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00:00Prince Harry's case against Britain's biggest newspaper is in the High Court next month.
00:07It's really a titanic struggle between two powerful segments in our society.
00:13Determined to hold the press to account following the hounding of him, his wife and his mother.
00:19The press themselves have incited so much hatred towards myself, my wife and even our children.
00:24Prince Harry is now going head to head with the mail.
00:27But the case is based in part on the word and the work of self-confessed hackers and criminals.
00:34So they asked you to listen in to my voice messages?
00:37It was instruction, it was an order.
00:40And as a key witness says his statement has been forged, is the case now on a knife edge?
00:46So this really has put a spanner in the works for Harry and the rest of the claimants.
00:50The Daily Mail stands accused of serious crimes.
00:53It seemed absolutely sensational. They were alleging not only phone hacking, but the bugging of landline phones and premises.
01:00And now another central figure tells dispatches claims about his involvement are wrong.
01:06Well they're going to have to rethink that and their legal team is going to have to rethink that.
01:09Well that blows a hole in the case against the mail doesn't it?
01:12The judge faces questions about the reliability of the evidence, after claims that people in Harry's team offered payment for information.
01:21He said, would you sign the document for me for £3,000?
01:26Could this be one fight too far for Harry?
01:29If that collapses, then Harry's got egg all over his face really.
01:32But the paper still has to explain its relationship with journalism's dark arts.
01:38I don't accept that this is evidence that our journalists were actively behaving illegally.
01:42It'll all be decided in a showpiece trial early next year.
01:46Harry is taking action with six other well-known faces.
01:50With both sides committed to having their day in court, the judge's call will have huge repercussions.
01:56Whichever way it goes, it's going to be enormously significant.
01:59A legal case involving Prince Harry and the publisher of the Daily Mail newspaper has been back at the High Court today.
02:20The Prince is one of a number of high-profile figures claiming private information about them was gathered unlawfully by methods like phone hacking.
02:28In print, it's the Prince versus the paper.
02:31Behind the headlines, there's way more to the story.
02:38For the last five years, Harry has been the renegade Prince.
02:43Cast out from the firm and doing what no other royal would do.
02:48Taking his battles with the press over phone hacking and intrusion to the High Court in outspoken comments like this.
02:55Harry is buoyed by the substantial payouts he's won from The Sun and The Mirror.
03:07Now there's only weeks left until the Prince goes to trial again, this time with six other famous faces to take on Associated Newspapers, the publisher of The Mail and Mail on Sunday, in a huge case dubbed The Superclaim.
03:21It's Harry's latest battle in the war he's waged against the tabloids over phone hacking and other illegal tactics.
03:30The case is set to cause a media frenzy, with Harry's fellow claimants against The Mail, including Sir Elton John, Elizabeth Hurley and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager Stephen.
03:43The stakes couldn't be higher.
03:47British journalism is on trial in this case.
03:50These lawsuits are tactics of a much wider strategy of trying to hold the press to account, that all of this sort of coalition of determined celebrities are part of.
03:59Harry's legal claim against The Mail goes back to the 2000s when he was dating Chelsea Davey.
04:06He accuses the paper of hacking and bugging their phones to get hold of private information about their relationship.
04:14Harry has identified articles in the paper which he claims appeared as a result of hiring private investigators who used illegal tactics to gather information.
04:28The Mail denies all allegations it's accused of.
04:32Proving specifics in those cases, which in a lot of cases date back 20 or even 30 years, is going to be quite a task.
04:39But Harry's appetite for holding the papers to account is undiminished.
04:45He's made no secret that he blames a toxic media culture for his mother's death.
04:51Prince Harry sees himself as St George slaying the dragon of illegal activity by the press.
05:00So his mother, he saw a victim of press intrusion.
05:04He thinks that his whole life he has been a victim of press intrusion.
05:08As photographers gathered outside Prince Harry's school, a rising chorus of complaint was beginning to make itself heard about the behaviour of the press.
05:17He's shown that he wants to settle a score with the British press.
05:22And so he's launched this wave of attacks in court and now he's going for the Mail.
05:27The Mail has been very clear from the beginning.
05:30It says these are preposterous allegations and they are fighting them.
05:33You know, they're going to see Harry in court.
05:35Cases against the Mirror and the Sun came after police investigations.
05:42But this claim against the Mail is different.
05:46The police haven't been called in.
