People on 9 July 2005 that it should not publish, but it went ahead regardless.

Between 12 July 2005 and 30 July 2005, there were then 38 more calls from the same extension to Ms Gibson’s phone, mostly of short or very short duration. At the end of July, MGN and the Beckhams reached a settlement, including damages of £12,500 and costs, and an agreed statement in open court in which MGN confirmed that Mr Beckham had not made any telephone calls to Ms Gibson of the kind described in The People.

In his witness statement in unfair dismissal proceedings, Mr David Brown said that The People regularly used information from “screwed” (i.e. hacked) mobile phones, and an example of this was the Abbie Gibson story. He said that it took MGN less than a month to settle because it knew that it could not produce the evidence of tapped mobile phones in any litigation. As I explain further below, I accept the accuracy of Mr Brown’s evidence about the source of the article. His account of phone hacking is corroborated by the disclosed documents, the nature of the story and Mr Thomas’s confidence in publishing it in the face of warnings from Ms Gibson’s lawyers.

It is also corroborated by what happened when Ms Gibson sued MGN in 2012 for having hacked her phone, solely in relation to The People’s article. MGN applied to strike it out on the basis (optimistically) that it had no reasonable prospect of success. It relied on the Harpin transcript as demonstrating a source for its story that Mr Harpin knew to be true. Ms Gibson’s evidence was that she did not listen to any voicemail messages so she cannot say that they existed. Mann J noted that there was no denial of the allegations and indicated to MGN (Mr Partington was in court) that unless someone was willing to make a witness statement confirming that the source was a human source, or at least not a phone hacking source, the application would be likely to be dismissed. Mr Partington did not make a witness statement and the application was dismissed. Before disclosure was due, MGN agreed to pay Ms Gibson damages and costs and agreed a statement in open court.

In 2005, the lawyer at The People handling the complaint was Rachel Welsh. Ms Welsh asked Mr Vickers to approve the settlement with the Beckhams. Mr Vickers said that he would not have questioned the basis of the settlement or asked about the source, if Ms Welsh recommended settlement, and that he had no recollection of what happened in 2013 when the application to strike out Ms Gibson’s claim was made and her claim was then settled. His position was that if statements in open court said that there were no abusive calls made by Mr Beckham there could have been no phone hacking. Mr Partington had nothing to add by way of explanation, given the privileged nature of any advice he gave MGN. Ms Bailey said that she did not remember the article or the settlement.

The true position was therefore that Ms Gibson had not received (i.e. picked up) the voicemail messages but Mr Harpin or the byline of the article, Mr Carlin, had. It is impossible to conclude that Mr Carlin simply invented the whole story and Mr Harpin’s conversation with Ms Gibson proves otherwise. Whether the voicemail messages were accurately described in the article or exaggerated is unknown.

Faced with threats of libel proceedings from the Beckhams and a statement from Ms Gibson’s lawyers that she had not received abusive messages (which was true), MGN’s only defence to the threatened libel proceedings would have been to rely on the material that had been hacked, whatever it contained. MGN seeks to argue that its acceptance that the allegations were untrue is supported by the evidence of the Beckhams and Ms Gibson. However, there was no such evidence, other than Ms Gibson’s statement that she did not listen to any voicemails. It is not implausible that the Beckhams would deny abusive calls to Ms Gibson, if they considered them not to be as described by The People, or that MGN and Ms Gibson would settle the claims brought against them – in Ms Gibson’s case confirming the absence of something that she did not know about in any event.

In my judgment, this episode is strong evidence of voicemail interception, of which Mr Thomas and Ms Welsh would necessarily have been aware in deciding to settle with the Beckhams. I was not persuaded by Mr Vickers’ assertion that he would have been uninterested in the basis for the payment when being asked to authorise a settlement. There is little point in requiring authority on behalf of the board to settle claims above a certain level if settlement was just rubber-stamped. I did not have the impression that Mr Vickers would have been uninterested in such matters, though Ms Bailey probably was. I therefore consider that Mr Vickers would probably have understood in 2005, when authorising the payment, that the story had been obtained by VMI and that MGN could not defend the Beckhams’ claims on that basis. There is no evidence that he informed the board that VMI was being used by MGN journalists and I conclude that he did not.

Only a few months before publication of What Price Privacy Now?, Mr Goodman of the News of the World and Mr Mulcaire were arrested. At the same time, on 11 August 2006, a Guardian article “Hipwell: voicemail hacking rife at tabloids” reported that Mr Hipwell, a former MGN journalist, had alleged that phone hacking was “widespread” at tabloid newspapers and gave examples of articles in the Mirror that had come from hacking into a celebrity’s voicemail, including the Eriksson/Jonsson affair. It commented that the Mirror had been approached about the allegations but had declined to comment. Mr Vickers said that he might well have been involved in the decision to make no comment, or possibly Mr Fullagar himself decided that.

It was admitted by MGN in its pleaded case that the board and the legal department of MGN became aware of the arrests and the Hipwell allegations at the time, and that these were discussed by members of the board but not at a full meeting of the board. In light of this, it is inherently likely that the decision to make “no comment” was made by Mr Vickers and not Mr Fullagar, who was not a board member. MGN also admitted that Mr Partington was informed, and told Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers that a Committee on Culture, Media and Sport was proceeding to hold a public hearing into issues connected with the Goodman case and “What Price Privacy Now?”. Mr Vickers said that he raised the ICO reports with the board.

The combination of the ICO’s first report in April 2006, the arrests in August 2006, Mr Hipwell’s allegations, the convictions in November 2006, the ICO’s second report in December 2006 and the notification of the Select Committee’s intentions mean that, at the end of 2006 and early 2007, there were very serious issues about newspapers and journalism in the public domain. The executive officers, board and legal department of TM plc (and MGN, to the extent different) are admitted to have been aware of these, and they could not properly have ignored them. MGN’s closing submissions said that, although there was no express reference in the reports to phone hacking, the board and legal department took the findings seriously.

MGN contends that knowledge of these matters was a wholly insufficient basis on which to conclude that the board or legal department became aware of widespread and habitual use of UIG including phone hacking. If they did not become aware, it was because a decision was taken not to investigate beyond checking that Mr Mulcaire had not done any work for MGN.

The first report of the Information Commissioner, What Price Privacy?, was not focused solely on activities of newspapers or journalists but included them within its reach. Its focus was the misuse (and abuse) of private data and the reach and effectiveness of the Data Protection Act in preventing it. The report said that 305 journalists had been identified during Operation Motorman as customers (of Mr Whittamore from 1999 to 2003) driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information.

I have already introduced the report in Part II above at [137], [138]. So far as relevant to the Press, its main conclusions were that:

The Second Report What Price Privacy Now? followed in December 2006. It was more specific in addressing the extent of the involvement of journalists in individual newspapers. A league table was published, in which the Daily Mail came top (or bottom) with 952 positively identified transactions with 58 separate journalists. In second place was The People with 802 transactions by 50 journalists, and third was the Mirror with 681 transactions by 45 journalists. The Sunday Mirror came sixth, with 143 transactions by 25 journalists. In aggregate, therefore, MGN was by far the largest customer, with 1,626 transactions by 120 separate journalists. It needs to be re-emphasised that the Commissioner was identifying this work as potentially criminal conduct, by the PIs or the journalists, though it is fair to note that the Commissioner says that some cases might be subject to public interest or similar issues.

There is no suggestion that the legal department and board of MGN were not immediately aware of these serious findings. The number of separate journalists and the very large number of transactions over 5 years are startling. Mr Partington accepted, in cross-examination, that the reports gave them “firm evidence” of widespread UIG going on at MGN and said that he accepted that all that had to be done was to look at the invoices from the accounting system to see what it was. He said that he was not part of the decision to adopt a “forward-looking” approach and that he did not discuss the conclusions of the report with Ms Bailey.

Obvious questions, which anyone on the board must surely have asked themselves, are: what types of work was Mr Whittamore doing for MGN journalists; and was it just Mr Whittamore that these 120 MGN journalists were using?

Mr Vickers, who was the group legal director, accepted that he was responsible to the board for regulatory and compliance matters. When asked about Mr Basham’s evidence that he was very influential on the board, he said that “in relation to these matters, the investigation into phone hacking, the Leveson Inquiry, press regulation, yes, I was the board member who was responsible for them”. This was confirmed by Mr Vaghela, the other executive director (responsible for finance) who said that with the support of the external legal team Mr Vickers took overall responsibility for editorial and the legal process. He also had supervisory control of claims and responsibility for settlement of claims – until 2004/05 in any amount, and after then claims above a certain limit. Mr Vickers accepted that he and Mr Partington had a close working relationship and that there was a “no surprises” rule for reporting by Mr Partington.

Mr Vickers’ position was that he did not know of voicemail interception until December 2013, when the MPS provided the key that unlocked the door, as he put it. He said that the picture of organised unlawful activities emerged over time. By this, I understood him to mean that he could not be sure that there was criminal conduct until December 2013 and that it was a picture of organised criminal activities that emerged over time, as he had previously accepted that he had known of unlawful activities since 1992 and was not interested in them.

The Commissioner laid his report before Parliament, with the consequence that the Select Committee arranged its March 2007 hearing into these matters.

The reaction of Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers to the first report is interesting because it acknowledged a risk of breaches of the criminal law by editors and journalists at MGN’s newspapers. That means that the implications of the report and the effect of the Data Protection Act were not overlooked. Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey must have been aware, from the time of this first report, of the risk of seriously compromising conduct within TM plc.

Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers gave evidence to Sir Brian Leveson about what they did in response to the two reports of the Commissioner.

Ms Bailey said, in her witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry, that TM plc does not tolerate any unlawful conduct and that its:

She continued:

Mr Vickers said in his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry that Trinity Mirror does not tolerate bribery or corrupt practices or any unlawful behaviour. He said that he had no role in instructing PIs or external providers of information but that he was aware that MGN journalists had used PIs over the years. After referring to the Information Commissioner’s reports, he explained that TM plc “adopted a forward-looking approach”, and that TM plc had disclosed documents relating to the payment of PIs. Payments to external sources of information were, he said, governed by strict policies and procedures.

Both Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers told the Leveson Inquiry that they had not conducted any investigation, or asked any further questions, on the basis that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing at MGN (“there was no evidence and we saw no reason to investigate”) and that their approach was to be “forward-looking” only. Ms Bailey disagreed that on reflection it might have been a good idea to satisfy herself, by some investigation, whether there had been phone hacking carried on by MGN journalists, on the basis that it was not a healthy way to conduct an organisation where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. She also suggested that MGN did not have the data to investigate whether any journalists had been acting illegally in the past.

In evidence to me, Ms Bailey claimed to have no recollection of the initial interviewing of journalists in Operation Glade, or any discussion at board level, or of talking to Mr Vickers about them; however, she was keen to emphasise that no further action was taken against the three journalists. She said that if no further action was taken by the Police, MGN would have had no reason to investigate. She could not remember any discussion of Mr Hipwell’s allegations – in her evidence to the Leveson Inquiry she had said that she might have been aware of them at the time but was not sure. In court, she said that she could not see why she should investigate something that a “known criminal” who was fired by MGN said. (This was a reference to Mr Hipwell’s dismissal from the Daily Mirror for his involvement in the City Slickers share tipping scandal. Mr Hipwell gave evidence in the Gulati trial and was only challenged as to his allegations of Mr Morgan’s knowledge, and his evidence was found to be persuasive by Mann J.)

Ms Bailey essentially repeated the evidence that she had previously given about the meeting with the editors following What Price Privacy? She could not recall whether there was an agenda or minutes were taken. No such agenda or minutes were disclosed, so the likelihood is that there was no agenda or minutes and that the meeting was informal. Following What Price Privacy Now?, she said she convened a further meeting with Mr Vickers, Mr Duffy Mr Partington and the three editors of the nationals – at that time Richard Wallace, Mark Thomas and Tina Weaver – and sought assurances from them that they had not been involved in illegal activity. Again, no agenda or minutes have been disclosed, so there probably were none. No one explained why such a serious warning (if that is what it was) was not minuted, or confirmed in writing

A search was done, at Mr Vickers’ instigation and conducted by Mr Partington, to see whether MGN had at any time used Mr Mulcaire’s services – what Ms Bailey described as “a very extensive search of all our databases to check whether or not we had ever done any business with Glenn Mulcaire”. It is hard to square this evidence with her assertion to the Leveson Inquiry that MGN did not have the data to investigate whether any journalists had been acting illegally. The answer that came back from Mr Partington was that Mr Mulcaire had not been used. But if the search had extended to the firm for which Mr Mulcaire had worked between 1998 and 2001, Legal Resource and Intelligence Research (LRI), MGN would have discovered that he worked for John Boyall, who was convicted following Operation Glade alongside Mr Whittamore, and that LRI had been commissioned at least 61 times by journalists at the Mirror, including Eugene Duffy, Anthony Harwood and Michael Greenwood.

The only reasonable conclusion to reach is that the search was either half-hearted, or deliberately limited in its scope, or both. At all events, it gave Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey the opportunity to assert that MGN had never used Mr Mulcaire and so, by implication, MGN had not done the kind of things that the News of the World had done.

As to the possibility of an investigation into potential criminality at MGN following What Price Privacy Now?, Ms Bailey said that the Commissioner did not provide them with details of their investigations, and: “I’m not sure what – what we would have investigated or how we would have done that or whether we would have had the resources to do that.” She claimed that she could not remember if she ever asked Eugene Duffy about the payments referred to in What Price Privacy Now? I find that she did not. She said again that it would have been difficult to hold an investigation “but that wasn’t the reason we didn’t hold an investigation; it was really about taking a forward-looking approach”.

Mr Vickers said that he was aware almost from the day that he joined MGN (1992) that unlawful activity (in the sense of actions that could give rise to claims for breach of confidence or, later, misuse of private information) was carried on by journalists, though whether it was unlawful depended on the nature of the information and how it was obtained. He disputed that he knew about criminal activity until December 2013, though he said in his witness statement that before 2012 he was aware of isolated claims that MGN journalists had been responsible for voicemail interception, though he did not consider that those claims amounted to evidence that it had happened. In cross-examination about his, he said that what he meant to say was no credible evidence. He did, however, accept that matters relating to phone hacking were informally discussed at meetings of ExCom.

Mr Vickers confirmed Ms Bailey’s account of the meeting with the editors after What Price Privacy Now? – he said they were told that “…if you’re operating under the misapprehension that we want you to do this stuff, you’re wrong, we don’t …” He said that all that was said to the editors in 2006/2007 was that there should be no illegality. Mr Vickers said that the editors got the message, but this was only based on something that was said to him in a taxi by Gary Jones. Mr Vickers said there were no emails or messages that came back – he could only recall what Mr Jones said to him.

Mr Vickers admitted that he did not at the time check or cause to be checked the expenditure on PIs, or satisfy himself that the group procurement policy was being adhered to. He was unable to say why he did not. There was no wider investigation following Goodman and Mulcaire because of the “one rogue reporter” line that was being spun, he said, and no investigation following the Hipwell allegations because “I really didn’t trust him. I didn’t like him: perhaps I was unprofessional about letting that cloud my judgment”. He said that the allegations were not discussed at board level.

I find that an investigation did not take place because Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey did not want there to be an investigation. There was the clearest possible evidence – in the Commissioner’s reports, in the data that MGN held and could interrogate, in the allegations of Mr Hipwell, and arising from the arrests of Mulcaire and Goodman – that there might well be criminal conduct being carried on by MGN journalists on a very significant scale, using PIs (or even, if it was the case, just one PI, Mr Whittamore). The idea of being “forward-looking” was no more than an excuse for not looking at what had happened in the past. So too was the argument that it would be “unhealthy” to conduct an investigation. Mr Vickers knew that an investigation was likely to reveal things that were deeply uncomfortable for MGN. The contention that there was “no evidence” of wrongdoing, or that MGN did not have the ability to investigate – which is what Parliament and the Leveson Inquiry were subsequently told – was simply untrue. There was evidence, though not clear proof at that stage, of criminal conduct. The purpose of an investigation is to find whether there is proof; but no investigation took place.

An honest appraisal of this was given by Mr Vaghela, whose evidence on this and other matters I accept. He said that these matters were not brought squarely before the board, though he was aware that Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers had had “conversations” with the editors following the Commissioner’s reports, and such matters were “the remit of Sly [Bailey] and Paul [Vickers]”. Mr Vaghela accepted that there was information available that justified an investigation and that, with hindsight, an investigation could have been carried out at that point, and that the suggestion that it could not have been was wrong.

On any objective assessment, it was self-evidently appropriate at that time for MGN to conduct at least an investigation into the 1,626 transactions of 120 MGN journalists with JJ Services, which the Commissioner had identified as potentially criminal conduct. However, the board left it to Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers to decide what was right, and they did nothing except admonish the three editors about future conduct, in two informal, undocumented meetings.

In my judgment, Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey, to whom the board had delegated responsibility for such matters, turned a blind eye to the obvious likelihood that some at least, but probably many, of the 120 MGN journalists who had given Mr Whittamore 1,626 instructions in 5 years, were involved in the illegal trade in confidential information, including phone hacking and blagging. In other words, the possibility that VMI and UIG were being done on a widespread and habitual basis at the three newspapers.

The evidence of illegal conduct became even clearer following a claim brought by David Brown, a Mirror journalist, alleging unfair dismissal of him by MGN. Mr Brown was dismissed summarily on 6 April 2006 for having provided stories sourced by the Mirror to a journalist at The People. On 30 March 2006, Mr Duffy emailed Mr Thomas, the editor, informing him that Ms Bailey had been told and that her view was that it was “intolerable” and “we must show we will not stand for it”. It is therefore likely that Ms Bailey knew that Mr Brown was to be dismissed, and why.

The claim for compensation was issued by Mr Brown on 4 July 2006 – his particulars of claim did not mention phone hacking or use of PIs.

The claim was being handled by MGN’s HR department, who instructed a firm of external solicitors (DLA Piper) to act for MGN. The Employment Tribunal proceedings were moving slowly until 16 May 2007, when Mr Brown served evidence in support of his claim. In the meantime, Goodman and Mulcaire had been arrested, convicted and sentenced, giving rise to much publicity about phone hacking.

In his witness statement, Mr Brown explained, in substance, that it was unfair that he had been dismissed for a misdemeanour when many other employees of MGN were guilty of felonious behaviour, which went unpunished; and that the truth was that MGN was taking advantage of what he had done to get rid of a well-paid employee as part of its cost cutting measures. In support of that contention, he gave evidence that phone hacking and use of PIs for unlawful purposes was widespread at MGN’s newspapers. He provided specific examples of stories that had been obtained by phone hacking, including Mr Eriksson and Ms Jonsson and Abbie Gibson and David and Victoria Beckham. He also identified other celebrities who had been targeted, to his knowledge, including Jessie Wallace, Frank Bruno, Tina O’Brien (a close friend of Ms Sanderson) and Jade Goody, and even named some of the PIs. He alleged that the conduct was illegal.

Mr Partington said that the witness statement was received by him on 16 May 2007. It must have been sent to him by DLA Piper or by the HR department. He was therefore brought in to address the matters raised in it. Mr Partington agreed that his involvement in such a mundane claim was unusual. Mr Partington then spoke to DLA Piper about the allegations. He said that he made Mr Vickers aware of the matter and Mr Vickers agreed that that was so. They communicated orally and in writing about it.

In the course of speaking to DLA Piper, Mr Partington made markings and annotations on his copy of Mr Brown’s witness statement. (The document with the annotations was originally privileged but privilege was lost in relation to the markings made and one note that appears on the first page.) Mr Partington accepted that the note was his and was made during his telephone conversation with external lawyers. It reads: “no choice but to settle – as over barrel”. This became known in interim applications and at trial as the “Partington Note”.

I previously decided that privilege had not been lost in relation to other redacted notes made by Mr Partington, and Mr Sherborne was not able to ask Mr Partington questions about those.

The passages of the witness statement that Mr Partington had highlighted on his copy included:

Terms of settlement were swiftly negotiated by TM plc: it agreed to pay Mr Brown £20,000 in return for extensive undertakings from Mr Brown to keep the settlement, the witness statement and the basis of his claim confidential.

Mr Vickers argued that a settlement was made as a routine method of settling employment claims quickly, to avoid costs. I have no hesitation in rejecting that contention, for the following reasons.

