REBECCA BARRY: It is a scandal.
One that's rumbled on for more than 20 years and counting.
Damaging lives...
I had an inescapable abuser.
..sowing distrust...
I became a recluse.
..and shaking an industry to its core.
Apologies by some, and over £1 billion spent
by two of Britain's biggest newspaper groups
on legal fees, and on pay-outs to thousands of victims
whose lives have been invaded by phone-hacking
and unlawful information gathering.
And yet for many, the pain endures.
Not least for a prince who continues to fight.
This is a David versus Goliath situation.
The Davids are the claimants,
and the Goliath is this vast media enterprise.
And it's not just the rich and famous.
This wasn't just salacious gossip, we were just normal people
who got involved in a horrific incident.
Recent claims go even further.
Burglary.
The whole door had been taken off its hinges.
Eavesdropping on people's live phone calls
and blagging their private information.
As one courtroom battle concludes,
other Fleet Street giants face trial.
Now, accusations of cover-ups against some newspapers...
It is clear to me that we were not told the full truth.
..have re-ignited this controversy...
The yard covered it up.
..giving some new drive in their fight for the truth.
I don't think there's anyone in the world that is better suited
to be able to see this through than myself.
I'm trying to get justice for everybody.
Can you just describe what it is that you're looking at?
A very young photograph of me from my school days,
and the headline saying, "Harry's Taken Drugs" -
smoking dope with pals in the pub.
And what goes through your head when you see that now?
Erm... I don't even know what to say any more.
HE CHUCKLES
Being that young and being under constant surveillance
and distrusting everybody around you... yeah, it sucks.
It's been a bitter legal battle
that finally reached its conclusion last December -
Prince Harry's High Court case against Mirror Group Newspapers.
Today is a great day for truth as well as accountability.
The judge ruled that phone-hacking and unlawful information gathering
was "habitual and widespread" at The Mirror, The Sunday Mirror
and The People, for more than a decade.
This case is not just about hacking.
It is about a systemic practice of unlawful and appalling behaviour.
For both sides, it was the end of a punishing legal process,
with one side claiming victory,
the other seeking to draw a line under the saga.
But it all might not have happened without the persistence
and financial firepower of an aggrieved and angry prince.
This is the first time Prince Harry has spoken about his win.
Did you feel vindicated?
Yeah, no, I did feel vindicated.
Phone hacking has been going on for a long time.
It's some... especially the defendants, you know,
claim to for it to be historical.
Well, there's a huge amount that has come to light now
that people, and the British public especially,
simply have no idea about.
The judge ruled 15 out of 33 articles -
about his past girlfriends, a conversation with his brother,
his deployments to Afghanistan -
were all the result of unlawful invasions into his privacy.
In total, he's reportedly been awarded
hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages.
Can you just spell out to me what kind of criminal tactics
Mirror Group newspapers used against you?
Well, there's voicemail interception,
blagging of flight records.
It was always referred to as just "phone hacking",
but it's the unlawful information gathering
and use of private investigators,
that was really the secondary part to this.
When you got the judge's ruling that you had been hacked,
what was your reaction?
To go in there, and come out
and have the judge rule in our favour was obviously huge.
But to go as far as he did with regard to, you know,
this wasn't just the individual people,
this went right up to the top, this was lawyers,
this was high executives.
And to be able to achieve that in a trial,
that's a monumental victory.
Nick Davies is the journalist who exposed the phone hacking scandal.
The judgment that Mr Justice Fancourt handed down
is devastating.
He identifies by name senior journalists
across the Mirror Group titles.
He identifies the chief executive of the Mirror Group at that time,
the chief legal officer, and he says of all of them,
"You were on the wrong side of the line here.
"You knew this was going on, you failed to stop it."
It's a really, really devastating judgment.
Prince Harry's settled case against Mirror Group Newspapers
isn't the only lawsuit on the table.
He's playing a pivotal part in two other live cases.
The first, against Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers -
the publisher of The Sun.
The second, against Associated Newspapers -
the publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday,
a powerful newsgroup who've been sucked into this storm
for the first time. All part of Harry's mission.
This is a David versus Goliath situation.
The Davids are the claimants,
and the Goliath is this vast media enterprise.
I'm trying to get justice for everybody.
To understand these courtroom conflicts,
you need to go back 30 years.
Britain in the '90s was in the midst of change -
technology altering the way we lived,
and celebrity culture had become a national fascination.
The tabloid papers held the cards.
The power to sway elections, to make or break careers.
And as the '90s were drawing to a close,
one little girl in Wales was becoming a rising star.
OPERATIC SINGING
I never look back at old headlines or old stories
that were written about me.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK
I think that whole period of my life was so coloured
by what the tabloid press were trying to do to us.
Because they sort of poisoned it, in a way.
Charlotte Church launched into the world's media spotlight
at just 11 years old.
Will you give us a little burst?
Of course. Please can I get a C off the orchestra?
A C. Well, you can try. They haven't been hitting them this evening.
C, please. There you go, C.
A household name overnight, with no idea of what to expect.
It was incredibly exciting.
We were a working class family from South Wales,
and this sort of stuff just didn't happen to people like us.
You know, it was proper fairy-tale stuff.
I was aware of the press coverage that I was getting,
but I had absolutely no context for it.
I'd never read anything, any sort of newspaper,
or I was reading things like Smash Hits.