05:48No journalist has confessed.
05:51We've taken a look behind the headlines.
05:54For over a year we've pored over pages and pages of court documents.
05:58And we've come across serious concerns about the way the evidence was gathered and its reliability.
06:04Many previous victims of phone hacking have won payouts after suffering untold harm.
06:13The idea that one's telephone would be routinely hacked and recorded, that conversations which were private would be reported in the newspapers.
06:23These are horrific crimes.
06:25It's very clear the corrosive, toxic effect it has on people, whether they're famous or not.
06:30But for all of them it's had a terrible effect and you can see it.
06:35Public sympathy has been with the victims, including celebrities.
06:40They very nearly ruined my life.
06:42I have certainly seen how they have ruined the lives of others.
06:46But with payouts in settlements from the Sun, the News of the World and the Mirror Group estimated to have exceeded a billion pounds, it's also created an industry of its own.
06:59There absolutely is a gravy train in this.
07:01I mean, there's an enormous incentive for anyone who suspects that they might have had their phone hacked or other unlawful activities undertaken against them by journalists back in the day to bring a court case.
07:11These are high-stakes cases and it means the fees are also huge.
07:14You could almost say it's a legal gold rush.
07:19For his case against the Mail, Harry is supported by a man with a controversial past.
07:25Graham Johnson, a former tabloid journalist and convicted phone hacker, who is one of three key members of Harry's legal research team.
07:34Johnson spent 10 years working for the tabloids and has talked very openly about the dark side of their work in a BBC documentary.
07:43Blackmail, fraud, deception. You coerced people into giving stories. Everyone is a bit scared of you because you've got the power to destroy the lives.
07:56Whilst working at the Sunday Mirror, he hacked the phone of soap star Denise Welsh.
08:02Johnson came clean to police years later, only after they'd started making arrests.
08:08So they asked you to listen in to my voice messages?
08:12It was an instruction. It was an order.
08:15The culture of a tabloid newspaper is high pressure. Get it quickly, get it cheaply, and if you don't get it, you're down the road.
08:22Johnson received a suspended sentence for the phone hacking in 2014, and afterwards he got a taste for tell-all confessions.
08:31Graham Johnson, come on out here.
08:33Revealing he was sacked from the News of the World for faking a story about discovering the mythical beast of Bodmin in Cornwall.
08:41We knew it didn't exist, so we went to the Dartmouth Zoo.
08:45We took a picture of a puma.
08:47Since his conviction for phone hacking, Johnson has reinvented himself as a poacher turned gamekeeper.
08:55So Graham Johnson has been a kind of evangelist against his former colleagues and his former career,
09:00and dedicated himself to exposing what he says was a criminal conspiracy at the heart of tabloid newspapers.
09:06We have uncovered and proved...
09:11Johnson was called to give evidence by the legal team in Harry's case against the mirror in 2023.
09:17The judge broadly found that my evidence was correct.
09:20But in this case against the Mail, Graham Johnson has been doing more than giving his own evidence.
09:28He's been involved in finding it too.
09:33Over the years, Johnson says he's paid law-breaking journalists and private detectives.
09:39He says for book deals and information for articles published on a journalistic website, Byline Investigates.
09:45So welcome to Byline Investigates. Today I'm going to talk about organised crime at the mirror.
09:53Information from the people he paid has also ended up being used to make the case against the Mail.
09:59Something the paper's defence team is making a big play of.
10:03The Mail's lawyers will make hay with some of the information about Graham Johnson in particular,
10:13having been convicted of hacking. There's high stakes here.
10:17Graham Johnson, in his role as editor of Byline Investigates, has been responsible for turning up
10:22and bringing to the lawyer's attention an awful lot of the evidence which is being used in this case.
10:27And that has become quite controversial in the way that the case is being conducted.
10:30In 2020, Graham Johnson published a story on Byline about an alleged hacking of Sir Simon Hughes, the former Lib Dem MP.
10:40Evan Harris, previously director of the press reform group Hacked Off,
10:45and another key member of Harry's legal research team in this case,
10:49wrote Sir Simon an email in July 2019, copying in Graham Johnson.
10:53The Mail says the email shows Sir Simon was told the Byline article would help get around the legal time limits for bringing a claim against them.
11:04The email said, to deter the Mail from arguing limitation, i.e. you knew about this six years ago,
11:10Atkins Thompson think it best for stories to be written in Byline, which can be referred as the basis for claims being raised.