Mr Vickers said in evidence that he satisfied himself that there was no truth in the allegations made by Mr Brown. He felt that this was just a “cuttings job” based on publicity after the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire. In his witness statement, Mr Vickers said that with the help of others, he did check out the allegations “so far as we could”. When challenged about the investigations that he conducted that enabled him to reach that conclusion, Mr Vickers accepted that he did not investigate as such – not even looking at invoices for the named PIs, or asking the bylined journalists about the source – but he checked “the easy ones, and the easy ones came back with negatives and we didn’t look any further”.

The “easy ones” were (1) the allegation by Mr Brown that Liz Harrison, the head of HR, had warned editorial executives at the three national newspapers following the Hipwell article to deny any suggestion from other publications that the Mirror “screwed” mobile phones, and (2) the allegations about hacking of Ms Gibson’s mobile phone. Mr Vickers said that he asked Ms Harrison and she denied it. He said that the allegation about Mr Beckham could not be true because the Beckhams’ claims had been settled by Ms Gibson and MGN on the basis that it was untrue that there had been abusive phone calls, therefore there could have been no phone hacking that produced the story.

This is manifestly neither a check of the allegations so far as Mr Vickers could check them, nor the kind of investigation that one would have expected him to commission if he had been serious about carrying into effect Ms Bailey’s admonishment to the editors to avoid illegal activities. As to Ms Harrison, it seems inherently unlikely that a head of HR, rather than the head of communications or Mr Vickers or the CEO, would have instructed editorial executives to deny allegations of phone hacking unless she had instructions to do so – but if she did, without authority, and was then asked about it by the Group Legal Director, Mr Vickers could hardly have been surprised by a denial.

As for the Beckham story, it is a non sequitur that because claims were settled on an agreed basis there were no voicemails and no hacking of Ms Gibson’s phone: agreement that there were no abusive calls does not mean that there were no calls or no voicemail interception. This was, in my judgment, no more than an ex post facto justification for not having investigated. Mr Vickers, given his position, could easily have investigated a number of the allegations by interviewing the journalists, asking the in-house lawyers involved in the stories, and inspecting invoices. Mr Sherborne suggested to Mr Vickers that there had been an investigation, to some extent, and as a result Mr Partington and he did know that what Brown was alleging was true. Mr Vickers denied it.

Ms Bailey, despite her earlier involvement in Mr Brown’s dismissal, said she had no recollection of the settlement of his claim or the reason for it, nor any recollection of an issue of whether Mr Brown was to be released from his confidentiality obligation when he was due to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. She did accept that she would have expected to have been told about the Brown allegations if there was truth to them.

The truth in my judgment is that Mr Partington and Mr Vickers both knew before 2007 that there was VMI as well as unlawful use of PIs, and that they suspected that there was likely to be truth in Mr Brown’s allegations. Mr Partington may well have done some investigations, of a limited kind, though Mr Vickers did not himself investigate. I do not accept his evidence that he interrogated Ms Harrison and the editors at the time. Mr Partington then would have shared his knowledge of the likely truth of the allegations with Mr Vickers. Following advice from DLA Piper, Mr Partington concluded that MGN had to settle quickly with Brown in order to keep the allegations quiet, and Mr Vickers agreed to the settlement for that reason. Whether Ms Bailey was told the truth about the reason for the settlement is unclear: I will deal with her position later in this Part.

In an email to a claimant lawyer, Charlotte Harris, dated 28 July 2010, Mr Hoare, a former People and News of the World reporter and admitted phone hacker, said that he had had a long chat with Mr Partington the previous week. The email comments that:

Mr Partington and Mr Hoare worked together at The People until Mr Hoare left in 2001. In September 2010 Mr Hoare alleged that phone hacking was a common practice at the News of the World and was encouraged by its former editor, Andy Coulson.

In a later email to a journalist, James Hanning, Mr Hoare said:

Mr Partington explained that Mr Hoare called him occasionally, for advice, and on one occasion he said that it was in relation to the importation of tobacco that he called, ostensibly on behalf of a “friend” (though Mr Partington suspected that it was Hoare who was doing the importing). Mr Partington said that he joked on that occasion, “you’re just a criminal aren’t you, Sean”, and that was why Hoare referred to being called London’s best criminal, nothing to do with Hoare’s phone hacking activities. Mr Partington said that he had no recollection about the content of the second email, and denied that they showed that Mr Partington knew about Mr Hoare’s phone hacking activities.

I was wholly unconvinced by Mr Partington’s evidence about this matter. In context, the reference to Mr Hoare’s past is obviously to his past as a phone hacker. Further, Mr Hoare was (it is accepted) asking Mr Partington’s advice about providing a witness statement about phone hacking. The idea that, in that context, a discussion about illegal tobacco importation would be why Mr Partington called Hoare London’s best criminal does not make sense. In my judgment, this matter demonstrates that Mr Partington knew about what Mr Hoare did at the People and the News of the World, though it does not itself prove that Mr Partington knew it before Mr Hoare left the People in 2001.

Operation Weeting was the MPS’s investigation into allegations of VMI at the News of the World. It started in January 2011.

The coverage that gave rise to Operation Weeting caused Mr Vickers to call a meeting with Mr Hollinshead, the managing director of TM plc’s national newspapers division, and Mr Fullagar, director of corporate communications. This gave rise to a press statement by Mr Fullagar, reported by the BBC in connection with allegations against TM plc made by Mr Marsden MP. The statement said that “Our journalists work within the criminal law and the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct”. This statement therefore impliedly asserted, contrary to facts known to Mr Partington and Mr Vickers at the time, that no MGN journalist had committed a breach of the Data Protection Act or any other criminal offence.

On 7 March 2011, the BBC wrote to Mr Partington and Gary Jones giving notice of the content of a forthcoming Panorama programme that was going to expose knowledge within the MGN group of illegal conduct involving Southern Investigations and senior journalists commissioning improper access to bank accounts of members of the Royal Family and others. The email asked for details of MGN’s response and MGN were subsequently asked to confirm that they had used or bought articles from Jonathan Rees. MGN’s response was a less than fully frank admission that “many years ago some of our journalists used Southern Investigations. They were last used in 1999”. The response did not say anything about other aliases of Jonathan Rees that continued to be used after 1999, such as Law & Commercial. The wording of the response was specifically approved by Mr Vickers and Mr Fullager and was copied to Mr Partington. It was carefully crafted to be true, but it was misleading.

MGN’s denial of any wrongdoing was quoted in an article published by the New York Times in July 2011, which reported that five former journalists at The People said that they regularly witnessed hacking in its newsroom in the late 1990s to early 2000. One was reported as commenting “I don’t think anyone quite realised the criminality of it.” The day afterwards, 22 July 2011, The Australian reported that James Hipwell was willing to testify to the Leveson Inquiry to similar effect. Both articles were emailed to Ms Bailey, Mr Vickers, Mr Hollinshead and the three editors and copied to Mr Fullager. Ms Bailey was therefore aware of these allegations of criminality when MGN made its statement of working within the criminal law and when she gave evidence to the Inquiry.

Mr Vickers concluded that no investigation was necessary. He said that the chairman at the time, Sir Ian Gibson, “was of the view that there was nothing worse than an unnecessary investigation”, and that he and Sir Ian did not think there was anything to investigate, as they had not seen what they considered to be prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. I find that that decision was reached with the agreement of Ms Bailey but without a board decision to support it. The decision was a remarkable conclusion to reach, given the cumulative effect of the evidence provided in 2006 and 2007 and the serious allegations that were then being made in the Press, as referred to in part above, and in view of the MPS investigation that had just been launched. What it amounted to was turning a blind eye to what had happened previously, and hoping that nothing that amounted to “prima facie evidence” would emerge.

Instead, Mr Vickers and the CEO, Ms Bailey, decided to set up an internal procedural review, under the Director of Risk and Audit, Charmian Stevens. As Mr Vickers said, this was not an investigation into phone hacking but “an investigation of editorial processes aimed at making sure that we avoided anything improper happening in the future”. In other words, as later reported to the Leveson Inquiry by Ms Bailey, Mr Vickers and Mr Vaghela, MGN was only “forward-looking”. Ms Bailey also said that after the Millie Dowler story, MGN did an internal review of controls, but its purpose was not to investigate phone hacking.

At a board meeting on 26 July 2011, one of the NEDs, Mr Gary Hoffman, suggested that, in view of the scandal that had broken, things might look bad for the board if they had not asked editors and senior staff the question of whether they knew about criminal conduct at the newspapers. Accordingly, a letter was prepared by Mr Vickers and sent to 43 senior staff asking whether they or anyone on their staff or instructed by them had:

Ms Bailey accepted that the categories were rather narrow (e.g. they did not cover instructing PIs to obtain information unlawfully), but Mr Vickers thought otherwise, and said that it was only intended to capture criminality. He was unconcerned by merely unlawful conduct by journalists and editors. There was then the following exchange with Mr Sherborne:

Mr Vickers did not expect to obtain any admissions, but what he did expect to receive was 43 responses which would satisfy any auditor of the board’s conduct that questions had been asked and assurances obtained. Further, the expected answers provided a renewed justification for not holding an investigation, which is what he and Ms Bailey wanted. This was not a serious attempt to investigate anything, just a “papering” of discharging the board’s responsibilities. Given the criminality identified, any positive response would have been tantamount to a resignation letter. I do not accept Mr Vickers’ protestation that he was very upset by the fact that many of those responding will have lied to him. He knew that some of the recipients were involved in VMI and he obtained the denials that he needed. MGN then focused on its evidence to the Leveson Inquiry that there was no evidence of phone hacking at MGN.

On 24 August 2011, a Mr Staines of the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics sent Mr Vickers a letter drawing attention to the facts of the David Brown matter (already known to Mr Vickers) and calling on him to explain why no investigation was carried out into the allegations, and pointing out that it would be very embarrassing for senior executives if what he alleged proved to be true. No investigation took place.

Later, under pressure from further adverse publicity following the Millie Dowler revelations and the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry, TM plc decided to ban the use of PIs – not, as Mr Vickers emphasised, because there had been any wrongdoing, but because MGN was under pressure to be seen to do so.

At the Leveson Inquiry, MGN submitted only a small part of the documents relating to its use of PIs, which were anonymised and redacted, and told Sir Brian that it had a “forward-looking” approach to compliance. Ms Bailey, who accepted that she was briefed by Mr Vickers before giving evidence, said that unless journalists were charged (under Operation Glade), or the Information Commissioner provided information about journalists, there was nothing that could be investigated. “There was no evidence and we saw no reason to investigate.” It was therefore right not to investigate. Pressed about whether now, with the benefit of hindsight, it was right not to investigate, Ms Bailey said that that she was not sure what they would have done, or how, or whether she had the resources to do it. There is still therefore, on her part, a denial of the ability effectively to have investigated anything.

Mr Vaghela took a more honest and realistic position, saying that at the time of the Parliamentary Select Committee in 2007 if MGN had wanted to investigate invoices, it could have done, and there was nothing to stop them from doing so. He could not explain why Mr Duffy had told Parliament that it could not be done, but suggested, rather generously, that Mr Duffy might have been focusing on what he personally was able to do. But that was certainly not what Mr Duffy was saying.

Ms Bailey repeatedly emphasised in her evidence in this trial that there was no evidence, only unsubstantiated allegations, but that is clearly not correct. What she meant was that there was no clear proof that would force the board to act. Mr Vickers used the same excuse for not investigating – he said that there was no “credible evidence of illegality”. Even when the board became very suspicious in 2012/13, he said,:

Mr Vickers said in his Leveson witness statement that he was aware that journalists used PIs and aware of the What Price Privacy Now? report, but that in line with the Commissioner’s own approach TM plc was taking a “forward-looking” approach. He said that TM plc had disclosed documents relating to the payment of PIs, but did not say that these were only a partial selection of invoices. He said that MGN makes payments to external sources of information but that this is governed by strict policies and procedures, any breach of which is a serious disciplinary matter. He continued:

Mr Vaghela, who also gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, said that he became aware of the David Brown matter only during the Inquiry, and that if he had been aware at the time he would have wanted the allegations to be investigated. He said that the advice from MGN’s legal team at the Inquiry was: “let’s see how Leveson comes out and then we will move forward”. Mr Vaghela, with his limited knowledge of unlawful conduct within MGN, probably understood that as meaning to wait and see what the Inquiry recommended for the future. But for those who were aware of what had happened in the past, what it amounted to was: let’s wait and see if we get away with it.

David Montgomery is a former editor of the Mirror and a significant shareholder in TM plc. In about September 2011, he compiled a dossier which, according to Mark Lewis, he handed to him at the start of the first claims in the MGN hacking litigation. I accept Mr Lewis’s evidence that this is what happened.

The dossier includes a copy of the David Brown witness statement, some background notes with a heading “prepared September 6, 2011” and a draft letter to the chairman and NEDs of TM plc.

The notes record that Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers were aware of the settlement with Mr Brown, and sets out a paraphrase (accurate in substance) of the Partington Note. They also record that the witness statement was “removed from internal human resources department files and archived off-site at another lawyer’s office” and state that no action was taken by TM plc “despite clear indications of criminal behaviour”. The notes conclude with a series of questions that Mr Montgomery considered should be asked of the board about their knowledge of the various allegations that Mr Brown had made and of their involvement.

The draft letter asks why the serious allegations were not investigated at an early stage and whether there was an orchestrated cover-up of the allegations. It refers to Sir Brian Leveson’s request for Mr Brown to be released from his undertaking to be free to give evidence to the Inquiry and asks:

The draft letter then sets out substantially the same questions that are in the note, including, as question 1:

Mr Montgomery did not, for whatever reason, send his proposed letter to the chairman or board members, but he did share the content of his notes and his concerns with others in the autumn of 2011.

At about the same time, Mr Basham, a former financial investigative journalist who was running a company research business called Equity Development, became particularly interested in TM plc. He had had a long association with the Mirror Group, including advising Robert Maxwell on his acquisition of it. Mr Basham had, and has, high level connections in the City, the Labour party and in publishing.

His interest in late 2011 was in discovering undervalued companies, for investment purposes. Contacts in the City told Mr Basham that the shares of TM plc were undervalued because of a concern about a pension fund black hole. Mr Basham researched that and persuaded himself that the concern was unfounded. He wrote to the then chairman, Sir Ian Gibson, and attended the 2012 AGM to ask questions.

At the AGM on 10 May 2012, Mr Basham met Paul Vickers and David Grigson, and learnt that Mr Grigson was due to take over as chairman later that year.

Having bought a substantial holding in TM plc, Mr Basham continued to be interested in its fortunes and he made further enquiries of journalist friends. He spoke to James Hipwell and others and learnt about the problem that TM plc faced with phone hacking allegations. Mr Basham said that he then spoke to a senior financial reporter (who had been identified by a friend, Alan Frame), who had been employed by MGN, and who gave him detailed information that was credible and turned out to be accurate. He learnt that James Scott was the king of hacking and Lee Harpin was described as the “phone hacking Dauphin”. He also spoke to a large number of people in “the Fleet Street gossip mill” and what he learnt there tallied with what his source had told him.

In the course of his further investigations, Mr Basham said that he was told that Mr Vickers was the villain of the piece, who, with Ms Bailey, had orchestrated a cover up of TM plc’s phone hacking. He said he also heard of Mr Partington’s quip to Mr Scott “James, I’ve left my mobile at home, can you tell me if there are any message on it”, and understood that TM plc lawyers knew that phone hacking was taking place. He said that that story had gone round Fleet Street.

He formed the view that MGN had been the originator and epicentre of phone hacking and that News Group newspapers, in particular the News of the World, had taken it up in order to compete with MGN’s story lines.

Mr Basham prepared a note, called “Trinity Mirror vulnerability to Leveson et al” setting out in detail what he had discovered and summarising his conclusions and what he thought the incoming chairman, Mr Grigson, should do about it. He believed that the problem could be contained but only if Mr Grigson “did a proper clean sweep of the Augean stables in the next 13 to 14 months”.

Mr Basham said that he took what he had discovered to a lunch with Mr Grigson in July 2012. (Mr Grigson had taken over as chairman on 29 May 2012). Mr Basham said that they got on well and that he learnt from Mr Grigson that he felt weak on the board because Ms Bailey had abruptly left and had not been replaced. Mr Basham said he told him everything that was in the note, including Mr Partington’s quip. He said that Mr Grigson told him that Mr Vickers was unusually powerful on the board (“he used exactly those words”) and that Mr Partington was helping to run the company. Mr Basham said that he warned Mr Grigson that urgent and serious action was needed to protect the company, and recommended David Price QC to investigate independently and publicly report the results.

Mr Basham said that following the lunch he was in almost daily contact with Mr Grigson and that he recalled sending him a copy of his note but could not be sure about that, as he did not have all his emails from that time. He was challenged in cross-examination about his claim to have sent a copy of the note, and he readily accepted that he might not have done, but did not accept that he was exaggerating the amount of contact that he initially had with Mr Grigson after the lunch. He also accepted that there might well be inaccuracies of detail or names in his note, as he had prepared the note from many conversations that he had had. In particular, he said that he might well wrongly have written Mr Scott in relation to the Partington quip, and that it could have been Mr Buckley (which is who Mr Evans said the quip was made to).

Mr Grigson conceded that it was striking that Mr Basham had found out so much that was accurate, but disputed almost entirely Mr Basham’s account of their contact. He said that he went to lunch with him but was “instantly distrustful” that Mr Basham was after a paid position at TM plc. He could not remember exactly what Mr Basham said at the lunch but accepted that the gist was that he needed to clear the decks properly. He said that Mr Basham confirmed his view that the “mood music” about phone hacking was threatening but did not present any evidence of phone hacking or tell him where the information came from. He disputed that Mr Basham was in almost daily contact after the lunch and that he had sent him a copy of his note.

Mr Grigson was a very defensive witness, who was keen not to answer questions about what he was told or about what he called “hypothetical” questions. He seemed to me to be in denial about what had happened under his watch, and was frequently inconsistent in the evidence that he gave. He denied saying things that, when the documents or recordings were examined, it was clear that he had said, such as his telling Mr Johnson that he had inherited a company with a head in the sand mentality, and that Mr Partington was aware of phone hacking or other UIG activities.

His main line of defence to the allegation that he had not done what he obviously should have done and start an investigation was that there were denials by staff (which he felt constituted the real evidence about phone hacking – what Mr Hipwell and Mr Johnson were saying about phone hacking was just gossip), and there were very competent management and executives in place, and no evidence of wrongdoing. He said that he satisfied himself that there were enough competent people in their roles, who said that phone hacking had not happened, and he took this at face value and concentrated on the strategic challenges. There was no need to go digging.

He relied on the new CEO, Mr Fox, when he was appointed, and did not hesitate to continue Mr Partington’s employment when Mr Vickers was made redundant in 2014. He said that he satisfied himself that Mr Fox and others thought that Mr Partington should stay in the role, and has still not seen anything to show that the legal team knew about UIG. When Mr Vickers was made redundant, Mr Grigson took his denials of knowledge of UIG at face value. He felt that he was not responsible for investigating what Mr Partington knew.

As for the functions of the company, Mr Grigson accepted that when he joined TM plc the flow of information was not good and there were “less than perfect” communications with the NEDs. He accepted that Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey had been taking the key roles on phone hacking and that the NEDs would not have been involved.

I have no difficulty in preferring the evidence of Mr Basham to that of Mr Grigson about what passed between them. Mr Basham was fair and firm in his evidence – not mincing his words but accepting where he might have been wrong. He had an excellent grasp on the detail and history of events. I do not find that Mr Basham sent Mr Grigson subsequently his note, because Mr Grigson denied it and Mr Basham said that might be correct, but I do find that most of the content of the note was imparted by Mr Basham over lunch. Mr Grigson may not have been paying full attention because, as he said, he was (wrongly) mistrustful of Mr Basham, but Mr Grigson was given the full picture of MGN’s involvement in phone hacking.

Mr Grigson is in my judgment in denial about that and about other aspects of his time as chairman. I consider that Mr Grigson was in a weak position and was naïve about what was required at MGN, and in taking assurances at face value, despite what Mr Basham had alerted him to. Mr Grigson had previously been chief financial officer at Emap (which published local newspapers) in the 1990s and then employed by Reuters plc before taking over at TM plc. I have the impression that he was not able to get to grips with the dysfunctional company that he inherited.