LAUGHS But that was about it!
Excuse me.
This new global superstar was in demand.
But once the angelic child became a teenager...
Eleven hours till I'm 18.
..the tabloid tone shifted.
Just gonna know exactly where I'm going, the little fuckheads.
MAN:They're gonna follow us. They cannot follow us.
You're gonna have to lose them, Mark. I know, I'm trying.
From the ages of, like, you know, 15 to 21, essentially,
I had an inescapable abuser - the press.
They used to cut holes in hedges and stuff,
where we lived and where my friends lived,
so they could use long lenses
and we wouldn't necessarily know that they were there.
And then, of course, when I was acting like a normal teenager,
they sensationalised that to such a point
where you would've thought that I was, like,
a completely out of control person on hard drugs.
And then, you know, have everybody believe that.
It's so dehumanising.
Many of the stories went beyond press intrusion.
From the age of 16 onwards,
she was being hacked by The News Of The World.
Get your fucking hands off!
There was so many articles that stood out to me
as being, like, there is no way... like, where are they listening?
There's just a level of paranoia and anxiety.
We used to say, "God, have they tapped our phones?
"Have they got microphones in our house?"
Charlotte believes an article in the Daily Mail
was the result of phone-tapping.
There was one story I remember where I was having an argument
with my mom and dad on the phone. I was literally by myself.
Nobody could have overheard us. And it was a live conversation.
It was a live conversation which ended up in the Daily Mail.
It's just such a violation.
And there was just... there were so many stories like that.
The Daily Mail say that Charlotte has never complained
about this article, and it was based on an overheard conversation
in a public place.
They categorically deny unlawful information gathering,
as does the journalist who wrote the story.
But for papers looking for a scoop,
anyone connected to Charlotte became collateral damage.
My mother was already an incredibly vulnerable woman.
Her mental health was really bad.
I'd found her after taking an overdose.
She was in a really bad way, and that was straight in the press.
Straight in the press, no idea again where it came from.
I mean, it was horrific.
And she's never been able to fully come back
from the abuse that she suffered.
My parents, they weren't public people.
They had never courted it,
and they just got absolutely mullered,
completely mullered by the tabloid press.
Like, they were fair game, like I was fair game.
Why was I fair game?
Their motivation could be put down to one factor - money.
There was this ruthless determination
to beat the opposition.
You have these big profit-seeking corporations
and they pass down the need to make profit,
which gets translated into a need to find stories
in order to sell more copies, in order to have more readers.
And the criminality in these newspapers
is the logical outcome of the constant drive
for more and more profit from their bosses.
If you wanted a career in newspapers
and you wanted a career in the tabloids,
you had to put your head down and do what you were told.
And so you saw this kind of escalating screw of anxiety going on
with people trying to find out, "Well, how do you get the scoops?
"Where are these stories coming from?"
And I think that pushed people into using shortcuts.
Even now, few from inside the tabloid world
admit to being a part of any illegality.
Paul McMullan spent seven years at The News Of The World,
one of Britain's most popular papers.
These days, he runs a pub on the south coast.
What sort of pressure was there to deliver exclusives and stories?
At The News Of The World, if you did less than 12 exclusives a year,
you got fired.
But sometimes, the methods to get those stories were unlawful.
Was that justified?
Perfectly, yeah.
Because what is in the public interest?
And I think the public is capable of saying what it's interested in.
And the very fact that five million people
put their hand in their pocket and paid a pound to read it,
surely that is public interest enough.
Isn't there a difference between public interest
and what interests the public?
No, it's exactly the same. It has to be.
Can you list for me the kinds of unlawful tactics
that you took part in?
I did loads of illegal things. Stole things.
I mean, blagged things. I did blagging.
Even that now is illegal.
I mean, I'll tell you a great blag on Bob Geldof, if you like,
to give you an idea. So Bob, he got off with this girl in France,
so we rang up the hotel, and cos I speak French,
I said, "We are Monsieur Geldof's accountants.
"Can you send us his bill?" So they faxed us over the bill,
everything he'd had on room service, all the numbers he'd called.
So we just called through all the numbers
and worked out who his new girlfriend was.
Which I think is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism.
But is that illegal? Yes.
Oh, well, anyway, it probably wasn't in the '90s.
'Then there's the act of voicemail interception
'or phone hacking, a legally grey area
'until it was made a crime in the year 2000.
'But Paul tells me it didn't stop The News Of The World
'from doing it on an "industrial scale". '
Did you hack anyone?
I didn't really have to cos I was senior enough
not to have to do it.
The people who did it were the reporters who were trying to get on.
And they were bullied by the bosses. But we hacked everyone's phone.
I mean, literally, everyone's phone.
We had a number, we were gonna listen to it.
It was almost an industry standard technique.
Everybody did it all the time. We didn't see it as bad.
We didn't see it as illegal.
So you could say it's a pretty victimless crime.
You didn't even know. But don't people have a right to privacy?
You might want privacy, but you don't need it.
The only people who actually need it
are people who are doing something fundamentally wrong or bad,
and that's why we had all our surveillance techniques
to catch them out.
Now it's alleged the tricks of some of the tabloids
went far beyond just phone-hacking.
There was microphones in window boxes,
medical records all blagged and stolen.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK
In those days, the paparazzi were something else.