11:18Sir Simon Hughes told Dispatches, I was not in a position to bring legal proceedings against Associated Newspapers Ltd until early 2022,
11:28until early 2022, which is when I obtained for the first time the relevant facts and evidence to provide me with sufficient confidence to embark on legal proceedings
11:39and to believe that I had a worthwhile claim against Associated Newspapers.
11:43He rejected any implication that he acted, planned to act or discussed any plan to disguise or camouflage the state of my awareness of Associated Newspapers' wrongdoing.
11:54Dr. Evan Harris' lawyer told Dispatches that we were making highly selective use of a single document without its context,
12:05and that the apparent implication that Dr. Harris was encouraging Sir Simon to make false claims as to his date of knowledge of unlawful information gathering by Associated Newspapers,
12:16appears to be an allegation of serious criminal wrongdoing and is false.
12:20The email in question simply sets out, in informal language, Dr. Harris' understanding at that time, that the date of Sir Simon's having knowledge of these matters,
12:31and potentially that he had a claim, would likely be around the point at which the allegations of unlawful information gathering by Associated was published by Byline Investigates.
12:40Coming up...
12:41He offered some high rewards, whether the information was factual or not.
12:49Do Harry's claims against the mail depend on evidence gathered using cash inducements?
12:53It could be £2,500 a month, if not.
13:06Prince Harry is due back at the High Court next month for his latest battle against the UK press.
13:11I've felt it personally over the years.
13:14He's developed a long-term distrust of the tabloids.
13:18I learned from a very early age that the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth.
13:28Dispatches has been carefully examining the case against the mail, brought by Harry and six other high-profile figures.
13:35That means going back over two decades to when tabloids sold big and journalists often turned to the shadowy industry of private investigators to get stories.
13:48The use of a private investigator by a newsroom is not in itself evidence of anything illegal or unlawful.
13:53And the mail admitted back in 2007 that they had used investigators.
13:57The mail had used a private investigator called Steve Whittemore, who's been exposed for obtaining the private numbers of celebrities and also murder victims.
14:07Paperwork discovered when he was arrested showed journalists at the mail used him more than any other paper had.
14:13At the Leveson inquiry into the ethics of the British press, the then mail editor, Paul Dacre, made an admission.
14:30But from what we know now, I would accept that there was a primal facing case that Whittemore could have been acting illegally.
14:38I don't accept that this is evidence that our journalists were actively behaving illegally.
14:45For Harry and the other claimants in this case, the key is getting evidence from private detectives that the mail was commissioning them to gather private information illegally.
14:54How are you feeling, Prince Harry?
14:59There are invoices showing Whittemore and other private investigators were working for the mail around the time articles were published about the claimants.
15:08So the task that Prince Harry and the rest of the claimants and their legal team have got ahead of them is proving that work that was undertaken by private investigators was unlawful.
15:18Which brings us back to a key figure working with the legal research team representing the Prince, the former tabloid journalist and convicted phone hacker, Graham Johnson.
15:31Dispatches have been talking to private detectives who say they were approached by Johnson to provide information about their dealings with the mail.
15:40What emerged is a tale worthy of any tabloid expose with claims of big money payouts and catastrophic fallouts.
15:48Some of that information is now being fed into the case against the paper.
15:52One private eye who says Johnson contacted him is notorious.
16:02Jonathan Rees.
16:04His private detective agency earned hundreds of thousands of pounds from the news of the world before the paper was shut down.
16:10In 2000, Rees was sentenced to seven years in prison for perverting the course of justice in a scheme where drugs were planted in a woman's car in order to discredit her in a custody battle.
16:25Rees claims Graham Johnson came to him around seven years ago offering to pay for stories that could implicate the tabloids including the mail.
16:34He offered some high rewards, whether the information was factual or not.
16:43You say he offered you high rewards. I mean, tell us how explicit he was about that.
16:48Well, it could be two and a half thousand pounds a month, if not more, for life.
16:55For life?
16:56For life.
16:57And you said he didn't mind whether what you told him was true or not.
17:01Not interested.
17:02But what did he say explicitly to you on that point?
17:05It was that as long as the statements that I made, and because of my history and my connections with the newspaper, it would add more credence to them through solicitors providing backup and information for the claimants and other celebrities.
17:27But it didn't matter what I said, but if I signed the statement, they would use it.
