Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has never attempted to conceal one of the main missions that he has set himself in life. In his glib, ghostwritten memoir Spare, he described discussing with his father, then Prince Charles, and his brother Prince William, his legal actions against the British tabloids:

“I’d soon prove that the press were more than liars, I said. That they were lawbreakers. I was going to see some of them thrown into jail…It wasn’t about me, it was a matter of public interest.”

That conversation took place in April 2021, just hours after the funeral of Harry’s grandfather, Prince Philip.

Now Harry’s mission is nearing conclusion. It will be resolved either by taking the last of his adversaries in the London press, the Rupert Murdoch–owned papers, to a public trial in January—or by following the example of more than 1,300 other victims of tabloid hacking, and, more specifically Hugh Grant, who settled for a very large sum.

Whichever way it goes, Harry’s obdurate effort to expose the truth about the most egregious scandal ever to envelop British journalism has already inflicted serious collateral damage on the reputations of a cluster of top newspaper executives, prominent among them Will Lewis, now the CEO and publisher of The Washington Post.

For their part, the Murdoch lawyers do not see this as a truth-telling mission. To them, in their boilerplate response to all the allegations, Harry’s and other claimants’ prolonged litigation has resulted in “a scurrilous and cynical attack on their integrity.”

And it must be borne in mind that, in civil actions of this kind in London’s High Court, the allegations are “untested” until the defendants get to make their defense in a public trial. Nonetheless, it has been said that the allegations made by more than 40 claimants in the case led by Prince Harry that have so far surfaced through court documents are presented in often gripping forensic detail.

And the pressure of these allegations has now been heightened by the intervention of a former British prime minister, Gordon Brown. His move underlines the fact that the most damning allegations are not about the scale of the newsroom-directed hacking itself, but about measures allegedly taken by Murdoch executives in 2010 and 2011 to destroy a trove of incriminating emails and computer hard drives.

As Brown himself put it, writing in The Guardian: “While Lewis has always claimed he was Mr Clean Up, these new allegations point to a cover-up. The destroyed emails were likely to have revealed much more of News Group’s intrusion into the private lives of thousands of innocent people.” (Lewis has consistently denied any wrongdoing and has a stated policy of not commenting on the matter. He was appointed general manager of the Murdoch newspapers in London in September 2010. Per The Guardian, the Murdoch group claims the emails were deleted “for commercial, IT and practical reasons.” The company has denied this was part of a cover-up.)

Brown claimed that hackers had reverse-engineered his phone number, faked his voice to secure personal information from his lawyer, paid an investigator to break into the police national computer searching for personal information about him, and accessed his medical records.

In his Guardian column, Brown wrote that after he passed to police new evidence to support these allegations, Scotland Yard assigned a special inquiry team, part of its central specialist crime command, to review the material to determine if there are grounds for criminal prosecution.

​​A spokesperson for News UK, the current corporate entity for the Murdoch papers, said, “The evidence Mr. Brown refers to is not new and has already been the subject of considerable scrutiny including a lengthy and extensive police investigation from 2011–2015 and at a criminal trial. His assertion is highly partial and quite simply wrong.”

In fact, Brown’s move was spurred by new revelations about the scale and duration of operations allegedly carried out on behalf of the Murdoch organization by a swarm of private investigators. The most intrusive hacking by the tabloids was outsourced to PIs, and the new allegations go beyond anything previously known. Crucially, they detail PI operations continuing until 2012—three years after the exposure of industrialized hacking by Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, the News of the World.

That is because, as Brown indicated in his Guardian column, the targets and purpose of the hacking had switched from the pursuit of scoops about celebrities to the pursuit of politicians who were vocal critics of the Murdoch-owned papers—aiming to find anything in their private lives that would damage their reputations. According to evidence submitted by claimants in the Prince Harry–led group, this even included politicians participating in a 2011 public inquiry into press ethics, named for its head, Lord Brian Leveson.