I mean, something extraordinary.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen still today, to me, to other people.
But I remember... I remember that night out.
I remember the paparazzi trying to get in the door, to get in the car,
I remember being hit over the head by cameras,
I remember my security doing everything they could
to try to keep them away.
It felt like harassment.
It felt horrible then, it feels horrible now.
MAN:How do you feel today, Hugh?
'I seemed to have no privacy at all.'
Please look towards me.
All right, guys, that's it.
Wherever I went, whatever I did,
there could well be a photographer or a journalist waiting, watching.
Some say the loss of privacy
is simply the price you pay for fame and fortune.
But Hugh Grant believes that as his profile grew,
so too did the illegal acts used against him.
This isn't something that's only about phone hacking.
There was microphones in window boxes outside the house.
There were trackers, microphones dropped into my car.
There were medical records of me
and mothers of my children, for instance.
All blagged and stolen out of the NHS.
And perhaps most spectacularly,
the burglary of both my flat and my office.
'The actor recently made these claims
'in legal action against The Sun,
'allegations the newspaper has always denied.'
Can you take me back to that moment
when you discovered you'd been burgled?
So, in the case of my flat burglary, yeah, it was quite spectacular
in that the whole door had been taken off its hinges.
Up, up, it's a big walk-up, like, four floors up.
And, yes, they'd been through the flat, and nothing was stolen.
They'd been there to get information.
And a lot of information about the interior and the contents of my flat
appeared in newspapers a couple of days later.
And there's never been a burglary before or since.
'But back then, Hugh says,
'even contacting the police brought its own risks.'
These people live above the law.
And the police, I'm afraid, at that least at that stage,
were as dangerous as the reporters.
If you called the police about anything...
I remember my girlfriend getting mugged just around here.
If you called them, you were absolutely sure
that the first person who would turn up
would not be a policeman, it would be a reporter.
Cos the Met just got straight on the phone to the tabloids,
tipped them off.
Most of the more difficult or illegal acts
were farmed out to private investigators - PIs -
specialising in what was known as "the dark arts".
And sometimes, they had links to the police.
Peter, which isn't his real name,
was a serving officer whilst moonlighting as a PI.
He says he worked for Mirror Group and News Group Newspapers.
We mainly specialised in the surveillance side of things.
Anything from accessing voicemails,
getting into people's emails, phone tapping.
If you personally couldn't get hold of information,
how did you go about finding it? What did you do?
We had a network of subcontractors who could help us
with getting any information that we wanted.
Some of them were more prevalent in blagging,
some were good at IT stuff, and some were good at phone tapping.
Do you think that the people who commissioned your work knew
that the information could only have come from unlawful methods?
It was a bit like the Wild West, really.
It was very open, everything was talked about.
I don't think that there were was ever a time where anyone would say,
"You need to be careful about this."
But away from Fleet Street, their victims and the public had no idea.
Until, in 2005, a chain of events at The News Of The World
exposed their unlawful tactics.
The royal correspondent of The News Of The World,
Clive Goodman, is plodding away in The News Of The World office,
not doing terribly well.
There's this private investigator in in the background, Glenn Mulcaire,
who's helping other people to hack voicemail.
Goodman hooks up with him and says, "Come on, help me out here, mate."
The mistake that Goodman and Mulcaire made
was to target the one group of people in this country
who have more prestige and more power
than Rupert Murdoch and his company - the royal family.
They systematically targeted
phone numbers from the royal household.
And to some extent, they were successful.
Their hacking did bring in exclusives
about Princes Harry and William, but the details were so specific,
they could have only have come from one place - voicemails.
Buckingham Palace grew suspicious and contacted the police.
In August 2006, Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire are arrested.
The police seize the private investigator's notebooks,
containing thousands of names and mobile numbers,
but no-one else at The News Of The World is charged.
Within months, Scotland Yard closes the police investigation,
only giving their reasons years later.
Our enquiries show that in the vast majority of cases,
there was insufficient evidence
to show that tapping had actually been achieved.
The pair are convicted in January 2007.
Though the paper's editor, Andy Coulson,
says he had no idea it'd been going on,
he resigns and moves on to a new job as director of communications
for the then opposition leader, David Cameron.
I believe in giving people a second chance.
In February, the paper's new editor says an internal investigation found
it'd been "a rogue exception",
carried out by a single reporter in their newsroom.
The News Of The World succeeded at that time
at strapping down a cover-up.
They were allowed to get away with claiming,
"Nothing to see here. One dodgy reporter, that's it."
And they very, very nearly got away with that.
The police didn't act quickly enough.
I was Deputy Editor of The News Of The World
before the hacking era.
Later on, again before the hacking era,
I was Deputy Editor of Daily Mirror and Editor of the Sunday Mirror.
People in the industry weren't buying it,
or at least most of them weren't,
especially anybody with any tabloid experience.
But the scandal was about to evolve beyond celebrity,
to those caught up in tragedy, prompting public outrage
and years of claims, court cases and compensation.
I was contacted by a complete stranger
who was in a position to know the whole truth
about the phone hacking saga.
And he sent me an email and said,
"Here's my mobile phone number, contact me,
"but whatever you do, don't leave a voicemail message."
Five years had passed since the arrests
at The News Of The World. Britain had moved on.
And at the tabloid papers, it was business as usual.
