In his opening argument for the publisher, White said the claimants were “clutching at straws in the wind and seeking to bind them together in a way that has no analytical foundation”.
He said a “striking feature” of the ANL’s defence was that it had been able to obtain an explanation from almost all of the journalists named in the legal action of how they had sourced their stories, to the best of their memory.
“The fact that they are willing and able to do so speaks volumes of the culture” of ANL, he argued.
White also argued it was improbable that the journalists facing the “very serious” allegations would all be lying to the court about their sourcing.
He made the case that the group was relying on evidence of payments to private investigators before or after an article’s publication, but often did not detail what the investigators were actually being paid to do.
He claimed they were instead relying on evidence about the investigators from previous cases in which Prince Harry took on Mirror Group Newspapers and News Group Newspapers, the publisher of The Sun.
He said this was problematic because such “generic” evidence had been “struck out” of the case by the judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, in 2025.
The judge had ruled at the time that evidence a journalist at one paper had used an investigator for unlawful purposes could not be used to prove a reporter at a different paper – using the same investigator – had also done something wrong.