17:35And he was clear with you that what you told him would be used in a court action?
17:41Yes.
17:43He couldn't provide any proof of Johnson's offer, but did Rees say he accepted it?
17:48Two and a half thousand pounds a month for life.
17:51Hmm.
17:52How did you react to that kind of money?
17:53I wasn't interested.
17:55Tell us why not.
17:57I'm wise enough and old enough to realise that I'm not going to sign a untruthful statement for Graham or for anybody at all that would support them in legal action.
18:14We only have Jonathan Rees's word this ever happened.
18:19But we've spoken to another private investigator Graham Johnson reached out to.
18:24This private investigator told us he can't be interviewed for legal reasons.
18:28He claims Johnson also offered him money to help with the case against the Mail and other papers.
18:37Gavin Burrows has been suspected of hacking for the tabloids over a 10 year period.
18:44He says he was contacted in 2020 by Graham Johnson, who wanted to speak to him about his investigation into unlawful information gathering by the tabloids.
18:53Just under a year after the two men met, this appeared.
19:00A 21 page statement, which page after page detailed the serious allegations against the Mail.
19:07Gavin Burrows was now blowing the whistle.
19:09The statement says the Mail on Sunday was one of Burrows' biggest and most regular clients.
19:16And it says his list of targets includes Prince Harry, Elizabeth Hurley, Sadie Frost, Sir Elton John and David Furnish.
19:25He admits to a variety of unlawful activities such as putting a mic on Hurley's window.
19:32Hard wiretapping the Windsor home of Elton John.
19:36And helping to blag the flight details of Prince Harry's then girlfriend, Chelsea Davey.
19:42In her statement, Elizabeth Hurley said Burrows' revelations deeply upset and troubled her.
19:49And Elton John said he was outraged.
19:52The Burrows' revelations reached the public figures in question and the super claim was born.
20:03Six of the seven claimants cite evidence from Burrows.
20:07That first witness statement of Gavin Burrows appeared to confess to all sorts of misbehavours on behalf of the Mail on Sunday.
20:12I mean, bugging cars and houses and all sorts of things.
20:15A long, significant statement, apparently with Gavin Burrows' signature at the end of it.
20:22And including a sign off by a lawyer that this had been all done properly.
20:27Around this time, journalist Michael Gillard began investigating the case against the Mail.
20:34He started talking to Gavin Burrows, who made some striking claims about his dealings with Graham Johnson.
20:42We've digitally altered Gillard's appearance because of threats from organised crime unrelated to this film.
20:48The Gavin Burrows I spoke to was only too happy to explain how he and Graham Johnson had got together, the amounts of money that had been promised him.
21:01Burrows says Johnson agreed to pay him a retainer of £5,000 a month to compile evidence for legal claims against the newspapers.
21:14Separately, Burrows claimed Johnson also put a £25,000 book deal on the table to publish his memoirs about working with newspapers.
21:22Gillard recorded a conversation with Burrows in 2023 for an article.
21:32Well, we were struggling with what we'd written apart.
21:35And, you know, we thought, I mean, we actually thought, like, I was thinking it's a celebration we did.
21:41Burrows claimed Johnson floated an idea, getting paid to sign a witness statement.
21:47He was very serious, he got across the table and he said,
21:50would you sign the document for me for £3,000?
21:54And I said, what do you mean?
21:55He said, I've just seen a pre-written document sign.
21:58£3,000, it would be £3,000.
22:00And then after about 40 seconds, 30, 40 seconds pause, he just swallowed us.
22:05He said, oh, only joking, test things like that.
22:08I thought, oh, OK, all right.
22:09But it was a bit weird.
22:11Hmm.
22:13By this time, I'd heard a lot of allegations of similar evidence from other PIs,
22:18suggesting that this was a modus operandi of Graham Johnson.
22:23And the picture then does become alarming.
22:27Graham Johnson and Gavin Burrows' relationship ended in acrimony.
22:32In a later legal dispute, Johnson said Burrows' work was poorly researched and inadequate.
22:38Now it will be left to the judge, who has said Burrows remains a very important witness,
22:42to decide on his reliability.
22:46They are only allegations, and Graham Johnson makes counter-allegations.
22:51But the point is this.
22:53This is the investigator for the claim, and this is the inquiry agent for the claim,
22:58falling out and calling each other liars, accusing each other of assault.