But then the story took on a new dimension,
centred on Millie Dowler,
a teenager who'd been murdered seven years earlier.
REPORTER:Tonight, it's been alleged that a private detective
working for The News Of The World
hacked into the missing girl's mobile phone
and listened to her messages.
I understood that the targeting of Millie Dower
was the most powerful story we had done so far,
and said so to the editor when I filed it.
I didn't foresee the extent
to which it would make the whole house of cards collapse.
People felt completely outraged that a couple of journalists
were tampering with a live police inquiry
into the murder of a schoolgirl.
And this went beyond
anything to do with hacking into the phone of a celebrity.
This was on another scale. Something had to be done.
Politicians don't want to alienate the press, they never have.
But if the public feel that way,
then the politicians can't ignore it.
And the politicians didn't.
Just days after the story broke, the prime minister, David Cameron,
announced a two-part public inquiry into the scandal.
These are the questions that need answering.
Why did the first police investigation fail so abysmally?
What exactly was going on at The News Of The World?
And what was going on at other newspapers?
That weekend, after 168 years,
The News Of The World closed for good
with this sentimental final front page.
But shocking though it was,
the hacking of Millie Dowler wasn't a lone example.
It's now thought thousands of people who weren't famous
were potentially targeted in the same way.
At least four explosions have rocked Central London
in a major coordinated terrorist attack.
Paul Dadge was propelled onto the front pages
when he was photographed helping the wounded
in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings.
It's obviously a memory that's deeply ingrained upon me.
More so mentally.
But, yeah, that picture changed my life.
I just wanted to help people on that day.
I can just remember hearing the shutters of the cameras growing,
that click, click, click, click, click.
I was now being held up as this heroic poster boy,
when in effect, for me, people had died underground.
And I found that very difficult to deal with.
For the media, that photo teased a mystery
they couldn't wait to reveal.
Do you know if she had been in the blasted train
or in the one ahead of you?
I don't know that, no, I didn't ask her that.
Do you know which hospital she's in? Don't know that, no.
Hungry for the next scoop, every journalist wanted to know
the identity of the woman behind the mask.
By the time I'd left that concourse, the story had been told
to pretty much everybody who was there.
And everybody, importantly, had my mobile number,
cos I just said, "There's my mobile, you know, if you need anything else,
"let me know and I'll help you out as much as I can."
Days after the hacking of Millie Dowler's phone came to light,
police contacted Paul to let him know
he too had been hacked by The News Of The World.
I wasn't surprised, because there was such an enormous pressure
on journalists to deliver the story of myself
and the person I was pictured with.
And I remember at some point, I got told by one journalist
that she was gonna lose her job if she didn't get this story.
And I remember at some point, I got told by one journalist
that she was gonna lose her job if she didn't get this story.
He's since received compensation,
and News Group Newspapers expressed regret for the distress caused.
We weren't celebrities. This wasn't salacious gossip.
We were just normal people who got involved in a horrific incident.
When something like that happens, it makes you feel very vulnerable,
because you've lost control of the story,
of what you want to tell and what you don't want to tell.
And that's very, very hard. It does take its toll on you.
The Leveson Inquiry began on 14th November 2011.
57 celebrities, politicians and members of the public
who were victims of press intrusion gave evidence across its 97 days.
One of them, Christopher Jefferies, a retired schoolteacher,
who found himself in the centre of a media storm
during a murder investigation.
I could barely go out.
In effect, I'd become a prisoner in my own house.
Christopher had been the landlord of Joanna Yeates,
a young woman whose body was found in Bristol
on Christmas Day in 2010.
I opened the door, at which point I was told I was being arrested
on suspicion of the murder of Jo Yeates.
It is the psychological equivalent, I think,
of being given a knockout blow.
He spent three days in police custody.
By the time he was released without charge,
headlines had untruthfully painted him
as a snooping, oversexualised predator,
linking him to a convicted paedophile
and even a previously unsolved murder.
The picture that was being painted in the tabloids,
it was a sensational story, was something they wanted to exploit.
It was perfectly clear that in reporting the case as they had,
one of the motives of the newspapers
was to whip up as much public anger against me as they could.
He was awarded "substantial damages" and a public apology
from eight newspapers for more than 40 libellous articles.
But recently, he learnt
some papers may have been using unlawful tactics against him,
and is now bringing a claim against News Group Newspapers,
owners of The Sun and The News Of The World.
The allegation is that I was subjected
to all sorts of illegality.
But it's further confirmation that there are almost no depths
to which certain elements of the media will not stoop.
Whilst the Leveson Inquiry gave victims of press intrusion
the chance to share their experience,
most of the 300 people giving evidence
were insiders from the worlds of press, politics and the police.
There is a great deal of official secrecy
around what actually goes on in the power elite.
And suddenly, there they were, being forced to talk in public.
Four Prime Ministers, senior civil servants, senior police officers,
and the most secretive beasts in the jungle, newspaper editors -
hauled out on oath in public. "Now, tell us what's been going on."
Those at the helm of the News Of The World
were quick to make denials.
The witness is Mr Coulson, please.
No, they didn't wield too much power over politicians.
I'm not sure I necessarily buy the theory
that a newspaper's endorsement
will influence its readers directly in that way.
No, they didn't influence the police.
..the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I felt that the contact I had with police officers,
particularly commissioners and senior police officers,
was always appropriate.
