Whether Prince Harry wins or loses in the High Court, one thing seems clear: he will haunt the reputation of Piers Morgan to the end of his days.
In his witness statement, Harry set out his deep animus for the television presenter. He accused Morgan of subjecting him and his wife Meghan Markle to “a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation”, and said he felt “physically sick” at the thought of the journalist listening to voicemails left by Diana, Princess of Wales, during his time as editor of the Daily Mirror.
The Prince will neither forget nor forgive. He pledged that he was “determined to hold those responsible, including Mr Morgan, accountable for their vile and entirely unjustified behaviour”, alleging Mirror Group Newspapers used unlawful methods, including phone hacking, to find out sensitive information about him.
For Morgan, the Prince’s pursuit of him represents a real threat to his future career. Phone-hacking has cost Rupert Murdoch more than £1bn and he will not want his highly-paid star TalkTV host to be indelibly associated with the scandal. Harry can taint Morgan’s name in Hollywood, as Piers courts A-listers for Piers Morgan Uncensored, which is shown on America’s Fox Nation.
Morgan has been known to bring high-profile guests to tears with his personal questioning and would like to be regarded as a compassionate and empathetic interviewer. But Harry’s court characterisation paints a very different picture of a cruel and cynical opportunist. Even if the Prince loses his case, his public defiance of a lifetime of press bullying will have won him admirers and his withering depiction of Piers will take root.
Morgan’s legacy as editor of the Mirror, largely defined by his brave opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is also being re-written. That editorship, between 1995 and 2004, is being reframed by Harry who alleges it was a corrupted media regime that condoned the systematic intrusion of personal privacy.
While several of Morgan’s tabloid friends, including former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, went to jail for hacking phones, Piers stayed out of the net. “I never hacked a phone; I wouldn’t know how,” has been his line, even after former colleagues alleged he allowed voicemail interception on his watch.
In legal filings at the opening of Harry’s case, David Seymour, the former political editor of the Mirror, alleged that Morgan had stood with reporters in the Mirror newsroom listening to a taped recording of a voicemail left by Paul McCartney, in which the musician sang a Beatles song to his former girlfriend Heather Mills to try and repair their relationship.
Morgan’s protestations of hacking innocence have not been helped by his earlier attempts to boast of his knowledge of the dark arts of old Fleet Street. His published diary, The Insider, included an explanation of how phones could be hacked that he wrote in 2001. Six years later he explained the ruse to Naomi Campbell in an interview for GQ.
After the News of the World – a paper which he previously edited – was closed down over phone-hacking in 2011, the Metropolitan Police interviewed Morgan in 2013 and 2015 as part of an investigation into alleged hacking at Mirror Group Newspapers. He was not charged.
Lord Justice Leveson called him to give evidence to his hacking inquiry and described Morgan’s claim to have no knowledge of the practice as “utterly unpersuasive”.
By then, Morgan had a new life in America as CNN’s unlikely replacement for Larry King. So many times, he must have thought he had put the spectre of phone-hacking behind him. In 2015, after being fired by CNN, he returned to Britain as the co-host of Good Morning Britain.
But his obsessive criticism of Harry’s wife, the Duchess of Sussex, cost him that plum job as well. In court testimony, the Prince alleged that Morgan’s personal attacks on himself and Meghan were designed to intimidate him, “in the hope that I will back down” in his legal action.
He linked the attacks on Markle to the Mirror’s coverage of Diana in the last months of her life and suggested Morgan had a personal vendetta against his family. Whether or not that is true, Harry is set upon his own feud. That is something Morgan will always have to live with.
