A newly pleaded document submitted by Prince Harry’s legal team last month as part of his ongoing case against Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers for privacy intrusion sheds more light on what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the "criminal-media nexus” of journalists, private investigators and corrupt cops during the heyday of the tabloids.

In an amended claim over alleged unlawful information gathering in the case of HRH Duke of Sussex v News Group Newspapers, the claimants have lodged a notorious News of the World front page, dated 21 August 1994, carrying an exclusive story alleging that Princess Diana was a ‘phone pest’. 

The story can only have come from police sources and so implicates both the then Editor of the now defunct News of the World, Piers Morgan, his then Chief Crime Reporter (now Editor of the Express) Gary Jones, and the proprietor Rupert Murdoch himself in the roaring trade between the tabloids and corrupt police officers. 

At the centre of it all – and at the centre of many of the ongoing civil claims against both Murdoch’s newspapers, Mirror Group, and the Mail titles – is the role of the infamous detective agency, Southern Investigations, and the murder of its co-founder Daniel Morgan.

Police and Tabloid Corruption

Daniel Morgan was alleged to have been investigating police corruption when he was axed to death in a south London pub car park in March 1987.

His business partner, Jonathan Rees, was the prime suspect. Rees was arrested a few weeks later, along with one of the lead detectives on the initial murder inquiry, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery. 

At the inquest into Morgan's death in 1988, evidence emerged that Rees and Fillery had colluded in covering up the murder. By this point, Fillery had retired from the Metropolitan Police and taken Morgan’s place at the detective agency.

Southern Investigations was now on its way to becoming a one-stop-shop for the ‘dark arts’ of unlawful newsgathering for the tabloids. 

Alastair Morgan, his partner Kirsteen Knight, and solicitor Raju Bhatt at the 2021 publication of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report. Photo: Kirsty O'Connor/PA/Alamy

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Southern Investigations became the main hub for selling confidential personal and financial information to the press obtained by phone-tapping, burglary, covert surveillance, and computer hacking.

Its major purchaser was Alex Marunchak, News Editor of the News of the World.

Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in training up a raft of Fleet Street journalists in subterfuge and surveillance – the most notable of which was Mazher Mahmood, the Sunday tabloid’s famous ‘fake sheikh’.

One of the main sources of both this illicit information, and the techniques for gathering it, was a network of corrupt police officers in south-east London. The trade was so extensive the CID in the area was known as the ‘News of the World Regional Crime Squad’.

Rees and Fillery’s close relationship with organised crime, and the ‘firm within a firm’ of corrupt Met Police officers, saw them engaged in a roaring trade with News International. But, even if the amounts of money siphoned-off to Southern Investigations didn’t attract the attention of the company’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, the political dimensions of their dark arts surely would have.  

When the then Culture Secretary David Mellor suggested in 1991 that the “popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon”, Southern Investigations set up the surveillance and bugging devices to expose him in an extramarital affair.

Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in the brokering of letters stolen from Paddy Ashdown’s solicitor, showing that the Liberal Democrat Leader had also once had an extramarital affair. The information was revealed just before the 1992 General Election. 

In effect, Southern Investigations and Alex Marunchak were becoming masters of politically targeted kompromat – years before the Russian term was well-known. But where do Piers Morgan and Express Editor Gary Jones fit in? And what did Rupert Murdoch know?

The Phone Pest Story

The following is an edited extract from 'Who Killed Daniel Morgan?’, which I co-authored with Daniel Morgan's brother Alastair Morgan

Piers Morgan took over the Editorship of the News of the World at the age of 28 in February 1994, at the height of the tabloid frenzy around the break-up of the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles.

Morgan's only journalistic experience to date was penning the ‘Bizarre’ celebrity column at The Sun. He appointed an even younger Rebekah Brooks to become Features Editor that spring. 

Given his inexperience with reporting, Morgan relied heavily on the older guard at the newspaper, especially his then News Editor, Alex Marunchak, whom he described as having a “deadpan, half-Ukrainian, moustachioed visage”.

Marunchak’s police sources would soon land Morgan in trouble. 

Piers Morgan, who went on to become Editor of the Mirror, after the High Court ruled there was "extensive" phone-hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers from 2006 to 2011. Photo: PA Images/Alamy

In his autobiography The Insider, Morgan explains how, in August 1994, Marunchak and Chief Crime Reporter Gary Jones walked into the Editor’s office in Wapping and explained: “Got rather a big one here, boss. Diana’s a phone pest.” Marunchak went on to elaborate: “The cops are investigating hundreds of calls she has made to a married art dealer called Oliver Hoare.”