23:03I mean, at what point does this not become a pantomime?
23:07We've looked at questions about the reliability of those gathering evidence in this case.
23:17Coming up, how Prince Harry alerted a grieving mother to allegations that the Mail illegally bugged her.
23:24I'd like to see it in the Daily Mail apologise and a public apology for what they've done.
23:31Is the man behind this high-stakes claim against the Mail now changing his story?
23:37Dory Lawrence's witness statement is based on your confirmation that you had done the bugging?
23:43Right, well they're going to have to rethink that, and their legal team's going to have to rethink that.
23:48There's a lot at stake in that part of the claim.
23:51Because if that collapses, then Harry's got egg all over his face really.
24:04Prince Harry's legal action against the Mail is his third in as many years.
24:08The press themselves have incited so much hatred towards myself, my wife.
24:14That's hard to forgive.
24:18The stakes are high for Harry when he arrives and gives evidence.
24:23The risk for him, if he loses, is that it just will reinforce how he is characterised by much of the British media.
24:31I could really build this picture of Harry as a bit of a petty prince.
24:36But despite the high stakes, Harry made the fight against the Mail even bigger.
24:44He was the one that tipped off Baroness Lawrence.
24:46She might have a claim against the Mail.
24:48Which is when she joined this particular litigation as well.
24:50Doreen Lawrence's son Stephen was brutally murdered on the streets of South London in April 1993.
25:05Days pass, then you realise that it's a completely different thing.
25:11That Stephen was a black boy and the interest was not there.
25:16Remember Stephen Lawrence!
25:19The Daily Mail later became a close ally of the Lawrence family.
25:23There was a personal link between Paul Dacre, the then editor of the Daily Mail,
25:27and Stephen Lawrence's family before Stephen was murdered.
25:32Because Neville, Stephen's father, was employed as a decorator at Paul Dacre's house.
25:37So the Daily Mail became the biggest advocates and supporters of the Lawrence family.
25:44And quite rightly, received a lot of praise for that.
25:49In 1997, the Mail took an unprecedented step,
25:53putting the pictures of five men they believed to be responsible for Stephen's killing on the front page.
25:58I think it's fair to say the way it acted in the Stephen Lawrence case,
26:09and stood up to the people it accused of murdering Stephen Lawrence, you know, was exemplary.
26:15It was an astonishing thing for the Mail, for any newspaper, just to put five people on the front page and say that they were murderers.
26:26And it did see tangible results.
26:29Two of those men have since gone to prison.
26:33It kept that case in the public eye, in a way that might not otherwise have happened.
26:37According to court documents, Doreen Lawrence was alerted to potential claims she might have against the Mail by a message from Prince Harry.
26:51After being provided with more information, she decided to sue the newspaper in 2022.
26:57I'd like to see the Daily Mail apologise and a public apology for what they've done.
27:02The fact that we as a family has been going through so much, and they've added to the trauma.
27:09What do we want? Justice!
27:11The Mail describes all allegations of unlawful information gathering in relation to Doreen Lawrence as appalling and utterly groundless smears.
27:20I would imagine that when those particulars of claim came in, in Doreen Lawrence's case, it was an absolute devastation for Paul Dacre.
27:26You know, that's his personal reputation and the reputation of the paper and everything he holds dear is at stake.
27:33Dispatches has seen the statement submitted by the Baroness.
27:38In it, she claims private investigators have admitted tapping her landline, hacking her voicemails and bugging a cafe where she used to hold meetings.
27:46She says lawyers had told her the information about her had accidentally surfaced through a conversation between two private investigators who worked for the Mail.
27:57Gavin Burrows and Jonathan Rees.
28:01I was staggered by the possibility that Jonathan Rees was going to be put forward as a witness of truth in a claim brought by Doreen Lawrence against the Mail.
28:13And I picked up from my sources that one question was being asked, how trustworthy is Jonathan Rees?
28:20Jonathan Rees, remember, is the man who was sent to prison for seven years for perverting the course of justice in a scheme where drugs were planted in a woman's car.
28:34He agreed to speak to us about what had been said about him in the statement from Doreen Lawrence, a statement that references a Daily Mail journalist named Stephen Wright.
28:43So, Doreen Lawrence's witness statement says, and I'll just quote it to you, Jonathan Rees confirmed he had done things for the Daily Mail and Stephen Wright aimed at secretly stealing information about me and the investigations into Stephen's murder.