And above all, no, they didn't know about the industrial-scale hacking
that went on inside the paper.
I think the senior executives were all misinformed
and shielded from anything that was going on there.
Someone took charge of a cover-up,
which we were victim to and I regret.
This inquiry wasn't just about The News Of The World.
Good morning, Mr Barr.
Good morning, sir. Our first witness is Mr Hipwell.
Thank you.
I, James Hipwell, do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare...
The entire tabloid industry was under scrutiny.
But just one journalist was willing to blow the whistle
on unlawful behaviour at another paper.
James Hipwell was a columnist at The Daily Mirror.
I was sitting next to the showbiz journalists,
and I saw phone hacking going on.
From the middle of 1999, I would say that I saw it happen every day.
There were eight or ten journalists on the showbusiness desk,
and most of them were engaged in phone hacking.
Can you tell me, who was your editor at the time
and did he know about what was happening?
My editor was Piers Morgan.
He was somewhat obsessive about celebrity news.
There was no question that he knew what was going on
because he would ask them, you know, "Where did this story come from?"
And did you get the impression
that this was just a technique used by Mirror Group Newspapers?
No.
I mean, on one occasion, I remember great laughter in the newsroom.
And so I asked what was going on, and this journalist had...
He'd hacked into the voicemail of one of the Spice Girls.
And he knew that one of his opposite numbers on The Sun
was gonna be hacking the same phone
and would've picked up the same message.
And he didn't want that journalist to hear the message,
so he just deleted it.
'The Sun deny this.
'James lost his job on the city column
'after he was caught insider trading.
'Lawyers for The Mirror papers at the Leveson Inquiry
'tried, unsuccessfully, to discredit him,
'suggesting these claims were his revenge.'
Some might accuse you of having an axe to grind
because you lost a job at The Daily Mirror.
That didn't really come into it.
I mean, I see The Mirror now as a criminal enterprise.
My column was part of that criminal enterprise. I accept that.
And I know that, you know, we needed to be reined in.
And it's not often in your life that you get an opportunity
to look back at what's just happened
and reflect on it and try to put things right.
But James was a lone voice
amidst a clamour of denials from Mirror Group bosses...
I swear by the Almighty God that the evidence I shall give...
..shall be the truth, the whole truth...
..and nothing but the truth.
Denials that two High Court judges
presiding over civil cases against the papers
have since found to be untrue.
Is it true that there was phone hacking going on
amongst the showbusiness team?
Er, no. Not to my knowledge.
JUDGE:'The inaccuracy of this statement has been established.'
I have seen no evidence to show me
that phone hacking has ever taken place at Trinity Mirror.
JUDGE:'Ms Bailey knew, or turned a blind eye to it,
'from about the end of 2006.'
Are you able to help us again as to whether or not it's true?
I'm afraid I'm not.
JUDGE:'I have already found that she was involved in it,
'and she clearly had knowledge of it.'
I have no reason or knowledge to believe it was going on.
But did you see this sort of thing going on, Mr Morgan?
No.
You sure about that?
100%.
JUDGE:'There is compelling evidence that the editors of each newspaper
'knew very well that voicemail interception
'was being used extensively and habitually,
'and that they were happy to take the benefits of it.'
I think the police need to investigate this
because we could have a situation where
a number of important witnesses
to a Government-backed, British taxpayer-funded inquiry
have lied, and that's just simply unacceptable.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation
to come out of Prince Harry's court action
is that these unlawful tactics
continued during the Leveson Inquiry.
What is so strange about the fact
that they continued committing the crime
is that it looks as though
they think that they are beyond the law. Impunity.
But by then, they know they're not beyond the law.
The risk level is astonishing.
When the 16-month inquiry came to an end in 2012,
its key recommendation for a new, tougher, industry watchdog
was effectively ignored by the papers,
with concerns over press freedom.
We do have an independent regulator,
but most of the press are not in any way attached to it.
And the regulator cannot function
if none of the organisations that it is intended to regulate
actually join it.
Many say the tabloids under the spotlight had got off lightly.
But then a new case brought fresh scrutiny.
You know, I went paranoid.
Didn't want... Didn't want to speak to nobody.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Can you describe what's happening there?
Just straight away what comes into me mind, you know...
People can take as much as they want,
but the one thing they can't take away from us is memories like that.
Them times were, like, the best times in me life.
Until I started getting hacked and that.
For years, many thought
phone hacking only happened at the News Of The World.
The publisher paying out compensation to its victims,
but each case was settled out of court.
They are not truly sorry, only sorry they got caught.
But then another newspaper group was sucked into the scandal.
In 2015, the publisher of The Mirror
became the first to face a High Court trial in a civil case.
Eight people accused The Mirror of phone hacking.
One of them was Paul Gascoigne.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In the '90s, Britain was gripped by "Gazzamania".
Widely regarded as one of the best footballers
England has ever produced.
Many labelled him a genius.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
COMMENTATOR:'Oh, here's Gascoigne. Gascoigne, he can finish it here!
'Paul Gascoigne! 2-0!'
In England, it's brilliant becoming famous,
but once you're famous,
they just try and knock you down as much as they can.
As the '90s came to an end,
injuries and excesses had taken their toll on his career.
There was divorce...
and struggles with alcohol.
I finished playing football, started drinking heavy.
