Prince Harry ‘turned’ Doreen Lawrence against the newspaper that had led a 25-year campaign for justice for her murdered son, the High Court heard yesterday.
Journalist Stephen Wright, the Daily Mail’s former crime editor, said an intervention by the Duke of Sussex had ‘changed everything’ in his professional relationship with Baroness Lawrence, whose son Stephen was stabbed to death by racist thugs.
The Labour peer and the Duke of Sussex are among seven public figures who have brought a privacy case against the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, following allegations that the newspapers gathered information about them unlawfully.
Associated Newspapers, which publishes both titles, denies claims that its journalists commissioned private detectives to hack voicemails, intercept landline calls and ‘blag’ their private information.
The High Court has heard that the Duke of Sussex contacted Baroness Lawrence in 2022 to alert her to information ‘that she would want to know about’.
She joined the claim against Associated Newspapers a few months later and has claimed she was ‘extensively targeted’ by private investigators who allegedly put her under surveillance and bugged her phone.
Giving evidence in the privacy case, Mr Wright said he had built a professional relationship with Baroness Lawrence in the years following her son’s murder in 1993.
The Daily Mail ran a decades-long campaign to bring Stephen’s killers to justice and Mr Wright said he had arranged multiple interviews with the grieving mother during that time.
Prince Harry, pictured outside court in January, ‘turned’ Doreen Lawrence against the newspaper that had led a 25-year campaign for justice for her murdered son, the High Court heard yesterday
Baroness Lawrence, pictured outside court this week
Six months before Harry’s intervention, the reporter said he hosted Baroness Lawrence alongside other figures affected by police failures, including Lord Brittan’s widow, relatives of Lord Bramall, DJ Paul Gambaccini, former Tory MP Harvey Proctor and Sir Edward Heath’s former private secretary.
Mr Wright said the event was ‘six months before Prince Harry rang Baroness Lawrence and turned her against the Daily Mail, very sadly,’ adding that it ‘changed everything’.
The journalist, who has won multiple awards over a 40-year career, accused the claimants’ legal team and their researchers of attempting to ‘destroy me and my reputation’.
Under cross-examination from David Sherborne, for the claimants, Mr Wright repeatedly denied allegations that he had paid a former police officer to hand money to corrupt serving officers.
The journalist told the court he relied on an extensive network of legitimate sources.
The trial continues.