Mr Johnson attended the TM plc AGM on 7 May 2015 which, as it turned out, was shortly before judgment was handed down in Gulati. By this time, Mr Johnson had been convicted of phone hacking, on his own admissions, and had served a community sentence. Mr Johnson asked challenging questions about how the phone hacking allegations had been dealt with, including why the David Brown allegations had been covered up and how Mr Grigson’s explanation that MGN had done “everything short of ripping up the floorboards” to investigate what had happened was untrue.

Following the formal part of the meeting, the executives, shareholders and journalists mingled at a reception, and Mr Johnson approached Mr Grigson (in the presence of Mr Fox, the CEO) to continue their discussion. Mr Johnson asked whether Mr Partington had been asked about phone hacking and if he had been involved in the cover up, and challenged the assertion that MGN had done all that it could. Mr Johnson recorded the exchange between them.

Mr Johnson must have been at least a minor irritant to Mr Grigson on that occasion, but to his credit Mr Grigson remained courteous and he engaged openly throughout the discussion with Mr Johnson. Mr Grigson assumed that the conversation was off the record and he was willing to speak frankly.

The claimants’ case is that, in that informal session, Mr Johnson put to Mr Grigson that Mr Partington was involved in the cover up of David Brown’s allegations and that Mr Grigson agreed with what Mr Johnson said. Mr Grigson said in his witness statement that he was just politely listening, while saying “yes …yes”, but not by way of agreement; and that he was anxious to get away from Mr Johnson to talk to some significant shareholders.

The whole of the relevant part of the recording was played in court. It was clear to me that there was no indication in Mr Grigson’s tone or involvement in the conversation that he was, as he suggested, trying to get away to talk to others. It was Mr Grigson who approached Mr Johnson (again, to his credit) to congratulate him on having raised the awkward matters that he had in the formal session, not Mr Johnson who “button-holed” Mr Grigson. It was also clear that Mr Grigson was fully engaged in the conversation, and continuing it, not apparently keen to draw it to an early conclusion.

Mr Grigson was asked specifically by Mr Johnson what Mr Partington said when asked what he knew about David Brown, and he replied that Mr Partington said that he “was aware that things had been going on” but not the details, and that TM plc decided when Mr Vickers left that Mr Partington was a “net help to us”. Mr Grigson agreed that by that he meant that a calculation had been done by the board, balancing the advantages and disadvantages of keeping Mr Partington on, and that the disadvantage was that Mr Partington had known about hacking since at least the Brown employment claim.

Mr Grigson said in cross-examination that he could not now understand what basis he had for saying that to Mr Johnson in 2015. But he did say it, and indeed later said that the David Brown issue had come up quite frequently at the time of Mr Vickers’ departure and when the decision was made to retain Mr Partington (and indeed promote him to become group legal director at that time). He said that he relied on Mr Fox to form a view as to whether Mr Partington remained a net benefit to TM plc. Mr Grigson agreed that he could not remember looking into the role that Mr Partington had in relation to David Brown’s claim.

In my judgment, this evidence demonstrates that the issue of knowledge of phone hacking by the group legal director and deputy group legal director had arisen at the time of Mr Vickers’ departure and Mr Partington’s promotion in November 2014, after the time when MGN had made admissions of phone hacking in the Gulati litigation and was considering whether the evidence was such that it should make public admissions (which it then did in February 2015). Mr Grigson and Mr Fox therefore knew at that time that Mr Partington had known about phone hacking in 2007 but felt that he would be of net benefit to TM plc in office as group legal director. That calculation must have been done with specific regard to the MNHL, which was then in full flow, with 50 more claims issued by the end of 2014. Mr Partington was clearly retained by TM plc to use his knowledge to manage the litigation in-house.

I heard the oral evidence of Ms Bailey, who was the CEO of TM plc from February 2003 to June 2012, over a whole day of the trial. I therefore had a good opportunity to assess her character and reliability, as I did with Mr Vickers, Mr Vaghela and Mr Partington.

My overriding impression was that Ms Bailey was a reluctant witness and evasive. In part, her reluctance is understandable in that she left TM plc in 2012 and was living in Spain at the time of the trial, but I am not satisfied that she did her best to assist me from the witness box. She sheltered far too frequently behind a claimed inability to remember events, some of which were really important matters during her tenure as CEO; some, indeed, presented existential threats to the business of TM plc. They were not eminently forgettable events. Ms Bailey did not say that she had any difficulty with her memory or health that affected her ability to remember. I do not accept that her recollection was as limited and as poor as she gave the impression that it was.

She was evidently not particularly interested in the regulatory and editorial legal aspects of TM plc’s business, but much more in the overall strategic direction and management challenge of running a large company with diverse parts. She was unconcerned with anything that pre-dated her arrival – on one occasion, she declined to answer a relevant question about an invoice on the basis that it pre-dated her arrival – and she had not taken the trouble, until shortly prior to the hearing, to find out what happened to MGN after her departure. She claimed not to have read or known about Gulati, despite its findings of widespread and habitual illegality during her time as CEO.

She emphasised repeatedly that she had many responsibilities – she was running a very large organisation, she said – and she would not have been involved in every decision. Asked whether she would not have approved a decision to make no comment on allegations of phone hacking at MGN, both in 2007 and 2011, she said:

While accepting in principle that Ms Bailey could not have been involved in addressing every story that appeared in the media, I do not accept that she was not involved in these decisions to make no comment about allegations of phone hacking. These were incredibly serious matters at the time and raised a real concern about TM plc’s business. As Ms Bailey accepted, unlawful conduct of MGN’s journalists could have serious reputational consequences for TM plc. In my judgment, Mr Vickers would have decided, in discussion with Mr Fullagar and other senior executive managers, to make no comment, but he would not have proceeded to make a public statement without the approval of the CEO, Ms Bailey, and possibly the chairman too. Ms Bailey approved the strategy of making no comment. It was another example of her being aware of the very serious allegations that were being made about MGN but acquiescing in Mr Vickers’ strategy of avoiding dealing with them.

Ms Bailey maintained throughout her evidence that there was no evidence of UIG or VMI at MGN, just stories in newspapers that were not necessarily correct. Accordingly, no questions or investigations were needed, beyond the admonishment of the editors to “stay legal”, in 2006 and 2007, and reminding them of their responsibilities in 2011. Her approach was that there were robust systems in place (and every journalist had the MGN code of business conduct and the PCC Code, she said) and they relied on the framework. Until anyone told her otherwise, there was nothing wrong. She emphasised that she would have expected Mr Duffy to tell her if there was any wrongdoing, and expected Mr Vickers or the head of audit to tell her if there was illegal or unethical conduct.

Some of the answers that Ms Bailey gave to questions were literally incredible. She said that she did not feel that she should have been investigating what a known criminal was saying – Mr Whittamore was given a conditional discharge for offences under the Data Protection Act and was clearly central to the Information Commissioner’s conclusions. She said that she would never have ignored evidence of wrongdoing, so she could only assume that it was concealed. In relation to David Brown, she said that she knew nothing about the matter and would not have expected to be told about it. I find that that was untrue: she was told about the David Brown problem.

Her approach, in short, was that until someone had reliable proof of wrongdoing, she didn’t want to be troubled by any allegations or concerns. She turned a blind eye to the implications of the serious allegations that she knew were being made of illegal phone hacking activity going on at all three MGN newspapers.

So far as editorial and regulatory issues were concerned, Ms Bailey clearly relied to a very great extent on Mr Vickers’ experience, stewardship and judgement. I do not consider that she exercised the independence and overall control of these areas of the business that a CEO should exercise. As a result, she was vulnerable to only knowing what others, in particular Mr Vickers, chose to tell her.

I consider that it is unlikely that Mr Vickers told her in any detail about the implications of Operation Glade: she had only newly arrived as CEO at that time. I am sure she was told the basic fact of an investigation but she probably did not appreciate the potential significance. However, it is plain that by 2006 she knew as well as Mr Vickers the evidence of likely illegal activities at all three national titles that required thorough investigation. She knew about the two ICO reports, about the allegations made by Mr Hipwell against MGN in the Guardian in August 2006, and about the convictions of Mulcaire and Goodman. She was involved in the decision to make no comment at that time. I find that she would also have known about the David Brown settlement and why he was being paid off, though she was probably not told that the allegations he made were believed to be true. Mr Vickers knew more than she did because Mr Partington (and to some extent Mr Duffy) loyally kept him informed.

Mr Vickers could not have controlled matters alone, however. He needed the support of the CEO. But, on the regulatory and editorial legal side of the business, it was Mr Vickers who kept Ms Bailey informed. Ms Bailey was content not be closely involved in editorial legal and regulatory matters and to leave it to Mr Vickers, and in return Mr Vickers told her what he needed her to know, not more. She deferred to his judgement about what to do.

Although the three national editors had a direct reporting line to Ms Bailey, there was no free and open flow of information to her, but even allowing for that, Ms Bailey knew enough to realise that there were serious concerns about illegal practices that needed to be investigated, but (on Mr Vickers’ advice, I find) she thought it better to keep a lid on the matter. That meant that, when it came to addressing the Leveson Inquiry, MGN advanced a case that was untrue, namely that there was no evidence of anything untoward happening at MGN, emphasising instead that it was “forward-looking” about abuses, and waited to see what came out of it. I find that Mr Duffy, Mr Vickers, Ms Bailey and Mr Partington all hoped that, with luck, there would be nothing to emerge that required them to investigate what had happened in the past. As Mr Vaghela said, they were advised by MGN’s legal department: “let’s see how Leveson comes out and then we will move forward”.

Mr Vaghela was a long-serving finance director whose tenure covers the whole period with which I am concerned. I found him to be an honest and straightforward witness. He did not have all the information that he should have had from 1999-2011 because executive management, principally Mr Duffy and Mr Honeywell, did not report to him what they knew about the level of expenditure on PIs, the nature of the work that they were doing and the evident breaches of MGN’s procurement policies. He was not involved in discussions between Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey about editorial and legal matters, despite being an executive board member and a member of ExCom. He, like other board members, did not hear about other matters such as Operation Glade and the David Brown allegations because they were not reported to the board.

Mr Vaghela readily accepted that, with hindsight, not enough was done to investigate illegal conduct. He was very clear that if certain information had been shared with him he would have wanted to investigate. These matters included the arrest of Mr Kempster and the evidence of criminal wrongdoing at that time, Operation Glade, the allegations of David Brown and the Partington Note. He accepted a degree of fault in not insisting on an investigation following What Price Privacy Now? but he said that Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey took charge of it. I felt that that was a very revealing comment.

Mr Vickers was in one sense an impressive witness, in that he displayed gravitas, intelligence and calmness in answering questions, many of which were of a provocative nature. He also displayed a tendency to try to take charge of a conversation, in the way that he set about answering Mr Sherborne’s questions. It was easy to see how he rose quickly to the board of MGN and then TM plc and that he must have been a very effective operator within a company of that kind. On the other hand, some of the answers that Mr Vickers gave in cross-examination were implausible and he (rather easily) managed to evade the real point behind some of the questions that were put to him and did not answer directly and frankly. In that sense he was not an impressive witness.

Mr Vickers was described by Mr Basham’s source as being the “villain of the piece”, in the sense that he controlled what was going on in response to the phone hacking allegations, and this chimed with what (I find) Mr Grigson told Mr Basham at lunch, which was that he was in a weak position as a new chairman, in the absence of a chief executive, and Mr Vickers was in an unusually strong position on the board. I consider that Mr Basham’s source and Mr Grigson were right in their assessments.

Mr Vickers came into the witness box with his line of defence prepared, viz that he was not concerned with mere unlawfulness, which happens routinely at newspapers, where there is often a public interest justification for it, but only with allegations of illegality. He was not interested in investigating alleged unlawful conduct, such as breach of confidence or misuse of private information, and was not interested to know what journalists were doing in that regard. There was nothing prima facie unlawful about use of PIs in any event, he said. That, however, did not absolve him from investigating and reporting what he did know about illegal conduct. He attempted to persuade me that there was no credible evidence of illegal activity that required action to be taken until December 2013.

The assertion that no (credible) evidence could be found of illegal conduct until the MPS had concluded the first stage of their investigation in late 2013 was no more than a pretence designed to exonerate him and the board of TM plc. What Price Privacy Now? read together with What Price Privacy? set out a clear case of likely illegal practices that could have involved many of the 120 journalists at MGN that the second report explicitly referred to. Mr Vickers said that his inaction was because he did not believe that PIs were suppliers, within the company’s procurement rules, and so there could be no breach of the procurement policy. (However, in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Mr Vickers had agreed with Mr Vaghela’s analysis that the procurement policy applied to PIs.) This attempt to explain his inaction was wholly unconvincing. Regardless of internal compliance, the Commissioner’s reports highlighted criminal activity. Despite recognising that What Price Privacy Now? had to be reported to the board, Mr Vickers did not recommend investigation, only a repeat of the warning that Ms Bailey had given the editors following What Price Privacy? I find that he did not want an investigation because he knew that it would open a can of worms.

I also found wholly unconvincing Mr Vickers’ explanation of why the use of expressions such as “a pal” and “a friend” in articles was unsuspicious. He said that this attribution was often used in order to avoid the subject of the article being identified as the source. That may be so in relation to different kinds of article, such as whistleblowing stories, but it is hardly likely to be the case where the subject of the article has been the victim of a sting, intrusive surveillance or compromising story or photograph. I felt that Mr Vickers was being evasive and less than frank in giving this explanation. Although the expressions may not have been invented for the purpose, they were being used in many articles to conceal phone hacking.

Mr Vickers was equally unconvincing on the subject of the David Brown settlement. He suggested, having been exposed in cross-examination on the failure to investigate the Brown allegations, that he authorised a settlement of Mr Brown’s claim on the basis that it would be cheaper to settle than to fight the case and win. I have already given my reasons for rejecting that explanation. It was simply untrue. Mr Vickers said that he must have been involved in deciding whether to release Mr Brown from his confidentiality obligations in relation to giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry but could not recall that process.

I regret therefore that I am unable to accept the truth of Mr Vickers’ denials of awareness of illegality and his explanation for not investigating VMI at a much earlier time than actually occurred. My suspicion is that Mr Vickers knew what was happening all along – he struck me as the sort of person who would know most of what was happening in his company – but there is no evidence to support that conclusion. I find that he knew that VMI was going on from at least 2003 (as a result of information from Mr Partington about Operation Glade and the Rio Ferdinand story), but possibly much earlier, on the basis that Mr Partington must have reported to him what he had discovered in 1999, and what he knew from his “legalling” work at The People and the Mirror. He would have told Mr Vickers on a “no surprises” basis what he needed to be aware of. Mr Vickers would certainly have been aware of other types of serious UIG, such as blagging and corrupt informants, from about 1999.

The case that members of the board knew about phone hacking as early as 1999, as pleaded by the claimants, is tenuous. There was no evidence that established that, though it is possible, as I have said, that Mr Vickers knew that early. I am satisfied that no one else on the board would have known then.

In February 2013, MGN applied to strike out in whole or in part the initial four phone hacking claims that had been issued against it. A month later, TM plc made a public statement following the arrests of Ms Weaver, Mr Buckley, Mr Thomas and Mr Scott in March 2013. It said that the company took the allegations seriously and had appointed external lawyers to investigate all the allegations. A month or so later, on 11 June 2013, Mr Vickers gave evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons that “we have done huge investigations and, to date, we have not found any proof that phone hacking took place”. Nevertheless, MGN pursued its applications to strike out the claims.

On 13 September 2013, Dan Evans pleaded guilty to charges based on VMI at the Sunday Mirror. TM plc responded by saying that it took the allegations seriously and did not tolerate any wrongdoing in its business, but that it was “too soon to see how this matter will progress”. Nevertheless, the applications to strike out were pursued to a hearing on 24 and 25 October 2013, and were dismissed.

On 16 May 2014, at TM plc’s AGM, the chairman, Mr Grigson, said that the company had done everything that it could short of “ripping up the floorboards”, and that there was nothing further that it could do except cooperate with the MPS investigation and ask external lawyers to investigate the allegations. This was therefore a year after TM plc had appointed the external lawyers; almost a year after Mr Vickers had said that huge investigations had been done, and 9 months after Mr Evans pleaded guilty to phone hacking at the Sunday Mirror, but no admissions were forthcoming.

On 24 September 2014, MGN admitted phone hacking for the first time in letters sent to 8 of the Gulati claimants. It then pleaded admissions to phone hacking in October 2014 and sought to have summary judgment on liability entered against itself, while contending that it did not know and could not establish the extent of the illegality. I find that this was an attempt to avoid having to give disclosure that would show that phone hacking was (as Mann J later found) widespread and habitual at all three newspapers. The tactic was a brazen attempt to conceal the extent of wrongdoing, but it did not work on this occasion.

MGN then published an apology to all hacking victims on 13 February 2015 in The Mirror and on 15 February 2015 in The People and The Sunday Mirror. The statement read:

The apology was therefore limited to unlawful accessing of voicemails “on certain people’s phones”.

By the end of Ms Bailey’s time as CEO, the board of TM plc was dysfunctional. Substantial parts of the company’s business were being handled informally and were not being reported to the board. The NEDs were not properly involved in decision-making, as Mr Grigson admitted. The three executive directors took separate charge of different areas of TM plc’s business but did not operate as a unit or as a single board. As a result, Mr Vaghela was to a large extent cut out of matters that were discussed informally between Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey, and the NEDs did not know about them, except when they considered matters in the public domain, such as the Information Commissioner’s reports, allegations made in the Press, and Operation Weeting, which was reported openly.

There is compelling evidence that the editors of each newspaper knew very well that VMI was being used extensively and habitually and that they were happy to take the benefits of it, and of connected and related UIG being conducted by journalists and PIs. There is also clear evidence that the legal departments of the newspapers knew that these methods were being used; that Mr Vickers, through Mr Partington and/or others in the legal department, knew that VMI was being conducted, as early as 2003, if not before; and that he ignored and Ms Bailey turned a blind eye to the extent to which illegal practices were going on at MGN. They did not make the inquiries or commission the investigations that a careful and conscientious director of TM plc would have made. This failure was on successive occasions: Operation Glade (2003), What Price Privacy Now? (2006); David Brown’s witness statement (2007); and the start of the phone hacking scandal in early 2011.

A pretence was maintained by Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey that there was “no credible evidence” of VMI at MGN newspapers. Both of them knew that there was evidence. What Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers really meant by this expression was that there was no irrefutable proof, as opposed to detailed allegations and evidence; but the reason why there was no proof was that the board desisted from investigating, as it clearly should have done. Even when a new chairman, Mr Grigson, took office in May 2012, the truth continued to be concealed, even though he was warned by a credible source that VMI was rife at MGN.

It was only when it could be concealed no longer – when the MPS provided clear proof in December 2013 that it had happened on a large scale – that MGN would have accepted, internally, that they would not be able to continue to deny that evidence existed and would have to make admissions. Before that stage, MGN had tried to strike out the phone hacking claims that had been issued against it. Admissions were delayed until September 2014. Even more concerningly, despite evidence to the court and public statements that it would seek to right all wrongs by being open about what it had done, MGN then tried to avoid disclosure, and, when that failed, concealed the extent of the UIG and VMI that had been carried on by not disclosing material documents that it knew that it had.

I am satisfied, in short, that Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey knew about – or, which amounts to the same thing, turned a blind eye to – the extensive and habitual VMI and UIG being carried on. It is obvious that Ms Bailey did not know everything that was going on, and she knew less than Mr Vickers and Mr Partington did, but she knew enough to realise that there was unlawful activity being conducted at all three newspapers. That was from early 2007 at the latest, in her case, and from 2003 at the latest in Mr Vickers’ case. As a result, the editors and journalists were enabled to carry on with their unlawful and illegal activities until the end of 2011, albeit it was done less, and more cautiously, after 2006.