28:59So, did you ever confirm all of that?
29:02Yes, that's exactly what I'd heard and I knew what was on offer.
29:09I'd been offered by other agents to assist in this surveillance, but I didn't get involved.
29:20So, Rees told us he did not get involved in the alleged bugging of Doreen Lawrence.
29:25We asked him if his position conflicts with what's in her court statement.
29:29But Doreen Lawrence's witness statement is based on your confirmation that you had done the bugging operation for the Mail.
29:37They're going to have to rethink that, and her legal team's going to have to rethink that.
29:40Listen, they can...
29:41Well, that blows a hole in the case against the Mail, doesn't it, if they've got to rethink that?
29:45No, not really, because it was done.
29:49All I can say to support that woman is, yes, I did hear about it.
29:55Yes, I was invited to be a part of the team.
29:58Yes, I did see factual transcripts.
30:02I know it was going on.
30:03I know that the surveillance teams were being used against her and her family.
30:10But I can't provide any documentary evidence for that.
30:15He's creating a massive gap between what he said and what he's saying now as this litigation becomes more real and we head towards trial in January next year.
30:28There are also questions about Rees's possible motives in relation to the Mail.
30:32Rees has always named former Daily Mail crime reporter Stephen Wright as being involved.
30:39For years, Wright has written about rumours surrounding Rees and the murder of Rees's business partner.
30:46Some people might think you've got a grudge against the Mail and Stephen Wright because of what he's written about you.
30:51Not at all. My grudge was against the Met Police, not against Steve Wright.
30:59Steve Wright didn't arrest me. I don't bear any grudge against Steve Wright.
31:06Rees maintained throughout his interview that the Mail did pay private detectives to investigate Doreen Lawrence,
31:13but he has offered no proof and no evidence that the Mail knowingly commissioned illegal information gathering.
31:19I think Wright would have been foolish to sit down with the private detectives and say,
31:24bug their telephones, bug that cafe, plant those devices on every single table in the cafe, bug their home, do the surveillance on them.
31:34It would have been an open request for information.
31:39Here you are, chaps, go and get as much information on this family.
31:44We want to know who they are, where they're from.
31:46Yeah, but it's all about proof as well, isn't it?
31:49Do you think now that the Mail did anything illegal?
31:58No.
31:59In court, concerns about the reliability of Jonathan Rees and what he says in relation to the alleged bugging of Doreen Lawrence will no doubt be a key issue for the judge to grapple with.
32:13And that is far from the only complication the judge will face.
32:18Just last month, a sensational statement by private detective Gavin Burroughs was made public.
32:25Remember Burroughs' first statement, which has always been central to Harry's claim.
32:30It made shocking allegations that Daily Mail had hired Burroughs to bug and hack into Harry and his friend's private lives.
32:39Well, last month, Burroughs dropped a bombshell.
32:42Daily dispatches, please.
32:44In a dramatic day just weeks before the trial starts, the court heard that Burroughs had issued a new statement denying he'd ever carried out any illegal activity for the Mail and said that the 2021 statement, the previous one, was a fake.
32:59In this news statement, Burroughs said, I do not recognise the earlier witness statement of 16th of August 2021 and I believe that my signature on that document is a forgery.
33:14Gavin Burroughs has completely dropped a bombshell on Harry's case.
33:18He has now claimed that that note in which he alleged the wrongdoing has been forged, that he didn't sign that.
33:25So this really has put a spanner in the works for Harry and the rest of the claimants.
33:31It's a sensational claim.
33:33And obviously, you know, various legal teams will want to test that in court if they can.
33:39But, you know, you have to say at this stage it's pretty devastating for one of your key witnesses, a former private investigator, to say that entire statement was made up.
33:47Burroughs's news statement could affect the evidence for the claims of six of the seven high-profile figures taking on the Mail, including Harry.
34:00So where could this leave the Prince?
34:02One thing about Prince Harry, he's quick-tempered, he, I think, can rush to judgement at times.
34:12So his judgement will be on trial in this case as well.
34:16And it may backfire on him.
34:17It may affect his attempts to reconcile with his family and it may damage his ability to reconcile with the nation.
34:34Coming up, Dispatches reveals the identities of those who have funded research into the Mail.
34:48Absolutely.
34:49If you want to do an investigation, investigate the phone hacking, computer hacking.