Jones backed up his News Editor with “a read-out from the police report" which he then quoted verbatim. 

Hoare had received hundreds of silent, anonymous phone calls and reported them to the police. With the help of British Telecom, the police had traced the calls to Kensington Palace, the home of Princess Diana. 

When Hoare was informed of the source of the calls, he told police officers that he and his wife were friends of Charles and Diana and he had been – according to the police report – “consoling her and becoming quite close to her” after her separation from the then heir to the throne.

The News of the World called the antique dealer for comment. Hoare did not deny there had been a police investigation. Under the bylines of Gary Jones and Royal Reporter Clive Goodman, the News of the World splashed the story over the front and four inside pages.

The details in the exclusive could only have come from the police documents: the date of Hoare’s first complaint, the involvement of BT’s specialist Nuisance Calls Bureau, the special code BT was given to trace the calls, the activation of the code on 13 January 1994, transcripts of six silent calls, and then the tracing equipment which linked the calls to a private number used by Prince Charles.

All of this detailed information could only have been sourced from the police.

The next day, in a long interview in the Daily Mail, Princess Diana denied the story.

Piers Morgan began to worry that he had made a huge career blunder. There were calls for him to resign. Marunchak tried to reassure the News of the World Editor by telling him: “We’ve had the report read to us, she’s lying." But Morgan still feared that the document could be a forgery. 

“I felt sick to the pit of my stomach,” Morgan recalled in The Insider. “I couldn’t eat or even drink a cup of tea, it was hellish.”

What Murdoch Knew

The only thing that finally put Morgan's mind at rest was a call from his proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. 

“Hi Piers,” Murdoch said. “I can’t really talk for long but I just wanted you to know that your story is 100% bang on. Can’t tell you how I know, but I just know.”

He then instructed his Editor to get on TV and tell the world that Princess Diana is "a liar", and to promise more material in the Sunday tabloid the following week. 

Though relieved, Morgan couldn’t help admitting to Murdoch that he didn’t have any more material. Murdoch replied: “Oh, you will have by Sunday, don’t worry. Gotta go. Good luck.”

How had Murdoch independently verified the story? It was Alex Marunchak who had seen the police report. Would the proprietor have checked with his veteran News Editor? 

At the Leveson Inquiry into the practices, culture and ethics of the press in 2012 – following the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal the year before – Murdoch explicitly denied even remembering meeting Marunchak. But, in careful legal language guarding against any surviving photos, he added: "I might have shaken hands, walking through the office."

By that point, Marunchak had served in a number of senior roles at the News of the World from his first days in the Wapping dispute, attending parties with the News International CEO and senior police officers, to being made Editor of the Irish edition two decades later. 

Steve Grayson, a freelance photographer who worked at the Sunday tabloid in the late 1990s, recalls Marunchak explicitly saying that he had a direct call from Murdoch on one occasion.

Despite his growing global influence, there is also no doubt that, during this era, Murdoch himself still called senior management at the newspaper most Friday or Saturday nights to check what stories were coming up. And there’s more evidence that Murdoch was well aware of the existence of Marunchak, who had served his company for more than 25 years.

Prince Harry with his lawyer David Sherborne at the High Court during his recent trial against Mirror Group Newspapers. Photo: PA/Alamy

In correspondence from September 1997, the then Taoiseach of Ireland, Bertie Ahern, wrote personally to Murdoch to thank him for the News of the World’s coverage of the country's General Election. He said he particularly “appreciated the very professional approach of your Associate Editor Alex Marunchak”. Ahern even asked Murdoch to pass on “my thanks and best wishes to Alex”.

Murdoch replied on 30 September 1997: “I shall be delighted to pass on your comments.”

Whatever Murdoch’s uncertain memories of Alex Marunchak, the ultimate source of Piers Morgan’s scoop was a confidential police file. Later, Morgan was careful to say that the source wasn’t a ‘serving police officer’ – partly because that would have opened him, and any police officer, up to criminal charges. 

Nobody was censured or sanctioned for the phone pest story. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

Gary Jones went on to win the Press Gazette’s Reporter of the Year Award, partly due to his News of the World exclusive about Diana’s anonymous calls.

Criticised by the then Press Complaints Council for another intrusive royal splash, Morgan would leave the Murdoch Sunday tabloid in 1995 and take up an even more senior position editing its rival, the Daily Mirror.

He would soon bring over Jones and, with him, the dark arts of Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees.

Ongoing Trials

While the judge has not ruled whether Prince Harry’s claims can date back to 1994 and the targeting of his mother, the evidence of Gary Jones’ relationship with Southern Investigations has already been heard in the case of the Duke of Sussex and other claimants against Mirror Group Newspapers. 