I was in a bad way, to be fair.
He soon found himself in the cross-hairs of the tabloids,
whose fascination with his fall from grace
led to the repeated hacking of his phone to get stories.
You know, I went paranoid, so I went out and bought six phones.
I just kept on changing numbers.
I thought, "Right, fuck it, I'm getting hacked again."
So I'll go and buy another mobile phone and get rid of that one.
And then I got so scared to fucking speak to someone,
I'd check into a hotel room and use the hotel phone.
And, you know, you think, "God, when's it gonna stop?"
Yeah, and then I got, just... I, I become a recluse.
Didn't, didn't wanna speak to nobody.
With every story published,
his suspicions turned on those around him.
Even those he was closest to.
I was just speaking to me mam and dad, just them.
And the next day, it had come out in the papers.
So I went mad, I said,
"What the fuck are you speaking to the papers for?"
They said, "We haven't spoke to 'em."
I says, "You have. You're the only two I've spoke to."
I loved me mam and dad,
so to think they were... thought they were hacking us wasn't good.
HE BREATHES SHAKILY
What did headlines like that do to you?
Oh, it were fucking horrific.
Then eventually, you end up reading the story and thinking,
"Fucking hell, here we go again."
I don't trust anybody any more, and it's sad, that, really.
'In Paul Gascoigne's case against The Mirror Newspapers,
'his legal team submitted 18 articles about him
'published in the early 2000s.
'The newspaper group admitted
'all of them were the product of unlawful information gathering.
'Throughout that time,
'he'd been struggling with addiction and been treated in rehab.'
Do you think that the actions -
the illegal actions - of the tabloids
exacerbated your alcohol problems?
Oh, yeah. Definitely, definitely.
I'd ring me therapist.
I'd say, "Listen, I feel like I'm gonna have a drink
"because I know I'm getting hacked again."
And he just said, "No, Paul, you're just paranoid."
And I'd say, "No, listen, I know I'm getting fucking hacked."
Said, "I ain't stupid. It's happening again."
'Working for a different newspaper, the News Of The World,
'Paul McMullan remembers how Paul Gascoigne was pursued.'
Is there anyone that you now regret targeting?
Yes, I, er... I do regret targeting Paul Gascoigne,
because, A, he was a hero of mine.
He was actually quite a sensitive soul.
I remember one particular evening,
he drove up to visit his dad in Newcastle,
and we turned up with, like, five paparazzi
sitting outside his dad's house.
So he was convinced that his dad or his wife or his kid
had rung up the papers to get, like, five grand to tell him where he was.
And so he went and stayed in a Travelodge
on Christmas Day on his own, and it's like,
"Oh, Gazza, man, it was us. We're just listening to your phone."
You know, "It's not your dad, it's not your daughter, it's not your..."
I mean, suspicion is terrible.
How do you feel about that now?
Oh, I actually feel terrible, you know, I've, er...
And we kind of destroyed his life.
Er, I'm not saying we made him an alcoholic,
but sometimes at the screws, we went too far.
In May 2015,
Paul Gascoigne and the other claimants' case against the Mirror
would conclude with emphatic victory.
It was the first time
a judge had ordered a newspaper group to pay damages,
the victims awarded an unprecedented £1.2 million.
Gascoigne would also settle separately with The Sun in 2021,
without any admission of liability by the paper.
When I've got a fishing rod in my hand,
I stop thinking about everything.
I just concentrate on the fish.
It's only till I put the rod away,
and obviously the problems come back.
That's why I miss football so much
because I think why I was one of the best players in the world,
that 90 minutes, for me, was my freedom.
I could do whatever I wanted for that 90 minutes.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It is a common thread that runs throughout -
a legacy of paranoia and broken relationships.
And none have played out more publicly, perhaps,
than those affecting Prince Harry.
"Harry's girl to dump him."
Seems as though they knew something before I even did.
As well as phone-hacking,
Mirror Group Newspapers commissioned private investigators
to blag the flight information, credit card details or phone bills
of Prince Harry's then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy.
What sort of feelings does a headline like that create in you?
It gives you paranoia and fear and worry, concern,
distrust around the people around you.
Clearly, a headline like that
has absolutely no public interest whatever, whatsoever.
There's a big difference
between what interests the public and what is public interest,
so what happens in my private life between myself and then-girlfriend
is exactly that: between us.
Other victims of hacking that I've spoken to
have described the paranoia that it creates.Mm-hm.
Do you identify with that?
I think paranoia is a... It's a very interesting word,
because, yes, then, it could be paranoia.
But then when you're vindicated,
it proves that you weren't being paranoid.
You know, same with my mother.
You know, there is evidence to suggest
that she was being hacked in the mid-'90s.
Probably one of the first people to be hacked,
and yet still today, the press, the tabloid press,
very much enjoy painting her as being paranoid.
But she wasn't paranoid.
She was absolutely right of what was happening to her.
And she's not around today to find out the truth.
Does your mother motivate you in this legal fight?
Yeah, yeah, er...
There's all sorts of things that motivate me.
'While it's never been proven in court
'that Princess Diana was hacked, the past remains raw.'
Some will question whether there's an element of payback here too.
No, I think, I think... I know that it is clear now to everybody
that the risk of taking on the press
and the risk of such retaliation from them
by taking these claims forward...
It's clearly not in my interest to do that.