I do not accept that Mr Vaghela personally knew about illegal phone hacking activity, nor did any of the NEDs on the board, and there is no evidence that Sir Victor Blank or Sir Ian Gibson, the former non-executive chairmen, knew. Allegations and issues that Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers knew about were not discussed formally at the board. There is not a single board agenda or set of board minutes, or an agenda for or minutes of ExCom, that has been produced that addresses UIG or VMI. Only in 2011, following Operation Weeting, was the board sufficiently involved for one of the NEDs to suggest that it should write to all senior editors and editorial managers asking them to confirm that they had not been involved in VMI or two other specific criminal acts. Mr Vickers’ questionnaire was the result. But this “papering” of the issue was wholly inadequate as an investigation. For any of the recipients to reply acknowledging illegal behaviour would have made their position immediately untenable, and so Mr Vickers received 44 denials.

The internal management of TM plc and MGN beneath it was also dysfunctional. Policies, protocols and procedures were in existence and Ms Bailey repeatedly told Sir Brian Leveson and me that she relied upon them, but they were not followed. Ms Bailey did not say (nor did any other MGN witness) that checks were made to see that they were being followed. Mr Honeywell, Mr Hollingsworth and Mr Duffy turned a blind eye to the huge expenditure on unlawful PI activity and breaches of company protocols, and did not report them to the board. The CRs and invoices were not scrutinised by those such as Mr Harwood who were responsible for authorising payment. The fact that money was being spent on illicit “special” searches was concealed, though Mr Duffy and other executive managers were aware of it. To that extent, Ms Bailey’s complaint that things were being concealed from her was justified.

In dealing with the 14 Incidents above, I have made findings that Mr Partington would have been aware of UIG from 1999 and was aware of phone hacking activities from no later than the end of 2003, but probably earlier as a result of his “legalling” work. The claimants have therefore proved their case that the legal department of MGN knew about phone hacking. There was no formal report to the board. I have found that, on the “no surprises” understanding between them, Mr Partington told Mr Vickers what he knew. Mr Vickers was the group head of legal and a main board director, so it cannot be said that the legal department concealed VMI and UIG from their employer.

Mr Sherborne put his case in relation to the board’s knowledge as being that the board as a whole knew about VMI and decided to conceal it. That is not the case: Mr Vaghela, Mr Parker (who left TM plc in 2004), Sir Victor and Sir Ian as chairmen and the NEDs did not know until well after the last of the articles or invoices complained about in this trial.

On any view of the law of attribution to a limited company of acts or knowledge of members of the board, MGN is taken to have known what Ms Bailey and Mr Vickers knew. Ms Bailey was the CEO and Mr Vickers was the group legal director with overall responsibility for editorial legal matters, on behalf of the board. The conventional approach to attribution is that if a fact is known by a person to whom responsibility for that matter is properly delegated by the company, the company knows that fact: see Meridian Global v Securities Commission [1995] BCC 942. If, instead, the correct test is as Lord Briggs of Westbourne suggested in Julien v Evolving TecKnologies and Enterprise Development Co Ltd [2018] UKPC 2 at [54], namely that it depends on whether the person owes the company a duty to report knowledge of the fact to the board, then that is clearly satisfied too.

The conclusion is therefore that Mr Vickers’ actual knowledge and Ms Bailey’s actual or blind eye knowledge was the knowledge of MGN, but not every member of the board in fact knew about VMI before 2013 and so the board as a whole did not know, and did not decide to condone or conceal VMI or other UIG. Mr Vickers and Ms Bailey kept what they knew about VMI and UIG from the board, the shareholders and the public.

Summary of the Duke’s claim and his evidence (paras 593-622)

Legal principles (623-628)

The Articles (629-854)

Duke of Sussex ‘Episodes’ (855-864)

Conclusions (865-869)

The Duke’s claim is in respect of VMI and UIG underlying 148 articles in total spanning a period from 1996 to 2011. 87 of these articles are during the Gulati period (May 1999 to August 2006). There is additionally a claim in respect of 61 separately identified episodes of UIG by use of PIs, which do not directly relate to published articles (“UIG Episodes”), and these extend over a period from December 1995 to December 2011. Most of the UIG Episodes, as presented by the Duke’s lawyers, comprise several PI invoices or contribution requests (“CRs”).

33 of the articles were selected for trial and this judgment therefore addresses those articles only, and the UIG Episodes.

In the Duke’s case, MGN makes only one admission: that an invoice from Avalon dated 25 February 2004 with the description “enquiries regarding Harry and Chinawhites” stated to be on instructions from Ian Edmondson at The People (“the Chinawhites invoice”) was an occasion on which UIG took place. Otherwise, there are “non-admissions” about UIG in relation to some of the articles complained of (which are articles 22, 25, 27, 29 and 30 in the short list of 33 trial articles), plus one other article (no.129 from the full list, which was not tried), and otherwise denials in relation to all other published articles and invoices. MGN also specifically denies that there was any VMI directed at the Duke or his 29 named associates.

The Duke’s pleaded case is largely based on inferences to be drawn from the generic case against MGN and the nature of the content of the articles. He alleges UIG and accessing of voicemail messages as well as listening in to telephone calls and bugging activities from 1996 onwards (in which year the Duke turned 12 years old).

It is a fact that there are no telephone records of calls to either of the Duke’s identified mobile phone numbers that have been disclosed. There is very limited call data to two of the Duke’s associates, Mark Dyer and Chelsea Davy. Six of the seven calls to Ms Davy’s landline and mobile numbers in South Africa were made on a single day, 24 January 2009, immediately before the publication of articles announcing the break up of the Duke’s relationship with Ms Davy.

The Duke relies in particular in his pleaded case on:

In total, there are said to be 114 CRs relating to the Duke himself, covering the period July 1997 to December 2011, and a further 152 relating to his associates, including 13 relating to Chelsy Davy, 6 for Mark Dyer, 10 for Guy Pelly, 9 for Tiggy Legge-Bourke (the Duke’s nanny), 11 for Natalie Pinkham (a close friend) and 14 for Caroline Flack (with whom the Duke was briefly very close). There are other payment records relating to the staff and customers of the Rattlebone Inn in Gloucestershire at about the time of a series of articles concerning allegations of drug taking by the Duke and his friends at the pub.

The Duke specifically relies on the fact that his name and mobile phone number were found in the palm pilot of Nick Buckley of the Sunday Mirror, a chief phone hacker at that newspaper, without his consent, as were the phone numbers of his associates Paddy Harverson, Michael Fawcett, Zara Phillips and Guy Pelly. Mr Pelly was a close personal friend of the Duke. Mr Harverson and Mr Fawcett were the then Prince of Wales’s communications secretary and a senior Palace official respectively, so it is possible that these numbers were held for proper professional purposes. The phone numbers of Mr Harverson and other associates, Princess Diana’s mother, her brother, Earl Spencer, and Hasnat Khan, were also found in the Palm Pilot of Mr Harwood, who explained that his Palm Pilot contained his entire personal and professional telephone list but did not say why these names and numbers specifically were present. I bear in mind that Mr Evans also said that not all the numbers in his Palm Pilot were for phone hacking purposes.

Mr Buckley did not give evidence to explain whether the Duke and his close associates were personal or professional contacts. Given the findings that have already been made about Mr Buckley’s involvement in phone hacking at the Sunday Mirror, and without any evidence explaining the presence of these contact details, the only sensible inference in relation to the Duke’s, Ms Phillips’ and Mr Pelly’s numbers is that they were there in connection with Mr Buckley’s VMI activities. It is difficult to imagine why else the Duke’s highly confidential phone number might be there.

The Duke gave evidence at some length, both in his written witness statement and when cross-examined. His witness statement was, in large part, an argument against the vicissitudes of the Press, and MGN in particular, and an explanation of the misery that (it is common ground) he has suffered from Press intrusion, rather than factual evidence that he could give about the specific matters in issue. It did not remotely comply with all the requirements of CPR Practice Direction 57AC, in limiting its scope to matters in issue about which the Duke was personally able to give evidence in chief, excluding comment and argument - for which his solicitors rather than he are culpable.

Factual evidence that he gave relevant to the question of whether his or his associates’ voicemails were hacked was that:

While the Duke fairly agreed in cross-examination that the private information about which he complained in a number of articles was already in the public domain, or that it was quite possible that the information had been obtained lawfully, in respect of other articles he doubled down on his case that he considered that the confidential information in the articles was taken from voicemail messages that he had left for others at the time, or that they had left for him. He explained why quotations in articles that were attributed to Royal sources could not have come from those sources.

The Duke confirmed that he did not in fact have a mobile phone until he went to Eton College, and he accepted that in most cases he did not read the articles published at the time of publication. He said that the newspapers were always available in Royal palaces and so were difficult to avoid completely – he would often see his name or photograph on a front page – but, understandably, he did not usually read them. He was however aware of and recalls some of the stories covered by them. He did read them when they were provided to him by his solicitors. He said that he found them upsetting, to see how his privacy and that of Ms Davy in particular, at a very young age, had been invaded at the time of publication.

In many cases, the Duke accepted that (understandably, given the length of time since the events in question) he could not specifically recall leaving or receiving voicemail messages in relation to a particular matter. He also struggled on several occasions to identify the information in an article that he said was derived from voicemails, and on other occasions disputed the accuracy of the information that had been reported, which tends to suggest that it could not have been derived from a voicemail left by or for him. The fact that the Duke cannot now remember these matters accurately does not mean that he cannot prove his case by other means, but I shall be cautious in making findings and – save in relation to a few articles – I cannot do so simply on the basis of the Duke’s limited recollection.

In answer to my question, the Duke clarified that the strange mobile phone activity to which he referred in his witness statement was experienced from the first time that he got a mobile phone and “never stopped”. He said that he got lots of very short missed calls and a lot of people asking “did you get my voicemail?” when he had not. He was unable to remember if there were particular times when it happened more, but suspected that that was probably the case. He said that it did not stop in 2011. Even assuming that the strange activity was indicative of attempts to hack his phone, that does not prove that it was MGN journalists who were trying to do so. I do not feel confident in relying on his recollection that strange activity started on day 1 and never stopped, but I do accept that there was strange phone activity at times.

The Duke did not call any other witnesses to support his case. MGN called Ms Kerr, who was the byline on several of the 33 articles and Mr Harwood, who was a joint byline on one. Both denied any unlawful activity.

MGN argued strongly that it was implausible that anyone would take a risk of intercepting the Duke’s or his associates’ voicemails, because of the high level of security surrounding him and his family; at least, they argued, not after the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire in 2006 for hacking the Duke’s and HRH Prince William’s voicemails. As the Duke himself said in cross-examination, it was an incredibly risky thing to do. MGN also argued that the complete absence of call data relating to the Duke and very little relating to his associates suggested that there was no VMI being attempted at all in his case. They also relied on the absence of relevant phone numbers from Mr Evans’s Palm Pilot and his evidence that he did not hack the Duke’s phone.

There was of course hacking of Royal mobile phones carried out at the News of the World, with which MGN’s Sunday titles were competing directly, and the hacking was not just on one isolated occasion. It is not therefore right to believe that members of the Royal family were considered out of reach. The incident of Prince William’s hacked message for the Duke gave rise to an MPS investigation, Operation Caryatid, which did not discover any further voicemail interception at the time. Although the terms of reference for Operation Caryatid were not limited to the activities of the News of the World, that was likely to have been the focus, given the trigger for the investigation. The evidence of hacking by Goodman and Mulcaire may have masked the activities of others, if they were more careful not to leave a trail; and the use of burner phones would have precluded the identification of others making calls. All of the incriminating calls of Goodman and Mulcaire were incautiously made on landlines.

It is, in my judgment, implausible that serial phone hackers at MGN’s newspapers, who were using these techniques on a widespread and habitual basis, would have considered members of the Royal family off-limits. All three newspapers (and other tabloids) were obsessed with stories about the Royal family and about Prince Harry in particular, which doubtless reflected the apparent public appetite for information about his successes and failures, his career, and in particular his love life. I heard much evidence of intense competition between News Group newspapers and MGN newspapers for newsworthy stories and celebrity gossip. Journalists and editors at MGN papers would not have sat back (and did not sit back) and suffer being outperformed by their fierce rivals. Prince Harry in particular, because of the tragic life of his mother and the impact on him of her death, was of primary interest to the tabloid press, all the more so, seemingly, as it became apparent that there were further problems in his life.

I am sure that the three newspapers took particular care when using the “dark arts” to obtain information about members of the Royal Family and those close to them. The absence of the Duke’s phone details from Mr Evans’ Palm Pilot and back pocket list and its presence in Mr Buckley’s Palm Pilot suggests that responsibility for collecting information about him might well have been delegated to particular journalists only, or possibly even one person at a time in each newspaper. Mr Johnson and Mr Hipwell did not claim knowledge of phone hacking of the Duke, but that is far from conclusive – Mr Johnson saw virtually no hacking, he said, and Mr Hipwell had been expelled in 2000, relatively early in the Gulati period during which UIG and VMI peaked. Importantly, Mann J accepted Mr Evans’ evidence that the majority of phone hacking was done using untraceable burner phones. That would have been an obviously sensible precaution in the case of members of the Royal Family, and would explain why there is so little call data. (In addition, there were was no call data before 2002 and there are substantial gaps in the call data records thereafter, particularly in 2005, so the picture is incomplete.) I reject MGN’s argument that the absence of recorded call data is a strong indication that there was no phone hacking of the Duke and his associates.

MGN’s argument that the Duke was not the subject of any VMI at a time when he was so frequently a lead story in its newspapers, and when its journalists were clearly using PIs to a great extent to obtain information for stories about him, is improbable. The documentary evidence shows that there was a frenzy of activity involving PIs in relation to some of the stories published about him. As is often said, stories sell newspapers, and the reputations of tabloid and Sunday newspapers depend on prominent scoops, stings and other groundbreaking stories. The attempts of some of MGN’s witnesses, in particular Mr Harwood, to downplay the importance to the financial health of the newspaper of the main story lines were unpersuasive. The Duke has been one of the most important story lines in town for much of his life, and remains so. The idea that MGN carefully eschewed in his case what had become a primary journalistic tool – which it otherwise used on a widespread and habitual basis – is unconvincing. Indeed, no one on behalf of MGN positively gave evidence that that was so: Ms Kerr and Mr Harwood said that they did not phone hack and were unaware of it going on. MGN’s case is therefore only based on inference, not on evidence.

I find the opposite to be the case, namely that MGN journalists did make use of VMI, though I have no doubt that editors and journalists took great care in the Duke’s case, particularly after 2006. It may be that they mainly targeted his associates rather than him, which, if successful, would be likely to provide them with the Duke’s own thoughts and plans. Further, as I have already stated in reaching my conclusion about phone hacking between 2006 and 2011, there are stories in some of the published articles in the Duke’s claim that are inexplicable save on the basis that phone messages left by or for him were intercepted.

I find that the Duke was targeted by MGN journalists using VMI, but in a much more limited way than some of the victims who were on Mr Evans’ back pocket list. I am doubtful that the VMI would have been, as the Duke suggested, from the very first day that he received his mobile phone. A first time user would not be likely to be conscious of strange phone activities, so his evidence in that regard is probably a mistaken recollection; and it must have taken PIs some time to be able to identify the phone number, which was presumably kept highly confidential. The evidence from the articles that I address individually below suggests that there may have been no voicemail interception directed at him or his associates until 2002, although I only have a partial picture from the 33 articles addressed at trial. There is no evidence about when Mr Buckley obtained the Duke’s phone number and put it in his Palm Pilot, or when the other newspapers did.

As for UIG other than VMI, the Duke relies mainly on the existence of invoices and CRs relating to him from PIs who are established in the generic case to have been conducting UIG for MGN journalists. There are many more CRs than invoices in the Duke’s case: these contain no detail about the commissioning journalist and little about the nature of the commission. It may be that narrative invoices were avoided deliberately in his case. The assessment of unlawfulness from an invoice alone is a calculus that involves weighing the identity of the PI, the identity of the journalist, any information about the instruction, the price charged, and the proximity of that invoice (and any related invoices) to published articles or any other significant event. Given the lack of detail on CRs, it is right to take a sceptical approach.

The 33 Articles (which, as previously explained, are a mixture of articles chosen by the Duke and by MGN) seek to illustrate the issues that arise in relation to all the articles and cover the full period in relation to which the Duke makes his claim. In order to succeed in his claim for damages in relation to any article, the Duke must prove that the (or some of the) information contained in it is material in respect of which he had a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that MGN’s misuse of that information was unjustified in the circumstances. It is important to emphasise that the claim is not in respect of publication of the information but in respect of the unlawful way in which MGN is alleged to have obtained it. It is therefore no answer for MGN to say that the information was in the public domain if it has independently conducted UIG or VMI to stand up the story or obtain further details. The Duke’s pleaded case identifies specifically the information in each article that he contends was private.

It is not in dispute that private information obtained by phone hacking, blagging, or by committing other criminal offences is unjustified; nor, at the other extreme, is it suggested on behalf of the Duke that information that is publicly available is private. There is a grey area where information in respect of which the Duke had a legitimate expectation of privacy had wrongly been placed into the public domain to some extent by someone other than MGN.

MGN’s case, forcefully advanced on its behalf, is that save in respect of the admitted 2004 Chinawhites invoice there is no evidence of UIG in relation to the Duke’s private information. The one admitted invoice from Avalon is in respect of Mr Edmondson, a convicted phone hacker at The People. MGN did not explain why there was an admission in relation to this single invoice or what it represents, or why what underlies it is different from all the other invoices. Nor was it explained why it was the case that UIG was directed against the Duke by The People on only a single occasion. There are however 22 UIG Episodes payment records relating to the Duke where MGN formally does not admit the allegation of UIG, rather than denying it.

MGN contends, in many instances, that the information was either not by its nature private, or was not information in respect of which the Duke any longer had a legitimate expectation of privacy, because it was already in the public domain; and in other cases that the invoices and CRs relating to the Duke do not indicate any unlawful activity that obtained private information. Of the 115 Episodes payment records relating to the Duke rather than his associates, 57 are said by MGN to relate to an article not complained about, only 17 relate to articles that have been complained about (but which are not among the 33 being tried) and 41 cannot be matched to an article.

Of the 152 UIG Episodes payment records relating to the Duke’s associates rather than him, 27 are in respect of certain PIs (Avalon, Andy Gadd/Trackers, Southern Investigations and its connected companies, and TDI/ELI) where MGN admits that a substantial proportion of their work was UIG, and 11 more relate to PIs where MGN admits that the PI engaged in some UIG. These payments are not admitted, and all other payment records are denied by MGN as being for UIG. MGN notes in its closing submissions that 130 of these records do not relate to any article complained about. It adds that in many cases there is no apparent connection with the Duke of Sussex, though 23 of the invoices do relate to an article about him that he has not complained about.

MGN also contends that in many cases the information is trivial and so not capable of being considered information in respect of which the Duke had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

It is pertinent to summarise some basic principles before turning to the Articles about which the Duke complains. The summary is as applicable in the cases of the other claimants as it is in the Duke’s.

In Campbell v MGN Ltd [2004] 2 AC 457, Lord Nicholls said of the misuse of private information cause of action, at [24]:

The two-stage test is now well-established and was recently confirmed by the Supreme Court in ZXC v Bloomberg LP [2022] 2 WLR 424 at [47], [49] and [50] in the joint judgment of Lord Hamblen and Lord Stephens JJSC:

Article 8 rights can however be engaged even in public places, if the nature of the occasion is one that falls within the scope of article 8, such as a family outing. Weller v Associated Newspapers [2016] was a case where photographs were taken of children in public and published without the parents’ consent. The Master of the Rolls said at [60]-[61]:

As a matter of law, the fact that a person has chosen to put some aspects of their private life into the public domain does not mean that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of other aspects of their private life, and indeed speaking about one’s feelings about a certain matter on one occasion does not forfeit the right to privacy in relation to one’s feelings on another occasion, save where the same feelings are in issue: see McKennitt v Ash [2006] QB 73 at [53], [54], per Buxton LJ:

A separate issue that arises in the Duke’s claim in particular is the drawing of adverse inferences from the absence of witnesses that the court would have expected to be called to give evidence, as they would clearly have relevant evidence to give. The legal position in relation to adverse inferences from failure to call witnesses, which had become a rather technical area of legal analysis, has been set out with clarity in the judgment of Lord Leggatt JSC in Efobi v Royal Mail Group Ltd [2021] UKSC 33; [2021] 1 WLR 3863 at [41]:

I will consider all the issues that arise, article by article and Episode by Episode, in this Part of the judgment, though I have relegated the consideration of the UIG Episodes to the separate UIG Episodes Schedule. Where I find that there was an actionable misuse of private information, I will address the appropriate quantum of damages for each such instance in Part XII.