The judge in that case, Justice Fancourt, concluded that Piers Morgan, as Editor of the Mirror newspapers, must have known about phone-hacking and other unlawful information gathering. 

Meanwhile, similar evidence is due to be heard in the pending claims by Prince Harry and others (including Baroness Doreen Lawrence) in claims against the publishers of the Mail and Mail on Sunday.  

According to the particulars of claim issued so far, Associated Newspapers also procured the services of private investigators involved in illicit information, including allegations that Southern Investigations were involved in targeting the family of Stephen Lawrence, murdered by a racist gang connected to the south-east London underworld in 1993. 

Like the tabloids used to say, this story will run and run. 

In the end, months of conspiracy theories were silenced by a two-minute video.

After a strict media embargo, on Friday at 6pm, Kensington Palace released the statement recorded personally by Catherine, Princess of Wales.

In it, she revealed that, following her abdominal surgery in January, doctors had discovered cancer, and she was now being treated with preventative chemotherapy. She explained how she had sought to share this news appropriately with her young children, reassured the public that she was growing stronger, and finished with a moving message of hope to others undergoing treatment for the disease.

It would once have been unthinkable for members of the Royal Family to share details of their medical conditions, and yet, this seemed like the least extraordinary aspect of the video.

The closest comparison is perhaps 1997, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when public and media disquiet effectively forced the Queen to address the nation.

Commentators have been divided on whether Kensington Palace was similarly forced into the statement as a result of mounting public pressure or if Kate would always have explained the details of her condition and was choosing a moment (the beginning of her children’s Easter holidays) that suited her.

Either way, the intense public and media pressure was undeniable. That tells its own story.

In 1997, the ‘public’ could only make its views known through opinion polls, mass gatherings, direct interventions (such as vox pops or letters) and, ultimately, through its arbiters in the press. Social media has upended that framework.

Newspapers now follow the internet’s lead. For weeks, conspiracy theories around Kate's absence from public life dominated the conversation on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), and ranged from light-hearted nonsense to poisonous defamation.

In two clear ways, that leaked into the mainstream ecosystem.

The first surrounded the Mother’s Day photograph on 10 March, presumably released by Kensington Palace to reassure people that Kate was happy and well, surrounded by her family. UK media outlets published the image as issued and only began discussing the edits made to it after analyses began to trend on social media.

That was followed by ‘kill notices’ issued by multiple international press agencies, effectively declaring the photograph unfit to be used – a damaging rebuke to Kensington Palace and its credibility. That, in turn, led to a highly unusual tweet signed by Kate herself, in which she apologised and claimed responsibility for editing the picture as an "amateur photographer".

The second involved another type of photography: an amateur video at a Windsor farm store, purportedly showing Prince William and Kate in good spirits carrying shopping. Crucially, this video was published by the Sun – providing a key contrast with an earlier paparazzo photograph of Kate and her mother Carole Middleton in a car, which was only published abroad.

Some commentators questioned whether Kensington Palace had tacitly approved the video’s publication. Even more significantly, however, some mainstream journalists – notably Rachel Johnson in the Evening Standard – questioned or openly doubted whether the woman was really Kate at all. This might, once again, have demonstrated an example of social media conspiracy spilling into the mainstream – or, more troubling for Kensington Palace, a new dent in the armour of deference which still pertains to William and Kate in a manner that long ago escaped Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

This notion of deference is important.

In some ways things, have not significantly changed since 1936 when American newspapers openly discussed King Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson and the British media remained entirely silent.

Foreign media has aired theories about Kate that would not have been touched here. There still exists in Britain a culture either of widely-known open secrets or of journalists hoarding information about the Royal Family – and either dropping small public breadcrumbs or remaining entirely silent.

In some ways, that is legitimate: members of the Royal Family are human beings with the right to a private life. But they are also public figures with, crucially, public and constitutional roles.

This feeds into the most fundamental tension in our modern monarchy: the codependence of members of the Royal Family and the royal press pack.

William and Kate are considered positive assets by both the tabloid media and the monarchy itself – the press’ treatment of them is a far cry from the hounding of both William’s parents in the 1990s. That is a product of multiple factors: a change in tabloid and paparazzi culture, the fact William and Kate have not yet been publicly linked to a tabloid-friendly scandal, and because the couple cooperates.

The media knows that the Royal Family sells newspapers and seeks access. The Royal Family knows that the media sustains both public support for the monarchy and people’s appetite for information about it, and seeks positive coverage. Underlying both anxious institutions is the British public, on whose patronage both depend.