The Murdoch executives told the inquiry that they had spent 30,474 pounds on PIs between 2005 and 2011 and none of the payments had been to conduct unlawful acts. The claimants have now submitted to the court an audit of the accounts of 12 PI contractors. It shows that one PI contractor alone was paid 323,285 pounds during that period. Indeed, the discovery process has led to the startling claim that the Murdoch organization spent well over 1 million pounds on PIs “to unlawfully gather information” at that time. The audit comments that the version given to Leveson was “grossly misleading.”

In response, the News UK spokesperson did not deny that the claimants’ total was correct. They said that the number submitted to the Leveson inquiry related “only to private investigators.” This excluded “enquiry or search agents” defined as individuals or agencies that check “publicly available records and data bases” and that the figure cited by claimants includes both. “This was clearly defined within our correspondence and the parameters and limitations of the exercise were made clear to the Leveson inquiry and are not misleading.”

If this was so, the Murdoch papers spent a great deal of money hiring private investigators to do searches normally done by journalists.

As a result of these far broader new allegations, a person familiar with those involved tells me that Brown is likely to be followed by at least two other prominent politicians in pressing Scotland Yard to consolidate the case for a criminal prosecution, which could follow even if Harry were to accept a settlement and there was no trial.

One focus of that new review is bound to be the chain of command at Wapping, the base of the Murdoch newspaper operations in the former docklands of east London.

Although Lewis has so far taken the heat for the cover-up allegations, he did, after all, report to Rebekah Brooks, who was then CEO of News International. She, in turn, reported to James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son, then executive chairman of the newspaper group. James quit the family business in 2020, citing “disagreements over editorial content and other strategic decisions.” A spokesperson for him did not respond to questions about his role in 2010–11.

Brooks had previously been the editor of both The News of the World and The Sun. Prince Harry’s lawyers describe her in somewhat Orwellian terms as “a controlling mind” of the newspapers.

With her cascade of red, twirling hair and pale, fine-boned face she resembles a frail, pre-Raphaelite figure. But there is nothing frail about her. She rose to the top in a swamp of misogynistic newsroom thugs, and was an unrelenting attack dog in defense of the Murdoch machine. And—of any single person—to Prince Harry she is the epitome of everything that animates his assault on the tabloids. In Spare, he said of her: “She was hunting the Spare, straight out, and making no apologies for it. She wouldn’t stop until my balls were nailed to her office wall.”

Now, the threat of a trial feels like the final showdown between them.

Everything that would spill into public view in a trial would tell another story: that years of discovery in a civil case has uncovered far more than the police investigation that led to the only criminal trial resulting from the hacking, in 2014, when Brooks was found not guilty of a charge to pervert the course of justice.

As things stand, the new Scotland Yard review of that evidence would likely not be completed before the scheduled January trial. A source with knowledge of evidence uncovered in recent discovery told me that there were thousands of pages of witness statements not yet disclosed in court papers that would greatly assist the police investigation.

Prince Harry’s prominence and his financial resources have powered up this fourth and final wave of litigation by victims of hacking. The other claimants in this group could have never on their own amassed such a formidable challenge to the Murdoch lawyers.

Harry has cast himself as the lone avenger for many years of pain inflicted by the lawless pursuers of (and profiteers from) royal celebrities. Although he believes he is acting in the public interest, this is not to be confused with the palace interest, in which he is certainly at odds with his father, the king. That breach is widened by Harry’s belief that the palace communications team frequently briefs against him and his wife Meghan Markle.

In Spare, he wrote that Charles and William accused him of being delusional—that Charles said, “Darling boy, the Institution can’t just tell the media what to do.” The probable reality is that Harry is the defiant outlier because he was never able to find the thing he most wanted and needed: a family. “Royal family” is a misnomer. It is not a family in any normal sense of the word, and never could be. It’s part of an institution that is essentially performative, in which the self is subjugated to duty. Living with that comes naturally to very few people. Elizabeth II was one.

Whatever the result, Harry is trying to litigate something that can’t be litigated. A victory in court against Murdoch would be a famous one, but it would not change the fundamental animus against Harry in the trinity of London tabloids: the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, and—most repugnant of all, the sui generis of the form—The Sun. Harry is the most unsettling force ever to break from the disciplines of the institution he was born into, even more so than his mother, Princess Diana, who provided the closest he ever got to knowing what a real family meant.