This article entitled “Diana so sad on Harry’s big day” (byline: John Todd) was published by the Mirror on 16 September 1996, the day after the Duke’s 12th birthday. It was therefore a time before the Duke had a mobile phone.

The private content pleaded is detail of the Duke’s feelings regarding the divorce of his parents and the ill health of a family friend. The article simply states that “[he] is believed to be taking the royal divorce badly” and “He is also as distressed as his father over the ill-health of ex-royal gardener Paddy Whiteland”, and another similar comment.

The information (if accurate and sourced by Mr Todd) is clearly private, even if similar observations about the Duke, the divorce and the gardener had been published previously. Even if there was UIG, which is far from clear, in 1996 there was no cause of action for misuse of private information (see Part IX below).

The claim in relation to this article therefore cannot succeed in any event.

This article entitled “Princes take to the hills for gala” was published by the Mirror (byline: Ian Miller) on 17 July 2000. It refers to the impending public celebration of the 100^th birthday of HRH Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The Duke at the time was 15 years old.

The private content pleaded is information concerning the Duke’s personal and family life, namely his plans to go on a rock climbing trip with his brother rather than attend the celebratory pageant. The article says that the Princes were sticking with controversial plans to join friends on a trip to the Lake District and will return in time for the actual birthday. The article contains detailed comment by St James’s Palace.

It is unclear whether any of the content could be considered private in view of previous publicity about the intended trip, but in any event at the time there was no cause of action for misuse of private information (see Part IX below).

The claim in relation to his article therefore cannot succeed in any event.

This article entitled “Harry’s time at the bar” was published by the Mirror (bylines: Jessica Callan, Eva Simpson, Polly Graham) on 19 September 2000. It relates to the Duke’s 16^th birthday celebration in The Ifield, Chelsea, and an earlier meal in a Pizza Express.

The private content pleaded is information concerning the Duke’s private life, namely his whereabouts at a lunch to celebrate his birthday with friends. The article, which was written by the Mirror’s 3am team, at which extensive phone hacking was being carried on at this time, tells of the Duke’s pizza with a female acquaintance and then his birthday lunch with seven blondes and two male friends in tow.

It appears that a photo agency attended and took photographs (not published) and that as a result a journalist spoke to the chef-proprietor, who had some information.

Given the public nature of the venue and the limited content of the information in the article, it is doubtful that the Duke could establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to it. His Counsel made some rather wild and unparticularised allegation of blagging of information, but there is no invoice that relates to this event. In any event, again the claim cannot succeed because the article was published two weeks before the Human Rights Act 1998, which made article 8 of the Convention on Human Rights part of the law of England and Wales, came into effect.

This article entitled “Snap .. Harry breaks thumb like William” (byline Jane Kerr) was published by The Mirror on 11 November 2000. It describes the Duke having his arm in a sling following an injury suffered while playing sport at Eton, and a minor operation.

The private content pleaded is: information regarding the Duke’s personal life, namely an injury to his thumb.

This claim is hopeless, as all the content was released by St James’s Palace in a briefing by a Palace spokeswoman the day before, and reported the day before the Mirror article by the Press Association, the Evening Mail, the Evening Standard, and in the Edinburgh Evening News and on BBC online, which both reported what the Palace spokeswoman had said. The information about when the Duke’s surgeon looked at the X-ray and not being able to play sport are part of the quotations from the spokeswoman.

Although I accept the evidence of Mr Evans that prior publication did not stop MGN journalists from using UIG to check or add something to the reported story, to justify a new story being published, that would not have happened on every occasion. Ms Kerr said in evidence that she never invented content, because of her privileged position as a Royal reporter, but there is nothing new in what was published in this instance, just quotations and a slight paraphrase of what the spokeswoman had said. There was no reason for Ms Kerr to check up on this, in view of the Press Association’s report, and no evidence that she did so.

There is no evidence and no inherent likelihood that VMI or UIG were used in this case.

This article entitled “Rugger Off, Harry” (byline: Andrew Buckwell) was published by the Sunday Mirror on 11 November 2001. It describes the Duke being signed off rugby after having injured his back playing polo.

The private content pleaded is: information concerning the Duke’s personal life, namely an injury he sustained while playing rugby and medical advice he received about the health of his spine. MGN accepts that the information is private, albeit the fact of his being unable to play rugby would have been evident to all at Eton and not private. (The Duke’s pleaded case is in error in suggesting that the injury was sustained playing rugby.)

The sensitive information is the warning given by doctors to the Duke that any more tough tackles could cause lasting damage to his spine, and that the Duke did not yet know when it would be safe to play rugby again. MGN claims a confidential source at Eton for the information published and a CR for £400 to a redacted source exists, approved by the Deputy Editor, Mark Thomas. The redaction was done pursuant to an agreed protocol that allowed the claimants to challenge the redaction, but no such challenge was made in this instance. The right conclusion is therefore that there was a source for the story, and the relevant question is whether UIG followed to obtain the medical details that were published.

The Duke’s case relies on an invoice from Warner to The People on 5 November 2001 for a “Prince William summer story”, and suggests that Christine Hart would have been doing a medical blag for the Sunday Mirror at the same time. That is pure speculation. There is also reliance on a payment to Jonathan Stafford by the Sunday Mirror for work done in November 2001 (total: £3,495), but where the schedule to the invoice has been removed. Mr Sherborne submitted that in any such case I should apply an Armory v Delamirie (1722) 1 Stra.505 presumption that the schedule, had it not been destroyed by MGN, would have supported the Duke’s case by demonstrating a blag in relation to his information shortly before the date of the article. The equivalent submission is made in relation to every single missing Stafford invoice for the month in which an article was published, regardless of whether there is any evidence that Stafford was involved in the story.

I reject that submission, which seems to me to be going too far in terms of any reasonable inference. I have found that the schedules were removed and destroyed by MGN to conceal the fact that Mr Stafford was engaging in UIG on a large scale. I have no difficulty in reaching the conclusion, adverse to MGN, that the schedule would have shown that a large proportion of the work done by Mr Stafford that month was UIG. But to infer, additionally, that Mr Stafford was instructed and did work during that month in relation to the Duke specifically in relation to this article goes too far, in my judgment.

The argument, if correct, would potentially enable any claimant to prove that Mr Stafford carried out UIG in relation to them for any month for which there is a Stafford invoice. Such an inference would only be appropriate if there were some evidence either that Mr Stafford was instructed in relation to the Duke at that time or that the schedule was destroyed in order to conceal that fact. The only evidence is that Ms Louise Flood instructed the removal of schedules on JJ Services invoices generally, giving rise to an inference that it was to conceal the scale of UIG being conducted. I cannot properly infer, absent some supportive evidence, that Mr Stafford was instructed to blag medical information about the Duke in that month. The same conclusion applies in relation to all other occasions on which the claimants seek to rely on the mere fact that there is a Stafford invoice for the month of the article in question.

The Duke was eventually constrained to admit in cross-examination that, he being who he is, there are many ways in which information about him can enter the public domain. The Duke nevertheless still preferred the inference that this information would have been obtained by VMI. Standing back, it seems to me most likely that this information was the sort of information that a 17-year old keen sportsman would be likely to share with his schoolmates – to whom some explanation of why he could no longer play rugby would be required – and that that information was divulged to a contact by the schoolmate. In the absence of any other evidence of UIG proximate to the article, and given the nature of the private information, I consider that it is more likely that not that there was no unlawful means used to obtain this information.

These two articles, one published by the Sunday Mirror (byline: Gerard Couzens) on 13 January 2002 and one published by the Mirror (bylines: Jane Kerr and Jeff Edwards) on 14 January 2002, relate to allegations that the Duke had smoked cannabis at a country pub near Highgrove and are principally about his father’s reaction to learning about that.

The private content pleaded is: allegation that the Duke smoked cannabis and his father’s reaction. MGN’s case is that the Duke could have no reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to his smoking proscribed drugs in a public house, all the more so if it was part of a gathering involving the taking of hard drugs (by others in the group) and underage drinking. Alternatively, there is a public interest in obtaining this information for publication, such that there is no wrongful conduct even if the information is private.

The event itself happened some months before the publication of the story, which reports the steps that the then Prince of Wales, the Duke’s father, took to deal with the matter. The story was first broken by the News of the World in its first edition on 13 January 2002. This contained St James’s Palace reaction to the story, as the News of the World had sought Palace confirmation and comment before publication. The Palace was reported as accepting the fundamental truthfulness of the story and the fact that publication was in the public interest. The Duke expressed his frustration that this had been agreed between his father and Mark Bolland without his agreement, and said that much of the follow-up story in the Daily Mirror, including the account of the police investigation, was inaccurate.

The story was then taken up in later editions by just about every national Sunday paper, including The People and the Sunday Mirror. The Sunday Mirror publication is therefore likely to have involved some investigation at breakneck speed, following collection of the News of the World first edition. The article published by the Mirror had the benefit of up to 24 hours’ consideration and further investigation. It is evident from the documents disclosed that the Mirror journalists went into an investigative frenzy over the storyline, as one might expect.

The author of the Sunday Mirror article, Gerard Couzens, had a clear history of UIG: see Part III and PI Schedule above. He is named on 186 TDI/ELI and 602 C&L invoices. On 13 January 2002, Mr Couzens commissioned TDI and C&L in relation to the owners and chef of the pub, assisted by Mr Evans and Mr Stretch, who targeted friends and the rehab clinic that the Duke was forced to visit. Mike Hamilton at the Sunday Mirror instructed TDI in relation to Mr Pelly and members of his family, as well as the occupants of the pub. Other names were the subjects of TDI searches commissioned by Mr Couzens and Mr Hamilton in the following days. (Mr Pelly was in Mr Buckley’s Palm Pilot.) There is a redacted CR dated 15 January 2002 in the sum of £230 relating to the Sunday Mirror article, but no one on behalf of MGN gave evidence about what it represented.

This PI activity is clearly not Mr Couzens seeking to verify the story or doorstep the occupants of the pub, but digging for further information about those involved in or witnessing the drug taking. As explained by Mr Harwood, a journalist in the position of seeing a story broken by a rival’s first edition has a very short time in which to stand up the story and try to find a new angle.

Given the identity of those involved, the importance of the story and the urgency of developing it, I consider that it is more likely than not that some UIG occurred following the News of the World publication. It is unlikely to have affected the content of the Sunday Mirror article, which was only a re-hash of the News of the World story written in a hurry; but following publication, Mr Couzens, Mr Evans, Mr Stretch and others would have followed up by targeting those associated with the Duke’s activities. I am not however persuaded that this would have involved VMI of the Duke himself, in the absence of some material that is likely to have been obtained in that way. It seems likely, given the date of the article and the persons involved with the story, that attempts were made to hack the phones of Mr Pelly and others who were named in the News of the World article. I find that that was the purpose of some of the instructions to TDI. Those further instructions are not covered by the public interest in the initial storyline and the further information gathering attempts were unlawful in nature.

MGN’s defence to article 7 is expressed to be the same as for article 6, but the Mirror’s article the following day contains more material, including some quotations attributed to the Prince of Wales, such as his being “hugely relieved” that the Duke had not taken harder drugs, but “worried sick” about it, and that the Duke was “very fed up and cheesed-off indeed”, which were not in the Sunday newspapers. The article reported that the Duke was back at Highgrove, ready for another meeting with his father, and that he was not allowed out without his brother or father or trusted friends being with him. The article attributes a number of quotations to a “source close to [HRH Prince] Charles” and “a family source”.

Ms Kerr, a joint byline on the article, claimed that she could not remember the story very well and does not know the source of the quotations. She said that it was possible that they came from another paper, or from a contact of her joint byline, Mr Edwards, or from Piers Morgan. She did not vouch for any confidential source. Her joint byline did not give evidence. John Peacock of the Mirror commissioned four C&L inquiries on 12 January, as soon as the story broke, and Rod Chaytor commissioned five C&L searches the following day, in the names of friends of the Duke, those running the pub and family of an alleged supplier of drugs.

In the same newspaper on the same day, a further article by Jane Kerr and Jeff Edwards purported to quote Prince William saying to his brother: “This serves you right. You have been partying far too hard and too recklessly to not eventually be caught. You’ve been an accident waiting to happen. Let this be a lesson to you”. Ms Kerr was unable to explain where this quotation came from, except that it was not through anything that she had done, but she felt sure there would be a legitimate source.

The Duke clearly had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to private conversations between him and his father – which was part of his father’s reaction – beyond what was put into the public domain by the Palace’s response to the News of the World’s allegations. The private relationship with Prince William was not the subject of the article under consideration, which only said that Prince William was one of those without whom the Duke was not supposed to leave Highgrove. I accept that his domestic arrangements of this nature were ones in respect of which he had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Those expectations were not outweighed by MGN’s article 10 rights because the public interest material in the story did not extend to these intensely private matters.

There are a lot of unexplained quotations and material in article 7. The obvious inference, and one which I draw, is that others at the Mirror (either those who commissioned TDI and C&L or others who were tasked with such matters) set to work, either with phone numbers that they knew or with the benefit of the searches that they had commissioned, to obtain information about what had happened following the Prince of Wales’s discovery that his son had been taking drugs. Ms Kerr, who said that she was not involved in phone hacking and would never have made up information, herself suggested that others, such as the editor, Piers Morgan, might have contributed, and it is clear that someone did.

Again, given the importance of the storyline in these two articles, I find that it is very likely that unlawful methods were used, including VMI, though I am not persuaded that this included the Duke’s own phone. He was still legally a child (aged 17) at the time, and particular care would probably have been taken in his case not to transgress in that regard. There is no evidence that MGN had the Duke’s phone number by then, though I suspect that it was obtained as a result of scrutinising others’ phone records at about this time. I find that Ms Kerr knew about this unlawful activity at the time, though she is now unable to remember it. While I accept her evidence that she did not personally do or instruct VMI, it is not credible that she – who had instructed C&L 894 times during the period in issue in this case – did not know the nature of the work that C&L did, and how what they provided was then used to enable further unlawful information gathering to take place.

In summary, taking articles 6 and 7 together, I am persuaded that VMI of some of the Duke’s associates probably took place, though not of the Duke himself, and that there was other UIG which included call data. These would have disclosed some of the Duke’s private phone calls and conversations.

This article entitled “Harry’s sick with the ‘kissing disease’” (byline: Jane Kerr) was published by The Mirror on 29 March 2002. It describes his illness and the fact that it would not prevent him from joining the family skiing holiday to Klosters.

The private content of the article pleaded is the Duke’s health, in particular the diagnosis of glandular fever. The Duke said that the article was correct but that he did not know how anyone outside his immediate family knew about it, as he was ashamed of contracting it and did not tell anyone. He said that in commenting publicly, the Palace was responding to a storyline put to it as it would not have volunteered such information. The article included the St James’s Palace spokeswoman’s comments. It said that the Duke’s friends and his brother had teased him about contracting the ‘kissing disease’.

MGN’s defence speculates about how this story was obtained by the Mirror, saying that Jane Kerr was well connected, that the Palace probably discreetly released it before the skiing trip, or that Mark Bolland might have told Piers Morgan during a drinking session, meal or phone call. It admits that the information was private, but not once it had been released by the Palace. That nevertheless leaves the question of whether Ms Kerr had found the story first, which resulted in the Palace being asked to confirm it, and if so how the story was sourced; and secondly how content that was not put into the public domain by the Palace was sourced.

Ms Kerr’s evidence was that she did not remember how that story was obtained, save that the article reports what the spokeswoman said. She felt that a Palace source might have given her the information about teasing, as a throwaway line.

The news about the Duke’s illness was published on the same day in other newspapers, including The Sun, which reported that the fact had emerged the previous night. It is clear from other reports that the date of publication was the first day of the skiing holiday, at which the Princes traditionally took part in a photo shoot in the morning. It therefore seems likely that it was the Palace spokeswoman who first put the information into the public domain. I consider it plausible and more likely than not that the Palace did so because of the skiing holiday that was about to start, and the need to give some explanation. I think that the Duke was mistaken about this: there was a sensible reason for the announcement.

This does not explain how the Mirror, unlike all the other newspaper reports, was able to say that the Duke was being teased about it by Prince William and his friends. It does look suspicious. However, communications between the Duke and his friends and family was not the private content that was pleaded, only the fact of the illness itself, so there is no claim in respect of any UIG relating to these communications in any event.

This article entitled “No Eton Trifles for Harry, 18” (byline: Jane Kerr) was published by the Mirror on 16 September 2002, the Duke’s 18^th birthday. It describes how the Duke had a quiet lunch with his father and brother on his birthday before being driven back to school.

The private content pleaded is how and when the Duke celebrated his 18^th birthday with his family.

The article quotes the Duke speaking about lessons that he had learned earlier in the year and on how he wanted to emulate his late mother by doing charity work.

The defence is that the content is derived from information the Duke provided to the Press Association in an interview to mark his 18^th birthday, which had been circulated to media organisations on 14 September 2002 under embargo. Anything beyond that material was trivial and not private.

In my judgment that defence is fully made out. The only sentence in the article that is not fully covered by the Press Association interview is that he was driven back to Eton. Ms Kerr said that she would have worked out that as term at Eton started on the Monday he would have been driven back to school on the Sunday.

The claimants had no other persuasive argument as to why this information would have been obtained by UIG or why there was a reasonable expectation of privacy about it, after the event.

This article entitled “‘Matured’ Harry is a godfather” (no byline) was published by The People on 20 April 2003. It describes how Prince Harry was chosen to be invited to become the godfather of the nephew of his former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke.

The private content pleaded is details of the Duke being invited to become a godfather.

The article explained that the Prince of Wales, the Duke’s father, had approved of the request and hoped that it might be the making of the Duke, quoting “a Royal insider” and Ms Legge-Bourke’s brother.

The Duke admits the truth of the article but cannot understand where the story had come from, as private matters such as this would not be released in advance of the event itself. He said that it appeared that Mr Legge-Bourke had been approached for a comment.

MGN disputes that the information was private, as the role of godfather was a public one, but that misses the point, in my view, which is that until the godparents or godfather chose to release the information it was a private ‘family’ matter. Nevertheless, MGN points to the information having been previously published in the Mandrake column of the Daily Telegraph on 13 April 2003.

Although MGN has called no witness to explain the source, it is obvious from the phraseology of the Mandrake column and the article that the former is the source. The Duke points to a CR for £200 to a freelance journalist, Chris Murphy, authorised by James Scott, and a TDI invoice headed “Pettifer/Bourke” for £85 dated 15 January 2002, suggesting that as a result The People had their phone numbers and Mr Scott hacked their phones, resulting in The People being able to add the comment about the Prince of Wales being keen.

In my judgment, it is much more likely that the addition was made by Mr Murphy, to add colour to the story that he supplied, or by a person unknown at The People (though no one has claimed a byline for it). It is inherently unlikely that Prince Charles would have left a voicemail for one of the Legge-Bourkes, though doubtless there was a conversation at some time seeking his approval.

This article entitled “Harry to lead cadets’ march” (no byline) was published by the Mirror on 29 April 2003. It states that the Duke had been chosen to lead military cadets at an Eton parade – he would be in charge of the school’s CCF tattoo and was said by a spokesman to be “delighted”.

The private content is pleaded as the content of the article.

I cannot see how this could be regarded on any view as a matter on which the Duke had a reasonable expectation of privacy. The Duke said that he regarded it as an honour and feared a backlash from publicity, but he could hardly have expected to lead the tattoo in private, or for his intended role to be kept confidential. If the information was confidential in any sense, it would have been confidential to the school, not to him.

In any event, the story line was publicised by St James’s Palace the day before the article and was reported by the Press Association on the same day.

The Duke accepted in cross-examination that the article was no more than a composite version of the Palace announcement and the Press Association report.

There is no documentary material to suggest otherwise, in support of the claim in relation to this article, and one does wonder what kind of judgement was exercised when claims are pursued to trial in respect of articles of this kind.

This article entitled “Harry is ready to quit Oz” (byline: Jane Kerr) was published by the Daily Mirror on 27 September 2003. It describes how the Duke was being pursued by camera crews in Australia, on his gap year, and might be brought home.