34:55Harry says he's paid a high price for his High Court showdowns in this revealing interview.
35:09Anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press.
35:14But, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing this for my reasons.
35:19Tensions are rising.
35:20With just weeks to the trial, a central witness has claimed his statement about illegal activity by the Mail was made up and his signature forged.
35:31This has led to questions in court about the reliability of the evidence and how it's been gathered by Graham Johnson,
35:38the convicted phone hacker and key member of Harry's legal research team.
35:43Dispatches has been looking into who's been funding Graham Johnson's work.
35:47Allegations about phone hacking at the Mail were voiced very publicly at the Leveson inquiry in 2011 by actor Hugh Grant.
35:59I cannot for the life of me think of any conceivable source for this story in the Mail on Sunday except those voice messages on my mobile telephone.
36:09The Mail's then editor responded to the movie star's claim with a robust denial.
36:15Our witness statements are made clear that it's associated that it's not involved in phone hacking.
36:19Grant became a leading activist for Hacked Off, the group campaigning for greater reform of the tabloids.
36:29We're making this film for Channel 4.
36:31And in this revealing documentary, he spoke of a challenging uphill battle.
36:34The truth is, we're the David taking on a terrifying Goliath of huge newspaper groups.
36:44To help with that battle, Hugh Grant turned to the very man who'd once done the dirty work of the newspapers he was trying to take on, Graham Johnson.
36:53We've seen evidence to suggest that just two months after Johnson was given a suspended jail sentence for phone hacking, he met Hugh Grant in Chelsea, an upmarket area of London.
37:06The pair apparently discussed rumours that Mail journalists had used illegal methods to obtain stories.
37:12Dispatches have seen a draft invoice from Johnson to one of Grant's companies, Under Arm, dated a month after this meeting.
37:23It's for over £1,000 and for investigative research.
37:26Hacked Off said in a 2023 statement, neither it nor Hugh Grant have ever employed or used the services of Graham Johnson, whether directly or indirectly, in respect of evidence gathering activities for litigation of any kind.
37:43So we asked Grant about the invoice from Johnson.
37:46He told Dispatches,
37:48In 2015, Graham Johnson asked me to help fund research into reports that Daily Mail journalists had offered payments to Ian Huntley, subsequently convicted of the murder of two young girls at Soham.
38:01If the research had established the truth of these reports, it would have been a matter for the police, not the civil courts.
38:07I have never used the services of Graham Johnson, whether directly or indirectly, for evidence gathering for litigation of any kind.
38:18Dispatches has also seen a document apparently written by Graham Johnson.
38:22It mentions leads he's following with the potential to envelop the Daily Mail in class action litigation.
38:28It's dated 2016, and what's interesting is this document appears to be for people funding Graham Johnson's investigations.
38:39So who was funding Johnson?
38:42One private detective Johnson approached says wealthy backers were involved.
38:48Obviously, Moseley would be paying the bill.
38:53Max Moseley? Max Moseley.
38:54He was clear about that, was he, Graham Johnson?
38:57Very, very clear. He was funding it.
39:01That's Max Moseley, former Formula One tycoon and son of infamous British fascist Oswald.
39:08And before his death in 2021, he had every reason to fund research on the tabloid press.
39:16You could say Max Moseley was desperate to give the tabloid papers a good beating.
39:21Does the panel think it's fair that the super rich and privileged can buy protection for their reputations when they stray like Randy Tomcats?
39:32Max Moseley?
39:34Oh dear.
39:36I thought that was going to be me.
39:38The news of the world accused Moseley of enjoying Nazi-themed sadomasochistic orgies.
39:47Max Moseley was pictured at a private sex party in West London.
39:54There were uniforms involved, but they weren't Nazi uniforms.
39:57Moseley won a famous privacy case in 2008.
40:00But this turned into a bigger campaign to restrict press intrusion into private lives.
40:07In any country, it cannot be right that the media can destroy your privacy.
40:14The Daily Mail later unearthed a racist election pamphlet that he'd published in 1961.
40:19I've never been a racist. I'm not a racist, never will be a racist.
40:24Moseley saw the Mail story as an attempt to shift the focus from their alleged hacking practices.
40:30I mean, producing this now, 56 years later, and trying to distract from the Daily Mail and their activities.
40:38If you want to do an investigation, investigate the phone hacking, computer hacking.
40:43Max Moseley was very keen to keep the activities of the Daily Mail under scrutiny.