Look at what has happened in the last four years
to me, my wife and my family, right?
So that was a very hard decision for me to make, which is,
how bad is it gonna get?
Some people would say that.
You know, you taking on these high-profile battles
actually attracts more attention onto you.
There is more than enough attention on me and my wife anyway.
There was... They pushed me too far.
It got to a point
where you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.
I don't think there's anybody else in the world
that is better suited and placed
to be able to see this through than myself.
It's still dangerous.
And all it takes is one lone actor, one person who reads this stuff,
to act on what they have read...
And whether it's a knife or acid, whatever it is.
And these are things that are a genuine concern for me.
It's one of the reasons why I won't bring my wife back to this country.
Both your father and your sister-in-law have been unwell.
It's a reminder, I guess, to all of us that life is precious.
Does it ever just make you think,
"This is not worth it. Life is just too short for these legal battles"?
Erm, I don't think the legal,
the continuation of these legal battles is the sort of, I...
The two things are completely separate.
Erm, you know, my father and my sister-in-law,
and me, you know, following through on these legal battles
I felt such a strong connection.
are two completely different things.
The scars run deep, from the personal to the political,
with claims unlawful tactics
I think the press had enormous power at that time,
and I think it's a lesson for all of us that we're in a democracy,
and it's the people, not the press, that must rule.
In 2007, just as the phone hacking scandal was starting to emerge,
Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.
At that time, amidst a frenzy of unlawful information gathering,
it's claimed no-one was safe,
not even the inhabitant of Number 10.
There seemed to be no limits to what this group would do.
The intention was obviously to embarrass,
or even to get rid of me.
Much of it has only become known to me in the last year or two.
He claims he was targeted
by journalists from Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers.
My bank account was broken into,
my building society account was broken into,
my gas bill, my electricity bill, my telecommunications bill.
I know that they tried
to get information from the police computer about me.
All these things happened to me
during the period I was Chancellor and Prime Minister.
He's been accusing the company since the Leveson Inquiry,
but they strongly deny all of this.
The former Prime Minister believes he was being spied on
as the country was facing difficult times.
We still don't know the extent of the surveillance.
If, of course, when you're talking about national security,
you're talking about, at that time,
Afghanistan and Iraq being military exercises,
you're talking also about, uh, very confidential information
about the state of the banking industry
during the financial crisis.
If any of that, we find, was being tapped,
then that would become a serious national security issue
that has to be further investigated.
We can see calls going into the mobile phone of Gordon Brown
when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister.
The Murdoch Company wants to say,
"Well, these may have been legitimate calls from journalists."
But just imagine the picture.
You're a journalist there trying to write a story, and you think,
"Ah, I need to check a fact.
"I know, I'll call the Prime Minister. He'll tell me!"
While some have been punished over the years,
many argue that if senior figures at the tabloids gave the orders,
they have, quite frankly, got away with it.
There have been multiple police operations.
REPORTER:'Once, Andy Coulson was a king amongst the press pack.'
And in 2013, a dramatic trial,
where former Editor of the News Of The World,
Andy Coulson, was convicted,
and the editor before him, Rebekah Brooks, was cleared.
I am innocent of the crimes that I was charged with.
But in total, in a story with thousands of victims,
just eight journalists and a single senior news figure
have been convicted.
Anyone with a sense of fair play would have to conclude
that it's unfair that so few people
appear to have been found guilty and paid the price
for what was an industry-wide, or at least tabloid-wide, crime.
I don't hold massive grievances against the foot soldiers
or these guys who did this stuff.
Not against them.
But I remain bitter and determined to exact justice
on the executives who commissioned this stuff.
Some argue that few faced justice because of a police reluctance
to take on those at the helm of the powerful newspapers.
The police, to an extent, the Met in particular,
were, you know, had to be dragged screaming and shouting
into investigating.
There's a mixture of police incompetence
and police cosiness with certain newspapers.
There was almost a mutual back-scratching relationship.
The relationship between the press and the police
was due to be scrutinised in the second part of the Leveson Inquiry.
But it was dropped by the Conservative Government in 2018.
Michael, not his real name, is a former undercover police officer.
In the late '90s, he infiltrated a private investigation firm
to gather evidence about a different crime,
but soon learnt about the work the company was doing
for some of the tabloids, including The News Of The World.
If it earned money, they would do it.
They were associated with criminals, corruption, corrupt police officers
to a high level.
They would actually brag, "There's nothing we can't get hold of.
"We can even get hold of the Queen's medical records!"
They would mention things about burglaries.
I was even asked once if I would do a burglary for them.
And they had tentacles into everything.
Michael spent almost a decade undercover,
reporting everything back to his bosses at The Met.
But even whilst Scotland Yard
was investigating phone hacking at the News Of The World,
owned by News International,
he says his intelligence was ignored.
What do you think about the fact that nothing happened for so long?
My honest opinion
why they tried to tidy it up and sweep it under the carpet
was because it involved the Metropolitan Police's reputation.
Senior officers were too close to News International.
So I think that's what it was.
The Yard covered it up.
Perhaps another reason some have not been brought to justice
is that potential evidence has quite simply disappeared.
Yes, it's the unlawful information gathering,
but the biggest piece to this is the cover-up.
It's been claimed, at the height of the scandal,
senior figures at Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers
tried to conceal wrongdoing.