The private content is pleaded as private information concerning the Duke’s personal life, namely details of his considering abandoning his gap year due to media attention. But in fact the article does not say anything about the Duke’s feelings or what he was considering.

The article quotes a St James’s Palace statement about the problem of the media not leaving the Duke alone and the Duke did accept that a Palace statement was made relating to his circumstances in Australia. The same story appeared the same day in essentially the same terms in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, all of which referred to appeals from Royal aides to leave the Duke alone.

It was also published in The Sunday Age in Australia. This publication referred to the Duke’s minders saying that he was sitting inside the ranch watching videos, quoted Mark Dyer as saying to reporters: “I’ve got a young man in there in pieces”, and quoted Frank Thorme as saying that Mark Dyer said that he could not do anything useful on the ranch without having his photograph taken.

It appears therefore that the source for the story was a Palace briefing and comments made by the Duke’s own companion in Australia.

Undeterred, the claimants contend that proximate CRs for Frank Thorne are indicative of UIG. But the first of these clearly relates to a different article, about which the Duke has not claimed; and the second, with the description “Prince Harry watch Hunter Valley (Ellis)” refers to a different publication date (albeit only one day earlier), and the location is entirely different – the Hunter Valley being north of Sydney in NSW and Tooloombilla being 370 miles west of Brisbane, in Queensland.

The claim in respect of this article is also hopeless.

This article entitled “Beach Bum Harry” (byline: Jane Kerr) was published by the Mirror on 16 December 2003. It describes how the Duke enjoyed playing in the sea in Noosa, Queensland, following the end of his jackaroo stint. It said that the Duke was due home in time for Christmas.

The private content is pleaded as: details of the Duke surfing with friends while on his gap year.

The beach was a public beach and the Duke was unaware at the time of photographers.

MGN’s defence is that the information in the article (which is really only comment on the photograph) came from an Australian freelance photographer, Jamie Fawcett, and had been printed first in the Evening Standard the previous day, and was then published in several newspapers on the same day as the Mirror article. The Duke’s intended visit to the Sunshine Coast, and Noosa in particular, had been published by the Evening Standard and the Evening Mail on 12 December, four days before the article in question.

Ms Kerr said that her article was just commentary on the photograph and that it was possible that she spoke to the photographer for a description. The return for Christmas was a deduction from the Palace’s previous announcement of the length of the Duke’s visit to Australia. But she was unable to say how the photographer knew to be at Noosa that day.

The claimants rely on the fact that Mr Fawcett had been labelled a dangerous “cowboy” by a court following a failed defamation case. The judgment referred to Mr Fawcett’s belief that celebrities had no right to expect any privacy in Australia and considered him to be a “recklessly irresponsible photojournalist”.

I am unable to see how that makes it more likely than not that the photographs taken or the content of the commentary on them were a misuse by MGN of the Duke’s private information. The photographer was obviously not commissioned by MGN, otherwise the photographs would not have appeared in numerous newspapers. They were taken by a freelancer and offered to the Mirror, and Ms Kerr appended a suitable commentary based on what she saw and what was already in the public domain. The quotation from the “onlooker” is very likely to have been the photographer, though Ms Kerr could not positively remember that she did speak to him.

This article entitled “WILLS. Seeing Burrell is only way to stop him selling more Diana secrets HARRY NO .. Burrell’s a ….” (byline: Rachael Bletchly) was published by The People on 28 December 2003. It describes how the two Princes, William and Harry, had had a strong disagreement about whether they should meet Paul Burrell to seek to end his sale of secrets of their late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.

The private content of the story is pleaded as: an alleged disagreement with Prince William about whether to meet Mr Burrell.

The story reports a clash over a planned New Year meeting, which the Duke wanted to cancel, and sets out what each of the Princes’ views were and what each thought of the proposed meeting and of Mr Burrell. It reports that the Duke brands Mr Burrell a “two-faced s***”. It also attributes very detailed comments to an unidentified “senior Royal source” and “insider” and a brief comment to a “Buckingham Palace spokesperson”.

The Duke said that what was attributed to the Royal source reflected exactly his private feelings and that he would have used the expression “two-faced s***” and suspected that this could have been lifted from a voicemail that he had left. In cross-examination, the Duke said that he “certainly” used that phrase and left it on voicemails. He was challenged with a different account in his book “Spare” about whether he did or did not want a meeting and became rather confused about what the position was at the time, but said that he was leaving voicemails for his brother (at the time he was in Australia), but did not specifically recall leaving a message using the words “two-faced s***”.

The defence is that although some of the information was private there was a legitimate confidential source for the story – said to be a person who specialised in royal matters and had extensive royal contacts – and an overriding public interest in the story.

There had been an earlier article published by The Evening Standard on 27 October 2003 claiming to report a disagreement between Her Majesty the late Queen and Prince William about whether he should meet Mr Burrell. The two Princes had made a joint statement when Mr Burrell’s proposed book was publicised, saying that they could not believe that he, who was entrusted with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold and overt betrayal. They had therefore, to that extent, put their feelings about Mr Burrell into the public domain. There had also been a report in the Daily Express on 8 December 2003 that a crisis meeting between the Princes and Mr Burrell would take place over the Christmas holidays.

The Duke’s case is that Rachael Bletchly was a prolific user of PIs, including 20 instructions to ELI and 66 to Mr Whittamore, and that three of her other articles have previously been admitted by MGN in the MNHL to be the product of UIG. She continues to be employed by Reach plc, but was not called to give evidence about her sources for the article, nor did any other witness for MGN explain where the story came from. The Duke relies on an invoice from IIG Europe (Gavin Burrows) to Senga Irvine at The People dated 13 February 2004 for “Extensive enquiries – Prince William”, noting that other invoices tend to show that Mr Burrows invoiced late and in batches for work done.

The fact of a serious disagreement between the Princes was clearly a private matter, regardless of the fact that they had previously made their joint feelings about Mr Burrell known and the fact that it was in the public arena that Prince William wanted a meeting and H.M. The late Queen did not want that.

What is reported is self-evidently derived from private conversations between the Princes or other means of communication between them. If there had been a legitimate source for this aspect of the story, MGN could have called Ms Bletchly to vouch for it, and to explain how the person who specialised in royal matters explained their source. I am left with the Duke’s evidence, which seems inherently credible, given that on 16 December he was still on a beach in Noosa and would therefore have been communicating with his brother by phone. Upon his return to the UK for Christmas, he would have been with his family (including Prince William) in person.

In my judgment, it is probable that this private information was obtained by VMI of messages between the Duke and his brother or other associates. The People therefore probably had the Duke’s mobile phone number by this time, at the latest. As I have already found, it is likely that it made use of it, cautiously, on occasions. I consider it unlikely, given the risks, that it was used routinely or indiscriminately, in the way described by Mr Evans for targets on his “back pocket list”.

This article entitled “Harry is a Chelsy Fan” (byline: Anthony Harwood) was published by the Mirror on 29 November 2004. It describes how the Duke had enjoyed a romantic liaison with Ms Davy during a stay on a ranch in Argentina. The short article was written by Mr Harwood, who had been sent personally to cover the Duke in Argentina (at the time he was based in New York, but if there were any doubt about the importance to MGN of storylines about the Duke, his travel dispels it).

The private content is pleaded as: information regarding his personal life, namely “details of his relationship with Chelsy Davy”.

The article contains legitimate quotations from construction workers near the ranch, who had observed the couple, and a student who had met the Duke earlier on his trip. The critical issue is how Mr Harwood managed to confirm that the “pretty blonde” in the accompanying photograph was Ms Davy.

MGN’s defence is that the information was not private, as visible to all at the ranch, and that the story was legitimately sourced from a report in the Mail on Sunday the day before, two confidential sources and a South African photographer. I disagree that there was no legitimate expectation of privacy: this was a private holiday for which significant efforts had been made to keep it, and the identify of those present, secret.

The Duke said that he had met Ms Davy in England, when she attended a school near Highgrove, and then spent some time with her in Botswana. He was unaware that Mark Dyer had personally arranged for Ms Davy to join him in Argentina.

The Mirror had published an article on 27 November 2004 (bylines: Mr Harwood and Mr Brough), two days before, reporting excessive drunkenness in Lobos and at the ranch in Argentina, a claim of a kidnap plot that had been faxed to the British embassy, and the return of the Duke to the UK on 26 November. An owner of a bar said that “the group was accompanied by a mystery blonde”. An accompanying piece written by James Whitaker said that the return to the UK was not a change of plan, as “His flight was booked a month ago. The reservation will prove this.”

Mr Harwood then reported back and the Mirror night log early on the Saturday morning records that he was working on finding the identity of the blonde girl, and whether she was Kelsey whom the Duke had kissed in a Cape Town night club earlier that year, and that “Locals in Lobos seem to think girl Harry was with this time around was called Chelsy or Kelsey, which obviously fits. I have got a freelancer in Cape Town, Mike Behr, working on finding out what he can on this girl … He is now trying to see if she is the same girl who has just returned from Argentina.”

Mr Harwood claimed that Mike Behr was a freelance journalist, though it is evident from the night log that he did not know him, as he was recommended by Mark Ellis. He said that he sent his contact, a Spanish freelancer, back to the ranch to talk to those present.

On 28 November (Sunday) the Mail on Sunday carried the story of the Duke’s “first true love” in Argentina and named the blonde as Chelsy Davy.

Mr Harwood said that it was likely that the photograph of Ms Davy on the “Harry is a Chelsy Fan” article was taken in Cape Town on Ms Davy’s return.

Mr Harwood emailed a draft article to the Mirror at 5pm GMT on the Sunday afternoon. It contained the content of the final article, confirming Ms Davy’s identity, but also much more, including that the Duke’s trip had been cut short by a security scare, the relationship’s earlier stages, the fact that the Duke had been at the ranch for several days before Ms Davy arrived, the fact that she had flown back to South Africa on the same day that the Duke flew back to London, and that her plane had left two hours before the Duke’s did.

Mr Harwood denied that the flight information came from flight blags and felt that he must have got the information from an Argentine stringer, or from reports in the local media. He said that Mr Brough, who was in London, had put in calls, as he speaks Spanish, and anything he found out would have been put into the story, but he did not know what that was. However, there was little in the story that was not in Mr Harwood’s draft, except the comment of the student with whom the Duke had danced at a night club in Lobos. What is significant is that all the flight detail was taken out of the final version.

Mr Harwood accepted that there was no payment record for the Argentine source for the story. Mr Harwood said that he did not know that Mr Stafford carried out flight blagging then but now knows that MGN has admitted it. He said the use of Mr Behr in Cape Town was a “punt”, and that he was not aware that Mr Behr blagged flight details. Asked to explain how he was able to identify that it was Chelsy Davy who had flown out from Argentina to South Africa two hours before the Duke flew to London, Mr Harwood said that he did not speak to Mr Behr and that Mr Behr did not blag flight details on this occasion but would have been making what enquiries he could:

There are numerous payment records relating to the Duke’s visit to Argentina, including four for Gerard Couzens between 25 and 28 November (for all three MGN papers), two photograph agencies, two redacted CRs, two CRs for a Tania Coetzee in Cape Town and two CRs for Mike Behr, all relating to this article publication date.

As previously detailed in the PI Schedule, there is credible evidence of Mike Behr having conducted or organised flight blagging and telephone bill blagging in relation to Chelsy Davy on other occasions. It is evident that the Mirror journalists had obtained details of the Duke’s flights. In my judgment, the story in this article – particularly the all-important confirmation of the identity of Chelsy Davy – was probably stood up by the Mirror by commissioning PIs to blag flight information, credit card details or phone billing data, to confirm that it was Ms Davy who had been in Argentina. That unlawful activity was, I find, specifically instructed from London, not undertaken at the whim of Mr Behr. Mr Harwood’s attempt to explain how else Ms Davy’s identity was confirmed was wholly unconvincing. It follows that, since MGN directed the unlawful activity, the tort is established.

This article entitled “When Harry met Daddy (.. the biggest danger to wildlife in Africa” (byline: Graham Brough and Jane Kerr) was published by the Daily Mirror on 13 December 2004. It describes how the Duke met Ms Davy’s father at a beach holiday in Bazaruto, Mozambique. He was alleged to be a “safari tycoon” in Zimbabwe, running trips for hunters wanting to shoot big game. Most of the article was about Mr Davy’s business interests, but it stated that the Duke would be flying back to Britain on 19 December 2004, was said to be besotted with Ms Davy, and that they wanted to marry, according to Ms Davy’s Uncle Paul.

The private content pleaded is: details of the Claimant’s personal life, namely details of his relationship with Chelsy Davy and the Duke meeting her father for the first time.

The joint byline, Ms Kerr, said she did not remember this story well, but that the holiday was already in the public domain after the couple had been spotted at Durban airport en route for Bazaruto. She said that she called Clarence House for comment but was told that it was a private matter, and that she then probably called some charities for comments on Mr Davy’s hunting business. All other material was likely to have come from desk top research or cuttings.

In fact, information about the romance and the holiday had been published the previous day and the weekend before by the Mail on Sunday, which revealed the holiday plans and the depth of the romance in a long article that included comments from Uncle Paul Davy. There had also been earlier articles on Mr Charles Davy, an article in the Daily Express nine days before, which said that the Duke and Ms Davy had been dating for eight months and were going to spend a holiday at Bazaruto Lodge, and an article in The Sun four days before, which said that the Duke flew from Durban for a week on the island of Bazaruto.

The new material in the Mirror’s article was that Mr Charles Davy had flown in to Bazaruto on the previous day to meet the Duke, when 11 family members were already there; that the Duke would fly back to London on 19 December, and a “pal close to Harry” saying that the possibility of marriage “should not be taken too seriously”.

The only payment records to which the Duke is able to point are a Jonathan Stafford composite invoice (without schedule) for December 2004 and four Big Pictures CRs for “Prince Harry” covering the period 10-13 December and charging £300 a day for unidentified services.

What is evident from this coverage is that once again the Mirror was able to be specific about flight arrangements. I reject Ms Kerr’s explanation that the return to London could be calculated from a previous publication, which did not refer to the Duke’s visit being for 5 nights. The majority of the writing of the article, focussing on the threat that Mr Davy posed to African wildlife, was done by Mr Brough, as a draft demonstrates, and it appears that Ms Kerr was asked to add in a bit of romantic interest. Most of it appears to be lazy journalism, picking up pieces from previous articles, but it is evident that someone at the Mirror obtained flight details relating to the various parties’ journeys to and from Bazaruto. I find that this was likely to have been done in England, by a PI by unlawful means. There is, however, nothing to support a case that VMI was used.

These articles entitled “Harry’s Girl ‘to dump him’” and “Chelsy is not happy” (byline: Jane Kerr) were both published by the Mirror on 15 January 2005. They relate to Ms Davy’s reaction to an unfortunate episode in the Duke’s youth when he attended a fancy dress party dressed as an Africa Korps soldier, wearing a swastika armband, and then had “a leggy brunette draped across his lap”.

The private content is pleaded as: information regarding the Duke’s personal life, namely details of his relationship with Chelsy Davy and the ‘tongue lashing down the phone’ after flirting with a brunette at a party.

MGN denies that the Duke had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to the exchanges between him and Ms Davy, and that the speculation about the effect of his behaviour on his relationship with her was trivial and obvious. It also denies any UIG, contending that the information came from prior reports in the public domain, Paul Davy and a confidential source.

The Sun had published an article “Harry the Nazi” two days before the Mirror’s articles, breaking the story of the fancy dress and the brunette.

Ms Kerr said that the copy that she filed did not contain the sentence “was so furious he flirted with a mystery brunette she gave him a tongue lashing down the phone” and suggested that someone else had added it. The draft indicated that Paul Davy was the source of some of the information. Mr Conor Hanna and Mr Richard Wallace were involved in email traffic prior to publication. The joint byline, Richard Smith, was a West of England correspondent and, Ms Kerr said, might have gone to the area to talk to people who had been at the party. Ms Kerr was unable to explain how the line “angry Chelsy phoned him at his father’s Highgrove home” came to be in the article, or “A friend said ‘She’s not happy at all’”. In an earlier version of the article, there was reference to how long a telephone call on New Year’s Eve lasted, but that was removed from the publication article.

The Duke’s case relies upon a CR for a payment of £150 to Mike Behr “Calls re Chelsy Davy story (kerr)” that states a publication date of 22 January but no relevant article of that date has been identified, and so it is likely to relate to Ms Kerr’s instruction of Mike Behr on 14 January to “find out what Chelsy thinks of this and whether they have split or likely to split as a result”. There is a single recorded call to Guy Pelly’s landline on 13 January of “null” duration. There is also a further CR payment to Barbara Jones for “Chelsy Dave b’ground re Prince Harry (Kerr)” dated 21 January 2005, after Ms Kerr emailed Louise Flood at MGN to request payment to her for “Chelsy Davy (Prince Harry’s girlfriend) background and contact telephone numbers”.

Some of the content of the articles has plainly come from earlier publications, or could have been stood up or added to by contact with any one of 250 people present at the party. However, the very specific information about what Ms Davy said to the Duke and how long their private conversations lasted could not have been obtained in that way. Nor was that content attributed to Paul Davy in the draft because it was not in the draft.

In my judgment, it is reasonably clear that billing/call data relating to Chelsy Davy’s mobile phone must have been obtained by MGN for the specific content identified to be added to Ms Kerr’s draft. How exactly this was done and by whom is unclear, though Mr Hanna and Mr Wallace were both involved and it would have been instructed from London. I consider that it is also probable that VMI was used, though there was no case advanced that the Duke’s own phone was hacked on this occasion.

This article entitled “You did what!” (byline: Simon Wright) was published by the Mirror on 6 February 2005. It is the product of an investigation into who photographed the Duke in Africa Korps uniform and then sold the photograph to The Sun. The alleged culprit was named and shamed, with a full sized photograph of him and his girlfriend and another picture of the Duke and the swastika armband.

The private content is pleaded as: information regarding the Duke’s family life, namely details of the farm work he was made to do as a punishment imposed by his father.

The relevant part of the article was the statement that the Duke was “sulking like a teenager” after being grounded; that Prince Charles had ordered the Duke to carry out lowly jobs on a farm as a punishment for the Nazi gaffe; that he spent days cleaning out sties and helping with cattle on Home Farm; and that he was ordered to keep a low profile, which included not travelling to South Africa to see Ms Davy.

MGN’s defence is that the information came from prior reports in the public domain and a confidential source; and that the Duke did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to the nature of his punishment for his misdeeds, given the publicity for the formal apology.

There is a large array of payment records for ELI in relation to this story, commissioned by James Saville and Simon Wright, two C&L invoices commissioned by Nick Buckley and Sara Nuwar, and three AJK Research invoices commissioned by Nick Buckley and James Saville. These relate to the investigations into Mr Springfield and Ms Grievson and others for the main storyline, not the information about the Duke’s punishment. Nevertheless, based on Mr Wright’s huge number of instructions of C&L, ELI and AJK Research and 366 telephone calls and 3 incriminating emails to Jonathan Stafford, and in the absence of any evidence from MGN as to how the story was obtained, it is highly likely that UIG was involved in the preparation of the article throughout. Mr Buckley, who had the Duke’s phone number in his Palm Pilot, was involved.

Focusing on the allegedly private information in the article, it is difficult to see how that information is likely to have been obtained by interception of voicemails, unless it was matters that the Duke was reporting to Ms Davy or other friends. However, there was no specific evidence to support that case and Mr Sherborne’s closing submissions were that this information was obviously obtained from conversations between him and his father (though it was not explained how Mr Wright or his PIs would have obtained this). There were 3 calls to Paddy Harverson on 2 February 2005 but no case was explained about why his voicemails would have the information in them. The Duke did not say that he left a voicemail for Mr Harverson or that his father might have done, in relation to the punishment.

In fact, most of the information that the Duke complains about had already been put into the public domain on 17 January 2005 in an article in The Sun and on 30 January 2005 in an article in the Mail on Sunday. The only non-public material was that the Duke was sulking (which is only an expression of opinion) and that he was ordered to keep a low profile.

Given what had already been put into the public domain, I do not consider that the Duke on 6 February 2005 had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to the additional point (if it was correct) that he had been ordered to keep a low profile. This was really implicit in the other details of the punishment, which had been made public. I am also not persuaded that this information was obtained by UIG – the efforts of those involved in preparing the article was on identifying who had “betrayed” the Duke by selling the photograph, not on the detail of the punishment. That was not his private information.