40:52Now, Dispatches has found evidence to suggest that since Moseley's death, his money has funded Johnson.
40:59We've seen financial records which reveal that a company set up by Max Moseley gave a business loan of £565,000
41:08to Graham Johnson's publishing company, Yellow Press.
41:10Yellow Press published these memoirs of some of the witnesses who have provided information cited in Harry's legal claim.
41:23We've unearthed more information about who may have been paying for Graham Johnson's work before he joined Harry's legal team.
41:31Investigations by Dispatches suggest another extremely wealthy figure may have been funding Graham Johnson's research into the Mail.
41:38The father of a man with a very public grudge against the paper.
41:43I have got, legally obtained, an orgy of evidence of you hacking phones, medical records.
41:50I will make sure there is so much noise, OK, that you have to be investigated, OK?
41:57Meet controversial former coke addict, Playboy, James Stunt.
42:00Once married to Petra Ecclestone, daughter of Formula One boss Bernie, and with a conviction for racially aggravated harassment, Stunt has a long history of making headlines in the Mail.
42:13The paper questioned where his money came from and how rich he really was.
42:19In 2016, the police raided the Mayfair offices of his gold bullion firm and other premises and arrested 12 people on suspicion of money laundering.
42:29He was later acquitted.
42:30Days earlier, James's brother and business partner had died in a drug overdose.
42:37James's father, Jeff, made an unsuccessful complaint to the press regulator, saying the Mail intruded into their grief.
42:45Do you think after my brother, I didn't put an army of people after you, OK?
42:49James Stunt publicly threatened revenge on the Mail and its owner, Lord Rothermere.
42:56I'm going to bring you down a house of cards.
42:59Documents seen by dispatchers suggest that Jeff Stunt funded Graham Johnson's investigation into the Mail.
43:08One memo from Johnson refers to an update about the Daily Mail.
43:12The memo also refers to the stunt phase of this long-running investigation and describes the work undertaken as a result of your funding.
43:22Morning, sir.
43:24We asked James's father, Jeff Stunt, whether he'd funded Graham Johnson's investigations into the paper.
43:29Jeff Stunt's lawyers told us that the apparent claim that he funded research into illegal activities at the Daily Mail as some kind of revenge is false and misconceived.
43:42And that he had funded research into whether he and his family members had been subject to A&L's unlawful information-gathering activities,
43:50but has never funded research into illegal activities at the Daily Mail for the purposes of the present claims.
44:00Graham Johnson did not respond to our letter setting out the matters raised about him in this film.
44:06The solicitor for Evan Harris told us, however, that Graham Johnson is part of the claimant's research team
44:11and that any work done in furtherance of this litigation has been done subject to legal advice on the rules of evidence,
44:19and any suggestion that witnesses have been paid for making any claims in witness statements is categorically rejected.
44:27He also said that all the things we were reporting, as said by Jonathan Rees and Gavin Burrows about Graham Johnson, were defamatory.
44:34When Harry heads back to court next month, some will argue he's driven by hatred of the press and lifelong anger about his mother's death,
44:48as revealed in this forthright interview.
44:51This is a David versus Goliath situation. The Davids are the claimants and the Goliath is this vast media enterprise.
45:00I think the Royal Family are very uncomfortable about it and they're particularly uncomfortable at the thought of their own relationships with the media being brought up as part of any evidence.
45:12They've done their best to try to distance themselves from Harry.
45:17Dispatches has looked at questions about the reliability of the evidence in his case against the Mail,
45:23with payments to witnesses cited and claims of faked statements.
45:26This is potentially one of the biggest court cases that will occur in 2026 and therefore a huge story.
45:34Love you Harry!
45:36The trial could mark a watershed moment in British legal and public life.
45:41The question that hangs over this is how much is about suing over potential unlawful things that went on many years ago,
45:48and how much of it is coming from a sort of crusade against the press.
45:51Whichever way it goes, it's going to be enormously significant.
45:56So where does all this leave us?
45:59After months of claims and counterclaims, the judge now has a tough call.
46:04It's down to him to cut through it all.
46:07Prince Harry versus one of the country's biggest newspaper groups.
46:10Whatever the ruling, it's set to send shockwaves through the palace, the press and the public.
46:16and the public.
46:17.
46:26.
46:32.
46:35.
46:39.
46:41.
46:42.
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