It was back in 2010, just a few months before the Met Police
launched its biggest operation yet.
The Murdoch company destroyed over 30 million emails
during a period of about six months.
People were beginning to sue,
and Sienna Miller in particular was suing,
and her lawyer had sent a letter to the Murdoch company saying,
"You must preserve evidence."
They destroyed all of the emails up to the end of 2004.
News Group Newspapers fiercely deny deliberately deleting any evidence
and have said the company was carrying out
a long-scheduled clear-out of old computer servers.
It's very hard to accept the Murdoch Company explanation.
I think that because of the timing, at least, we all are allowed to say,
"Are you sure about that? Because it really does look suspicious."
Both the Crown Prosecution Service
and the judge in Rebekah Brooks' trial
found no evidence of wrongdoing.
But Gordon Brown says new information has since come to light.
It is clear to me that we were not told the full truth.
This is a cause for a criminal investigation,
and I want the Metropolitan Police
to reopen their investigations into what happened.
The truth is important
because we are talking about basic civil liberties.
Until then, those chasing justice must pin their hopes
on getting a damning verdict through the civil courts.
Prince Harry and others are due to take on The Sun next year.
The paper's publisher have so far avoided trial
by offering huge settlements without accepting liability,
as they did with Hugh Grant.
If you're innocent,
why do you shove so much money at someone not to go to court?
He had been determined to take his case all the way to trial,
but settled in recent months.
The rules of civil litigation
are designed to prevent cases going to court.
They want to keep the courts unclogged,
and therefore, if you turn down a big settlement,
say, "I want my day in court," and you go on,
and the judge finally, at the end of the trial, says,
"I find in your favour, Mr Grant, but I'm giving you this settlement,"
and if it's one penny less than that settlement
that you were offered by the other side earlier, months earlier,
you have to pay both sides' costs,
which, I was advised in this case, would be about ten million quid.
And, much as I want these things to come to light in a trial,
I shied at that fence, ten million quid. It's too much.
Meanwhile, Prince Harry's case -
accusing The Sun of unlawful information gathering - continues.
Are you determined to go all the way to trial? Whatever the cost?
Erm, that is the plan.
If I can get to trial,
then we're talking over a decade's worth of evidence,
most of which has never, ever been known to the public.
That's the goal.
'There are accusations flying on both sides.
'Recently, Prince Harry was asked to explain how some of his own messages
'were apparently "destroyed" - a judge ordering him to search
'for deleted online exchanges with his biographer.'
Some will say there have been multiple criminal investigations.
There have been convictions.
Millions of pounds have been paid out in compensation.
Some will wonder, why are you still fighting?
Because that evidence needs to come to the surface,
and then after that, the police can then make their mind up
because this country and the British public deserve better.
'Prince Harry's mission stands in stark contrast
'to his brother's approach.
'In 2020, Prince William reportedly settled out of court
'with News Group Newspapers
'for what's been described as "a very large sum of money".'
To what extent do you think
that your determination to fight the tabloids
destroyed the relationship with your family?
I think there's, yeah, I... That's certainly an essential piece to it.
But, you know, they, er...
It's a hard question to answer
because anything I say about my family
results in a torrent of abuse from the press.
I've made it very clear that this is something that needs to be done.
It would be nice if we, you know, did it as a family.
I believe that, again, from a service standpoint,
and when you are in a public role,
that these are the things that we should be doing
for the greater good.
But, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing this for my reasons.
What do you think of their decision
not to fight in the way that you have?
I think everything that's played out
has shown people what the truth of the matter is.
For me, the mission continues, but it has, it has, yes...
It's caused, as you say, part of a rift.
You said in court documents that The Queen -
your granny, as you call her - supported your claim.
What do you think she would think of what you're doing now?
We had many conversations before she passed.
This is very much something that she supported.
She knew how much this meant to me, and she's very much up there going,
"See this through to the end," without question.
And this is far from over for the Prince.
On the horizon is another civil claim against the publisher
of The Daily Mail and The Mail On Sunday,
accused of hiring private investigators
to bug properties, tap landlines,
and blag private medical and bank records.
It's the first time the news group
has been taken to court in this scandal.
The looming case being brought by Prince Harry and others
is potentially the most serious of all.
The Daily Mail Group have strenuously denied wrongdoing,
and none of their journalists have ever been prosecuted.
So if, and it's a very big "if", that one went wrong for The Mail,
it would be hugely, hugely embarrassing.
Alongside Prince Harry are six other claimants,
including Baroness Doreen Lawrence,
whose son Stephen was murdered in a racist attack in the '90s.
She praised The Daily Mail
for supporting her "struggle for justice"
with this famous campaigning front page.
The Mail presented themselves as the champions of the Lawrence family,
and if the court finds that there is persuasive evidence
that Doreen Lawrence was targeted by unlawful means by The Daily Mail,
that would be an act of such grotesque dishonesty and hypocrisy
that it would produce, I think, national revulsion.
REPORTER:Good afternoon, Harry.
What do you hope to change through this court battle, Harry?
The repercussions of all this are a long way from subsiding.
For Prince Harry and others, the fight continues.
When people are damaged, they don't just shut up shop and go away.
If people are damaged, and they feel
they have the possibility of getting some kind of satisfaction,
and particularly if they have the resources to do so,
they will go on and they will go on until they get satisfaction.
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