This article entitled “Who Dares Windsors” (byline: Jane Kerr and Chris Hughes) was published by the Mirror on 4 March 2005. It concerns the appointment of Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton as private secretary to the Duke and his brother.

The article is not relied on by the Duke as an occasion of misuse of his private information but only as evidence of UIG.

The article is principally about the career of Mr Lowther-Pinkerton but also says that both Princes helped to choose him and get on very well with him. The Duke said that that was true.

It was published the day after an announcement by Clarence House. Much of the content of that announcement is in the article. Ms Kerr said that she suspected that her joint byline, Mr Hughes, was responsible for collecting quotations from former colleagues of Mr Lowther-Pinkerton.

The Duke relies on a 52 second phone call from Ms Kerr to Mr Lowther-Pinkerton on the date of the announcement as evidence of VMI. In my view, that is most improbable, and far more likely that Ms Kerr was phoning him for any comment that he felt able to make.

Other than that item of call data, the Duke relies only on the extent to which Ms Kerr and Mr Hughes are proved by documents to have made extensive use of PIs involved in UIG. However, in this case, the nature of the comments attributed to ex-colleagues of Mr Lowther-Pinkerton are not at all suspicious and are very unlikely to be the product of UIG.

This article entitled “Chelsy’s Gap EIIR” (byline: Dean Rousewell) was published by The People on 24 April 2005. It concerns the Duke’s relationship with Chelsy Davy and their communications by telephone and their plans. It is the first of 30 articles with Mr Rousewell’s byline about which the Duke complains. Mr Rousewell was by that time the royal editor of The People.

The private content pleaded is the Duke’s relationship with Ms Davy and her plans to take a gap year to spend more time with him. The article describes in some detail the feelings of both the Duke and Ms Davy, how long they spend on the telephone, the intention to take a gap year and how it would be spent, and what the Duke had told his brother about Ms Davy, among other things.

The Duke said that he found the level of detail in this article disturbing, as both Ms Davy and he were very careful not to talk to people about their relationship and were careful to keep their plans a secret. He said that he would not been telling friends how long he was spending on the phone to Ms Davy.

MGN’s defence is that the information was not private because the relationship was in the public domain and information about their plans was trivial, and not something in which the Duke had a reasonable expectation of privacy. It says that in any event the information came from a news agency and there is no evidence of VMI.

There is a £600 CR for Ferrari Press Agency for the publication date of the article, authorised by Mr Proctor and Mr Mark Thomas. The claimants point to emails passing between these two men in 2004 (unconnected to the Duke’s case) passing on mobile telephone numbers of celebrities.

Ferrari was run by Matthew Bell, who had gone “freelance” after a career at the Sunday Mirror where he was the news editor and made much use of the services of Jonathan Stafford and TDI. The claimants do not plead a generic case against Ferrari or Mr Bell, however.

MGN called no evidence to explain where the story came from, but asserted in closing submissions that it came from a news agency and prior reports in the press, namely a Daily Mail article four days previously, which reported the holiday in a South African hunting lodge, referred to in the Rousewell article, and a Daily Star article four months previously, which suggested that Ms Davy sent the Duke “10 sexy phone calls and texts a day” and that the couple were madly in love with each other.

The detail in the article about the gap year plans and hours spent on the phone to Ms Davy, the Duke’s moods and feelings and what he told his brother are not explained by prior publications. It seems obvious that someone has had access to phone records, and voicemails too, to be able to report on this.

Mr Rousewell still works for MGN and is believed to be the news editor at the Mirror. No explanation was provided for why he did not give evidence to explain how he wrote the story. Given Mr Rousewell’s involvement in 30 articles in the Duke’s case, I would have expected to hear his account of what was happening on the royal desk at The People at this time and how he wrote the stories that he did. Mr Green argued that no adverse inference could be drawn, and stressed that MGN could not have signed the statement of truth on its pleaded defence if Mr Rousewell had told its lawyers that UIG was used. (In fact, two of the Rousewell articles in issue in this trial are “not admitted” to be the product of UIG, rather than “denied”.)

If MGN was properly able to deny that the other articles (of which this is one) were the product of UIG, one might have expected some evidence to support the case, but there is none, other than a CR to Ferrari, which proves nothing and is unexplained by evidence. It is simply wrong to assert that no adverse inference can be drawn from failure to call relevant evidence where privilege is asserted in relation to how that decision was reached: what cannot be done is to draw an adverse inference from the assertion of privilege. Whatever the reason, the court is left without the benefit of what is likely to be highly material evidence from the author of the article about how the story was obtained. I draw no conclusion from the absence of an explanation for not calling Mr Rousewell, but equally I cannot assume in MGN’s favour that there is a good one. The inference from the absence of Mr Rousewell is nevertheless obvious: Mr Rousewell was considered unable or unlikely to provide supportive evidence, or evidence that would stand up to scrutiny.

Regardless of that inference, the Duke’s case and evidence raises a strong prima facie case that UIG and VMI were used to obtain this story, casting the evidential burden on MGN to explain; but there is no evidence from MGN to rebut it. It is not necessary to make a finding about who carried out phone hacking in this case and I do not do so, but Mr Rousewell’s record of instructing PIs who engaged in UIG (ELI, JJ Services, C&L and Avalon) and the nature of some of these commissions show that he must knowingly have used unlawfully gathered information.

I reject the argument that the Duke had no reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to Ms Davy’s plans to spend time with him on a gap year, his feelings about that, how often he was at that stage of their relationship on the phone to Ms Davy, and what he told his brother about his feelings. These things are private by their nature, but particularly so given the difficulty that the Duke and Ms Davy had in conducting their relationship in the glare of publicity. Any secrecy or privacy they could get was of great value to them.

This article entitled “Harry Carry!” (byline: Dean Rousewell) was published by The People on 15 May 2005. It concerns the Duke’s knee injury that left him allegedly unable to participate in runs at Sandhurst, and how his relationship with Ms Davy would be affected by his initial officer training.

The private content pleaded is quite narrow: information regarding the Duke’s private and professional life, namely details of being let off marches due to his knee injury.

The Duke said that he did not discuss his medical issues freely at Sandhurst, or discuss his email contact with Ms Davy with anyone. He also said that the article was inaccurate in that there were no 5-mile runs during the first week of training.

It had previously been publicised that the Duke had problems with a knee injury but there had been no recent publicity about it since his entrance to Sandhurst was deferred from January to May 2005. On 15 January, The Independent reported concern from officers at Sandhurst about the knee problem being the reason for the Duke’s deferral while he continued to ski and play football, and said that “other cadets may feel he is getting preferential treatment.”

There is a CR for £150 for John Ross for a “Harry Sandhurst asst”, authorised by Ben Proctor and a CR for £1,500 for Ferrari Press Agency Ltd for a “Harry at Sandhurst” contribution, authorised by Mr Proctor and Mr Mark Thomas, a further redacted CR for “Harry at Sandhurst” for £500, and two CRs for reproduction of photographs. It is therefore obvious that The People had invested in several different means of obtaining information about the Duke’s progress at Sandhurst. One of those may have been a fellow cadet, which would explain some of the quotations in the article. The involvement of Mr Ross is unexplained, as is the very substantial payment to Ferrari.

MGN does not admit that the information was obtained by UIG, but, despite that, sought in closing submissions to advance a positive case that much of the information came from a confidential source who specialises in royal matters and has extensive royal contacts. I reject that argument, as it is inconsistent with the pleaded case and unclear why royal contacts would have information about the experiences of the cadets at Sandhurst. The involvement of Mr Ross and Mr Bell of Ferrari suggest that there may well have been UIG.

However, I do not consider that the Duke could have a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to a matter of his ability to participate in fitness training and what other cadets thought of the fact that he had been excused part of it. Subject to any regulations imposed by Sandhurst, any of the cadets or officers would have been entitled to tell family or friends what they had seen. If they were not, the confidentiality was imposed by Sandhurst and was for its benefit. There is no case advanced that the Duke had the benefit of that confidentiality arising from the terms of his service or otherwise.

This article entitled “Chel Shocked” (byline: Dean Rousewell) was published by The People on 9 April 2006. It concerns details of a night out that the Duke and other Sandhurst cadets enjoyed at Spearmint Rhino, involving “lap dance antics”, and Ms Davy’s reaction to hearing about it. It purports to relate content of the telephone conversations between the Duke and Ms Davy, attributed to a “highly placed source”. The article also says that the Duke and Ms Davy were going to spend a 5-day holiday in Mozambique later that month.

The private content pleaded is: information regarding the Duke’s personal life, namely details of his relationship with Ms Davy and her anger in a “string of phone calls” after the Duke visited a lap-dancing club. MGN denies that the information was private on the basis that Ms Davy’s anger in response to the event was obvious and trivial.

The story of the visit to the club had been broken the previous day (Saturday) by numerous newspapers and one had speculated about Ms Davy’s likely reaction. It is inevitable that the Sunday tabloid newspapers would have gone into overdrive to find out more and, if possible, what Ms Davy’s reaction actually was.

The News of the World published its take on the same day as The People’s article. The article was probably the most significant article in the long history of phone hacking. It was entitled “Chelsy tears strip off Harry!” and the bylines were Clive Goodman and Neville Thurlbeck. They reported that the Duke had been given a furious dressing-down and ear-bashing by telephone, but the only telephone call reported was made by Prince William leaving a prank voicemail on the Duke’s phone pretending to be an offended Chelsy Davy. This obvious hacking of the Duke’s phone was reported by Buckingham Palace and the MPS started the investigation into hacking of Royals’ phones that led to the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire in August 2006.

The Goodman/Thurlbeck article only referred to the fact and content of text messages from the Duke to Ms Davy, not voicemails or phone calls, though it is obvious that Ms Davy was doorstepped in Cape Town and refused to comment. Interestingly, the article also referred to Clarence House releasing an official portrait of Prince Charles and Camilla on their first wedding anniversary and refusing to comment on the reports of lap-dancing.

MGN’s defence is that the story came from two freelance journalists (one confidential, who had extensive royal contacts) and a news agency, Ferrari, also said to specialise in royal stories. They point out that the fact of an intended holiday in Mozambique had already been publicised a week before the article, but that does not extend to the 5-day duration.

The explicit reference to a string of phone calls and a further call lasting half an hour suggests that someone obtained call data for the phone of one or other (or both) of the Duke and Ms Davy. There is no explanation of how a “highly placed source” would be able to inform The People that Ms Davy went berserk at the Duke and then called him back and ranted at him for half an hour.

The article also refers to “Charles and Camilla’s anniversary joy”. I have considered on several occasions whether there may be a more straightforward explanation for some of the journalism in issue, namely that journalists just recast what has already been published and invent a few details to add some colour to the story before publishing it. However, Ms Kerr explicitly denied that a royal correspondent would risk doing that, and Mr Evans and Mr Johnson both explained that even with a story that had broken, MGN journalists would use UIG to make sure that the story stood up or alternatively find an additional angle on the story. There is no evidence from Mr Rousewell or anyone else that lazy journalism is the explanation, so I put that possibility aside.

Once again, with this article, there is a strong prima facie case that there was UIG or VMI, or both, used to capture this story. There is no evidence other than some CRs (that provide no detail) and which are unexplained in evidence to set against that case. In this instance, it may be that VMI of the Duke’s phone can be discounted, on the basis that the MPS will have examined carefully the call history at about the date of The Sun’s and The People’s articles and are likely to have indicated if other suspicious calls were made at about the same time as Mr Mulcaire was intercepting voicemails left for the Duke. On the other hand, it is possible that calls from another untraceable mobile number (Goodman and Mulcaire had both used traceable landlines to make their calls) were identified but could not be investigated further.

Although MGN denies it, the nature, length and content of private phone calls between the Duke and Ms Davy are self-evidently private in nature. The fact that it may be “obvious” that a girlfriend would be upset by a boyfriend enjoying lap-dances does not mean that the detail of Ms Davy’s actual reaction and communications to the Duke, and their feelings about each other, are not private. They are certainly not outweighed by freedom of expression, given the unlawful way in which they were obtained.

This article entitled “DavyStated!” (byline: Dean Rousewell) was published by The People on 16 September 2007 (the Duke’s 23^rd birthday). It concerns a series of rows between the Duke and Ms Davy after she flew from Cape Town to spend time with him in London before starting her law degree in Leeds.

The private content is pleaded as: details of the Duke’s relationship with Chelsy Davy and three arguments the couple had. MGN admits that the content was private but denies VMI or blagging.

The article describes in great detail the feelings of Ms Davy and what was said between them and what the rows were about. It purports to quote a “Palace source” at some length, and then what a “friend” said about Ms Davy’s intelligence and aptitude for studying.

The nature of the content of most of this article, things said by the Duke to Ms Davy or vice versa, is by its nature material that was very unlikely to be available to third parties by lawful means. (The same may not be true of the comments attributed to a friend of Ms Davy.) The article refers to a “Palace source” but the Duke said, convincingly, that he never discussed the details of his relationship with anyone at the Palace (by which expression I took him to mean Royal servants rather than members of his own family or close personal friends). He was convinced that the “Palace source” is the product of VMI, and he accepted that his relationship with Ms Davy was strained at the time.

Although there is no call data disclosed from Mr Rousewell’s extension, there is evidence of 9 calls from Mr Harpin’s mobile phone and 2 calls from his extension to Rob Palmer in the previous week (though Mr Harpin is not bylined on the article).

MGN relied on a Sun article the previous day as the obvious source of the information about the Duke attending a Ricky Gervais performance with his brother rather than Ms Davy, and says that the source was otherwise a Palace source, but gives no detail about how the source would have obtained this kind of detail. There is no CR for a legitimate source.

No evidence was given on behalf of MGN to explain the provenance of this article, despite the fact that MGN denies rather than not admits that it was the product of UIG. Again, I infer that Mr Rousewell’s or others’ evidence would not have supported MGN’s case that there was a legitimate source.

I conclude that, in the absence of some plausible explanation, this article was obtained by VMI of the Duke’s or Ms Davy’s or their associates’ telephones, and by obtaining telephone call data. It seems likely that whoever was charged with obtaining information about the Duke and Ms Davy at each of the three newspapers will have been active following this publication, to see how the story line developed over the following days and weeks.

This article entitled “Hooray Harry’s Dumped” (bylines: Zoe Griffin and Nick Owens) was published by the Sunday Mirror on 11 November 2007, about two months later. It reports that the Duke and Ms Davy had split up is concerned with allegations of drunkenness at a nightclub called Amika in Kensington, where the Duke had gone with friends.

The private content pleaded is: details of the breakdown of the Duke’s relationship with Ms Davy.

The Duke raises questions about how anyone knew that he was going to be at that nightclub but from an email from Ms Griffin to Mr Saville, Mr Hamilton and Mr Scott it seems that she received a report from someone unnamed at 11.30pm and Ms Griffin attended the night club at 12.30am and witnessed what happened. It also appears that there was information obtained on behalf of MGN about the booking and the bill by unlawful means. In any event, that is not the private content in issue.

The story line of Ms Davy “dumping” the Duke had first been published by the News of the World in its first edition on the same Sunday (“Chelsy dumps Harry; Exclusive”). There was considerable detail about the events leading to the break up. The story in the Sunday Mirror was only published in its third edition, so an hour or two after the News of the World. There is an invoice for BDI for £200 entitled “Project Harry” the previous day, which suggests that the Sunday Mirror was engaging in attempts at the time to uncover stories about the Duke. The invoice bears the name of Mr Hamilton and is signed “p.p. N.B.” which suggests that Mr Buckley was still the person responsible for payment of such invoices.

There appear to have been continuous attempts to find out about the Duke’s activities at this time, which led Ms Griffin to the night club. There were several calls made to Paddy Harverson the previous day, which are unexplained by MGN, though they might have been innocent, given Mr Harverson’s role as Prince Charles’s press secretary.

In my judgment, the content about the Duke splitting up with Ms Davy and “drowning his sorrows” and what Ms Davy thought about the Duke’s “hooray lifestyle” and the fact that they had hardly seen each other recently was still private notwithstanding the slightly earlier publication by the News of the World. People who read the Sunday Mirror’s edition on the date of publication are unlikely already to have learnt about the story from reading the News of the World. I reject the argument that the current state of their relationship was a matter in the public interest to publish, even if a proportion of the population found it very interesting to know about it.

However, I consider it more probable than not that the limited private content complained about in this article was taken from the News of the World article. It is not the main focus of the Sunday Mirror article, which was the drunken activities alleged to have happened in Amika, and the break up story line appears to be super-added, on short notice. I accept the argument that an MGN journalist would even in such circumstances have tried to find out more, or stand the story up independently, but there is no evidence of that having been done on this occasion. It seems very likely that there were attempts to cover the Duke’s activities generally at around this time, but that the private information about his relationship was not obtained unlawfully on this occasion.

This article, entitled “Down in the Dumped” (byline: Emily Nash) was published by the Mirror on the following day, 12 November 2007. It reports that Ms Davy had suggested to the Duke a trial separation and that he had only visited her once in Leeds, where she was studying. A quote from a “friend” says that they needed time out but were likely to get back together again.

The private content is pleaded as: details of a trial separation from Chelsy Davy.

The Duke said that by this point he and Ms Davy were not discussing anything with anyone, and that voicemails between them were very likely, owing to the difficulties in the relationship.

MGN’s defence is that the information was already in the public domain and that there is no evidence of VMI or UIG in relation to the article. Much of the content had already been published the previous day, in particular in the Mail on Sunday, which had reported a trial separation, the Duke’s single visit to Leeds and the possibility of getting back together. The content was also to be found in the News of the World and in Reuters coverage on the Sunday.

There is a considerable number of CRs for the date of publication, but none appears to be to a source for the information in the article. It is not clear how Ms Nash obtained some of the other information in the article relating to Ms Davy’s course and unhappiness in Leeds, but that is not the material in relation to which the Duke claims.

Although one can imagine that someone at the Mirror would have endeavoured to stand up the story published over the previous weekend, there is nothing to support the Duke’s case that details of the trial separation were confirmed by VMI or UIG, and no new detail was published by the Mirror. In my judgment, this is likely to be another case of lazy journalism.

This article, entitled “ER, ok if I drop you here?” (byline: Susie Boniface) was published by the Sunday Mirror on 2 December 2007. It reports that Ms Davy had spent the night at Kensington Palace and emerged at lunchtime the next day wearing a different outfit from the previous night.

The private content is pleaded as: details of his relationship with Chelsy Davy and her spending the night at Kensington Palace. MGN does not admit that the content was obtained by UIG, though Ms Boniface still works for MGN and was not called to give evidence.

The article alleges that Ms Davy had found texts from another woman on the Duke’s phone, and that he had been begging her to take him back since they had split up.

The Duke said that photographers do not routinely wait outside the gates to Kensington Palace but admitted that anyone walking past could look up the driveway.

There is a CR in respect of Newsreel (Jonathan Stafford) headed “Chelsy” for £500, authorised by Mr Buckley, and one for £360 to the photographer who took the picture. MGN says that it is unable to explain to what the Newsreel CR related. Call data shows that Ms Boniface called Stafford on 52 occasions in total from her extension and is named on one instruction to him for four flight blags. There are incriminating emails between Ms Boniface, Mr Stretch and Mr Saville disclosed relating to blagging and cracking mobile phones. In her autobiography, Diary of a Fleet Street Fox, she admits to blagging and phone hacking and opines that it is justified in some cases.

In my judgment, information about the whereabouts of Ms Davy and the arrangements for her to spend the night in Kensington Palace are likely to have been obtained by voicemail interception. Ms Davy’s arrival and departure were carefully observed, and the photographer was not there by accident. The information about the state of the relationship and their sleeping arrangements (which were discovered by subterfuge) are clearly private and had not previously been put into the public domain.

This article, entitled “Harry fear as mobile is swiped” (no byline) was published by the Mirror on 26 July 2008. It reports that the Duke was pickpocketed in Lesotho while partying and that the incident raised security concerns, though his contacts and texts were password protected.

The private content is pleaded as: personal information about the Duke’s mobile phone being stolen.

It is clear that this story had already been broken by the time that the Mirror published it. Agence France-Presse had reported it the previous day, as had the Telegraph, which said that royal sources had said that contacts and texts were password protected.

There are no invoices or CRs relating to this story, nor is there any new content. This is another instance of lazy journalism (to which no one was willing to put their name).

This article, entitled “Soldier Harry’s Tali-Ban” (byline: Dean Rousewell) was published by The People on 28 September 2008. It reports that the Duke had been blocked from undertaking a second tour to Afghanistan on the ground that it was too risky.

The private content pleaded is: private information regarding the Duke’s professional life namely being banned from going back to serve in Afghanistan. MGN does not admit that the content was obtained by UIG.

The article cites “royal sources” and one that claimed that the Duke was “absolutely desperate” to return to duty and believed that there was a vital job to do there. A source is quoted as saying that the Duke did not agree that he had proved himself and believed that if he missed out on the most dangerous missions he would be seen as a lightweight soldier.

There is a CR for Rob Palmer for £500 for this article, authorised by Lee Harpin.

The Duke said that the reporting was accurate and that he was speaking to those closest to him about his frustration, including his private secretary, Jamie Lowther Pinkerton, but he does not believe that anyone who had information contained in the article would jeopardise his career by talking about it to others, given that media indiscretion was the reason why he had been withdrawn previously. He rightly accepted in cross-examination that the article was not (solely) about his private life and that the question of whether he should serve on the front line was in the public interest. However, in so far as the article reported his personal feelings about the decision and ambition, that was in principle a private matter.

In my judgment, given the involvement of Mr Harpin and Mr Palmer, and the absence of any explanation from a witness called by MGN, there is likely to have been VMI or other UIG involved in reporting this story. The story was not already in the public domain, though issues about the safety of the Duke serving in Afghanistan were. However, the fact of the Duke’s non-deployment was not private to him and further was in the public interest to publish. That does not, however, extend to what is attributed to a “source” about the Duke’s personal feelings, which is the private information regarding his professional life about which complaint is made.

This article, entitled “HE just loves boozing & army SHE is fed up & is heading home” (byline: Grant Hodgson) was published by the Sunday Mirror on 25 January 2009. It reports that Ms Davy had dumped the Duke because he loved the Army more than her, and that Ms Davy would be returning to Cape Town once her course in Leeds was finished. It alleges that the Duke had spoken to his father about Ms Davy and his proposed helicopter pilot training.

The private content pleaded is: details of the breakdown of his relationship with Chelsy Davy and her view that he loves the Army more than her. This article is not admitted by MGN to be derived from UIG, even though it appears that Grant Hodgson still works for MGN.

Call data records show that Mr Hodgson called Mr Stafford of Newsreel 142 times and instructed ELI 141 times, together with 2,377 C&L instructions. There is an incriminating email dated 8 July 2005 from Mr Hodgson to Mr Stretch and Mr Saville, which shows steps that he was taking in order to enable voicemail interception or other unlawful activity to take place. Mr Hodgson’s extension also called Ms Davy three times on the day before the publication: these could have been attempts to obtain a response directly from her or to access her voicemails.

The story was broken by the News of the World online on Saturday 24 January 2009 and then by the Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, which also said that Ms Davy could not cope with the Duke’s military career. But this article has added a considerable amount of detail about the reason for the break up (“the final straw came when he signed up for a 21-month helicopter training course”), the attempts to rescue their relationship (“several tense meetings with the 24-year-old Prince last week”) and the Duke’s and Ms Davy’s feelings, as well as acrimonious rows on a Mauritius holiday over the previous New Year period, an abandoned trip to South Africa and a conversation between the Duke and his father.

The Duke denied the accuracy of the story in so far as it blamed his career for the break up. That would suggest that his voicemails were not the source of the private material.

There is a CR to Newsreel for £100 – “Chelsy & Harry assist” and a later invoice from BDI – “Project Student”, addressed to Nick Buckley. This was too late to relate to the article but it makes it clear that Ms Davy was being targeted. The People was at the same time instructing Rob Palmer under the reference “Harry booze bungles”. In this frenzied atmosphere of trying to find out about the breakdown of the relationship, I have little doubt that the newspapers were trying everything they could to get more information.

I reject the argument that this kind of detail about the nature of the breakdown and the feelings of those involved were not private and that there was any proper public interest involved.

This article, entitled “What a way to Harry on” (bylines: Clemmie Moodie and Danielle Lawler on the 3am column) was published by the Daily Mirror on 26 March 2009 and reported that the Duke was “openly cavorting” with his new girlfriend, Astrid Harbord, in a hospitality box at Twickenham.

The private content of this article is pleaded as: information regarding the Duke’s personal life, namely his relationship with Astrid Harbord and the couple’s ‘secret dates’.

The article reports that Ms Harbord was very physical with the Duke at the match and that, according to a “spy”, they had been on a few secret dates over the previous 3 weeks and things were “going well”.

Some of the content in this article also appears identically in a Press Association article circulated on the previous day – the Duke accepted that a sentence appeared to have been copied and pasted from that publication, but he denied the accuracy of much of the Mirror’s article. He said that Ms Harbord was never his girlfriend but that they were in regular contact, by text, phone and voicemail, as they were in the same circle of friends and spent a lot of time together. The article was the subject of a complaint from the Duke’s assistant press secretary to the editor on the basis that Ms Harbord was not at the rugby match.

There are 5 searches conducted by C&L earlier in the same month in the name of Astrid Harbord and her relative Charles Harbord, which suggest that someone at the Mirror (the contact named in the invoices is John Peacock, though the invoices are sent to Louise Flood) was anxious to obtain information about Ms Harbord. That was because there had been a good deal of publicity already about the Duke spending time with Ms Harbord, in articles published by 9 different newspapers from 8 to 22 March 2009. There may well have been UIG in relation to Ms Harbord at an earlier time, but not in relation to the Duke’s private information.

In my judgment, this 3am article was just lazy journalism, “our spy” was an invention, and no UIG was involved in relation to the Duke’s private information, which in any event could not include what happened in a hospitality box at a public event.

This article, entitled “Harry’s Date with Gladiators Star” (byline: Katie Hind) was published by The People on 19 April 2009. It reports a dinner date of the Duke and Caroline Flack at the house of a friend, Mark Dyer, in Fulham, and leaving together at about midnight in the Duke’s protection police’s people carrier.

The article reports that the Duke had dashed straight from training in Lincolnshire to be at the dinner party and quotes “an onlooker” about how they looked very happy together as they walked down the street, and that Ms Flack was just the Duke’s type. It claims that the two met through their mutual friend, Natalie Pinkham.

The private content is pleaded as: the Duke’s relationship with Caroline Flack and their attendance at a dinner party together. MGN admits that, apart from what could be seen in the street, the information was private, but it denies any UIG, arguing that payment records show that the photographs were purchased.

The photographs were taken by Ikon Pictures and a CR for £2,500 relates to their purchase by The People. They were also sold to the Mail on Sunday, who also published the story. There are then separate payments to Ikon for £1,000 and £1,500, authorised by Harpin and Embley and Moyland and Embley respectively, for additional services that are not identified.

The Duke said that this event was very private and was arranged by Mark Dyer, and that only the people involved knew about it. He and Mr Dyer had exchanged voicemails to arrange it. He was horrified to see the Ikon Pictures photographers literally lying in wait for them, beneath a car, when they arrived. He had been in contact with Ms Flack for a couple of weeks and the event was arranged at Mr Dyer’s house so that it would be private. The Duke said that he and Mr Dyer had exchanged voicemails about the event, and only they and Ms Flack knew about the plan.

There is a draft of the article disclosed in an email of the evening before publication, which has more detail in about Ms Flack. This was removed in the final version, which is written on the basis of what an “onlooker” saw on the street. MGN’s defence is that it is essentially a picture caption story, based on photographs that it bought. But this does not explain how Ikon knew to be at Mark Dyer’s house in the first place, or what the other two payments to Ikon on the same day were for.

There are C&L invoices for “electoral roll” searches for Ms Flack and a “DBaseSearc” for £33 each showing an enquiry by Irfan Cernal on 21 April 2009 – these therefore appear to postdate the article and show continuing interest at The People in private information about Ms Flack.

In my judgment, it is obvious in this case that the likely whereabouts of the Duke and Ms Flack at Mr Dyer’s house must have been obtained by VMI. Given the limited group who knew of the dinner, it is wholly improbable that Ikon knew of Mr Dyer’s flat or the arrangements otherwise. Although the Duke said that Ikon had stalked him for 10 years, they could not realistically have followed him from Lincolnshire to Mr Dyer’s and been there on his arrival.

The information published about a first dinner party date and a possible romance was not trivial, as MGN argued, even if there had been previous publicity given to the relationship. That it was not trivial is evident from the trouble that those involved had taken to maintain secrecy.

This article, entitled “Chelsy ‘New Fella’” (byline: Katie Hind) was published by The People on 26 April 2009, and reports Ms Davy telling the Duke that their relationship was over for ever as she had found someone else. The article describes how the Duke had been “bombarding” Ms Davy with calls asking her to take him back, before she told him that it was true that she had a new man. It purports to state the words used in conversations between Ms Davy and the Duke, and quotes an onlooker at a party in Raffles and a “close pal” of Ms Davy. The article was accompanied by photos of the Duke and Ms Davy, but not the “New Fella”, who was not named.

The private content pleaded is: the Duke’s relationship with Ms Davy and his attempts to win her back by bombarding her with calls. MGN admits that the information was private but denies any VMI or UIG.

The Duke said that he would not have told anyone about his contact with Ms Davy at this stage and that she was similarly guarded. He said that he could not remember the evening that is described in the article.

The Mail on Sunday, the Daily Star Sunday and the Sunday Express all reported on the same day that the Duke and Ms Davy had been partying in near proximity to each other and the Star published a picture of Ms Davy and her new boyfriend. However, in Ms Hind’s article there is more detail about what one had said to the other and about the volume of telephone calls between them. There is no explanation of how Ms Hind obtained the information.

MGN relies on an email dated 5 March 2009 from a redacted source to Mr Saville at the Sunday Mirror saying that they had made contact with Ms Davy and would pass on information. They say that the information therefore most likely came from a source close to Ms Davy. But there is no evidence of any information being passed on to The People at the time of this article. That is pure speculation by MGN who could have called evidence to explain where the private content in the article came from, but did not.

In my judgment, the most probable explanation is that The People had obtained call data or access to voicemails, or both.

In addition to the 33 articles that I have considered in detail, the Duke’s case relies on a large number of other invoices. These are rather chaotically pleaded in the Re-Amended PoC and various schedules to it, and one (the 2004 Chinawhites invoice) was admitted by MGN. They are each relied on as being an occasion of UIG in relation to the Duke himself or his associates – in their cases in circumstances such as were likely to involve the misuse of the Duke’s private information.

In the event, the invoices that related to the 33 articles were dealt with as part of the Duke’s case for those articles. The claimants explained that they have not dealt with other invoices that relate to the other articles that were not tried. That leaves a rump of payment records that are unconnected with articles complained about, on which the Duke separately places reliance in this trial.

Hardly any of these invoices were introduced in written or oral opening submissions, considered in evidence, or addressed in oral closing submissions. They were addressed in written closing submissions by the claimants by means of a separate schedule of “Episodes of Separate UIG”, produced by them without notice to MGN with their written closing submissions. This schedule comprises 61 different “episodes” in which UIG is alleged, some involving a significant number of payment records and some only one. 5 or 6 examples from the schedule were addressed very briefly, orally by Mr Sherborne, in his closing submissions in the Duke’s case, but that was to show me how the Episodes schedule was compiled and how it should be read, using the submissions about the PIs involved. MGN addressed the invoices in a more conventional way (not having been given notice of the claimants’ intention to do it differently) by adding their comments to the schedules of 115 invoices relating to the Duke and another 274 relating to his associates. These were necessarily in summary form and quite basic.

Again without notice of their intention to do so, the claimants produced a further version of these schedules in the course of their oral closing submissions, with an added column containing their reply to MGN’s comments in the schedule concerned with records relating to the Duke himself, and a more generic response in the part concerned with records relating to his associates. Although MGN protested at this late addition to the written closing submissions, I allowed the claimants to rely on it, as it did not appear to add very much but just distilled the point(s) of difference between the parties. In many cases, this simply came down to whether a particular PI has been proved in the generic and/or individual cases to have been conducting UIG.

I record here frustration that, as a result of the claimants significantly overloading their case for what was only going to be a 7-week trial, the court has been left with a very substantial volume of material raising issues for decision on which very little help was given at the trial and no argument addressed, simply because the parties did not have time to do so. In effect, a swathe of material has been dumped on the court with a request for a paper determination on top of all the issues that were properly ventilated and explored at trial.

I also record annoyance that as a consequence of the parties’ inability or unwillingness to communicate sensibly between themselves during the trial, which recurred far too frequently, the parties’ cases on the same issues have been presented in writing only in two totally different formats, which do not cross-refer to each other, and without MGN having an opportunity to respond to the claimants’ Episodes document in the way that they might have wished to. The consequence is that I have had to spend extra time trying to do the cross-referencing. The blame on this occasion lies squarely with the claimants: had their intention to re-present the invoices claim as Episodes been raised, it is likely that I would have approved it (as it helps to make some sense of what individual payment records represent, in context) and given MGN time to respond to that document, instead of expending its efforts on responding to the previous schedules.

I have however, done the necessary cross-referencing exercise, so that in relation to the records relied on for each Episode, I can refer to MGN’s case and response. That said, it is not possible to do more than a summary and short determination, by evaluating the credibility of the points made in the light of my findings about the PIs involved. Many of the allegations have zero credibility and seem to have been included in a list indiscriminately.

One issue that arises on numerous occasions is the right approach where the PI (usually a freelance or ‘stringer’) is operating abroad. I am in no position to judge whether what was done abroad was illegal under local law, and the question of how English private international law applies in relation to activities conducted abroad was not addressed at all by the claimants. I will therefore only find that the payment record is evidence of UIG if it is clear that the work must have been instructed by the journalist or editor (from England or Wales) knowing that what was requested was unlawful under English law as a misuse of the Duke’s private information.

A second general point of common application is that the Duke complains about many payments for C&L “Elect Roll” searches and “DOB” searches against his associates. These may well have been done with a view ultimately to finding out information about him, but the results of the initial searches would not have produced that information, nor misused any of his private information. The Duke’s only legitimate complaint in such cases is the subsequent UIG, if any, that made use of this initial information, or further information thereby obtained, to procure unlawfully his private information. He has no claim in respect of the initial searches against his associates that will only have produced their private information.

In order to reduce the length of the main judgment, I set out my decision in the UIG Episodes Schedule attached.

I have only a partial picture of all the articles about which the Duke complains in this action. I have reached conclusions based on the 33 articles and UIG Episodes considered at trial about the occasions when VMI or other UIG directed at the Duke took place. It is difficult to reach conclusions about the frequency with which he was targeted save for the conclusions that I have already indicated. Given that I only have an incomplete picture, it is difficult to make an overall award of damages to reflect the extent to which the Duke was targeted and subjected to hacking and other UIG generally. I will address the damages by working backwards from the articles where I have found that unlawful activity must have taken place to give rise to the publication, and work from those invoices in the UIG Episodes where I have found that unlawful searches or blagging were conducted and directed at the Duke, either personally or through his associates.

My overarching conclusion is that VMI of the Duke personally did not start until late 2003 at the earliest, and then did not happen on a regular basis, but only in a more targeted and controlled way, subject to the oversight of a few journalists only (and perhaps only conducted by one at each newspaper). VMI of the Duke’s associates probably started in 2002. Once started, it would have continued, as and when needed, throughout the period 2002-2011 (with perhaps a hiatus of several months after August 2006), but not on a continuous or even regular basis.

So far as the Duke personally was concerned, his phone was probably targeted on occasions when there was an important storyline that MGN journalists were chasing, such as the ups and downs of the Duke’s relationship with Ms Davy. It was done carefully and with control (more so after 2006), given the evident risks, but it nevertheless took place on occasions.

Less care was taken with Ms Davy’s phone. She and her family and friends were clearly not considered off limits and I am satisfied that she was subjected to UIG and VMI regularly, as a means of obtaining information about their relationship and the Duke’s life.

The same applies to the Duke’s other girlfriends and his close friends, in particular Guy Pelly, Natalie Pinkham and Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who were regularly targeted with a view to obtaining information about the Duke. I am satisfied that they would have been subjected to VMI and other UIG.

Mr Turner’s claim and his evidence (paras 870-877)

The Articles (878-1057)

The UIG Episodes (1058-1063)

Conclusions (1064-1069)

Michael Turner is well known as the actor who (under the stage name Michael Le Vell) for many years has played the part of Kevin Webster in Coronation Street. As such, he was of some interest to most tabloid newspapers, including MGN’s three national titles. Interest in him increased markedly when in 2011 he was arrested and charged with a serious offence (Articles 18-28 relate), of which he was later acquitted.

Mr Turner’s claim spans most of the period for which the claimants alleged a widespread and habitual use of phone hacking and other UIG, and approximately coincides with the period that I have found proved. His first article is January 1995 (though in fact his claim asserts that unlawful activity started in 1991) and the last is November 2011. I have already found that there was no widespread and habitual use of phone hacking before 1998, but that there were occasions on which VMI and UIG were used before then. I have also found that phone hacking and UIG reduced in volume after 2006, so that it became less widespread than it previously was during the peak years of 2003-2005; but I have found that it was still widespread up to and including 2011, albeit less so than in 2003-06.

Mr Turner’s claim is in the tort of misuse of private information only and is based almost exclusively on the content of the 28 articles about which he complains. The claimants’ closing submissions really only focussed on these, but it is understood that his case is advanced in the context of the generic case and the findings that I have made in that regard.

There is no call data in relation to Mr Turner’s phone numbers to support his claim and only very little in relation to one of his associates, Alan Halsall. There is no evidence that Mr Turner was in anyone’s Palm Pilot or on Mr Evans’ back pocket list or other lists of names for regular hacking.

Mr Turner relied originally on six payment records that have a variant of his name on them, only two of which clearly related to him. Three ELI invoices clearly did not relate to Mr Turner, but despite MGN’s case as to why they did not being made clear before the trial started, there was no concession from Mr Turner’s legal team at any stage before closing submissions. There were also six payment records that related or might have related to associates of Mr Turner. There were no UIG Episodes relied on in the same way as in the Duke of Sussex’s and Ms Sanderson’s claims, and eventually there were only 4 invoices relied upon that did not result in the publication of an article on which Mr Turner relies.

Mr Turner referred frequently in his witness statement to the likelihood of voicemails having been left and intercepted, but it was clear from his cross-examination that he cannot actually recall having left a voicemail on a particular occasion, or in relation to a particular matter. That is unsurprising: the events in some cases were more than 25 years ago and even the more recent ones, 12 years ago, and he accepted in relation to most articles that he had not read them at the time they were published, so he would not have thought about it at the time.

Mr Turner did confirm that he was in general a heavy user of mobile phones and voicemails. He said that he would usually have his phone turned off while he was at work, so often received voicemails. He described how he was the “Union Rep” for the Coronation Street cast and as such was often the recipient of a lot of private information relating to his co-stars, which he felt made him a target for MGN. He did not recall having re-set a PIN code. His claim form and his witness statement contained the same, somewhat formulaic assertion of suspicious telephone-related activity on his mobile phone that appears in every claim in the MNHL. Mr Turner said that he was constantly surprised at photographers turning up at obscure locations, when hardly anyone knew that he was to be there. However, he never suspected that he had been hacked before his friend, Sally Dynevor, told him in 2020 that he might have been.

MGN’s defence is that there is no evidence at all of voicemail interception directed at Mr Turner and that, in many cases, the private information asserted was already in the public domain. That would be a complete answer were the claim based on publication of articles, but it is not: it is based on the underlying UIG. If MGN independently conducted invasive UIG into Mr Turner’s private information, by phone hacking or blagging, whether independently of another newspaper or to stand up or add to that paper’s story, it is usually no answer for MGN to say that the information had already been published.

Ms Sanderson’s claim and evidence (paras 1070-1088)

The Articles (1089-1292)

The UIG Episodes (1293-1298)

Conclusions (1299-1302)

Introduction (paras 1303-1312)

The Fiona Wightman invoice and article claims (1313-1348)

Conclusions (1349-1352)