Ordinary people were concerned about Kate’s welfare, but they also wanted information as they would about any other high-profile celebrity. Kate, in turn, was entitled to privacy as an ordinary human being, but will also one day be Queen. Such is the woozy confluence of soap opera and constitution. These people function both as fodder for national entertainment and as instruments of the state.

During the past three months, the media has performed a strange dance, balancing a mostly justifiable interest in a public figure with a mostly unjustifiable interest in a private one – sometimes, it appears, with the cooperation of Kensington Palace, and sometimes, it appears, without.

The media wanted to push, but not too hard. The Palace attempted to manage the coverage and, in the end, through Kate’s video, resolved to produce its own. This appears to have been a power struggle that ended in stalemate.

Once this story dies down, the most important soul-searching will probably take place not in Fleet Street but Kensington Palace. Insofar as the monarchy is a political institution, it relies on trust, both from the media and public. Credibility is not easily replaced and the photograph incident will have damaged faith in its communications machine. Now Kate has revealed her diagnosis, more questions arise about why the princess was thrown into the centre of a PR storm while receiving treatment for cancer.

And yet perhaps the greatest question centres on Kate herself.

The monarchy is a barer institution than a few years ago, and a weaker one. While the King and Queen are liked and respected, they do not attract either the deference of the late Elizabeth II or the rock-star appeal of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Only William and Kate come close to embodying both the stability and glamour that the institution needs – and Kate above all. She is the most popular member of the family, and so indispensable that the modern monarchy can scarcely be imagined without her.

That, in turn, reflects the vulnerability of the institution: it can only ever be as strong as its cast. It cannot, constitutionally, just disappear – but it can fade into irrelevance or embarrassment. Its sustainability, in current form, can no longer be guaranteed.

Prince Harry has won another big pay out to settle his phone-hacking case with the publisher of the Daily Mirror – and repeated calls for former Editor Piers Morgan to face criminal investigation.

It came as High Court judge Mr Justice said that Morgan’s former employers, Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), has been “shockingly dishonest” for concealing endemic wrongdoing at its Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and Sunday People tabloids between 1996 and 2011.

It follows a comprehensive courtroom victory for the Duke of Sussex in December in which Justice Fancourt found that there could be “no doubt” Mr Morgan – the Daily Mirror’s Editor from 1995 to 2004 – knew about his newspaper’s hacking and habitual unlawful use of private investigators.

On Friday, MGN agreed to pay the prince an undisclosed sum in respect of 115 articles over and above the £140,000 he received last year for distress and invasion of privacy relating to 15 other illegally-obtained stories.

During the trial, it was heard that MGN was spending up to £925,000 a year on illegal snooping, targeting thousands of people of interest to the editors of MGN’s three titles.

Lawyers for the prince read a statement outside court in which he claimed a famous win and – focusing on Morgan, who did not defend himself at trial but attacked the judgment from his doorstep – called for the “rule of law” to be upheld.

The prince said: “After our victory in December, Mirror Group have finally conceded the rest of my claim, which would have consisted of another two trials, additional evidence and 115 more articles.

"Everything we said was happening at Mirror Group was in fact happening, and indeed far worse as the court ruled in its extremely damning judgment.

“As the judge has said this morning, we have uncovered and proved the shockingly dishonest way the Mirror Group acted for many years and then sought to conceal the truth.

"In light of all this, we call again for the authorities to uphold the rule of law and to prove that no one is above it. That includes Mr Morgan, who as Editor, knew perfectly well what was going on, as the judge held.

“Even his own employer realised it simply could not call him as a witness of truth. His contempt for the court’s ruling and his continued attacks ever since demonstrate why it was so important to obtain a clear and detailed judgment.

“As I said back in December, our mission continues. I believe in the positive change it will bring for all of us. It is the very reason why I started this, and why I will continue to see it through to the end.”

In its most recent statement on the matter, given to Byline Times last week, the Metropolitan Police said it was continuing to consider the content of Justice Fancourt’s 386-page ruling before deciding whether to re-initiate criminal inquiries into Morgan.

Morgan was first interviewed in February 2014 over phone-hacking by Scotland Yard’s Operation Golding. Despite Golding’s discovery of significant evidence – and the prospect of securing multiple former staff as witnesses against the company – and heavy expenditure of public resources on Golding, former Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders decided in 2015 that there was “insufficient” prospect of winning a conviction “in any” of 10 potential cases against MGN employees.

However, substantial evidence of criminal behaviour and cover up at MGN emerged last summer at trial during in which Justice Fancourt found endemic unlawful information gathering went on at MGN’s three national newspapers between 1996 and 2011.

At trial, former Mirror journalist Omid Scobie gave evidence that he heard Morgan being told a story about the singer and actress Kylie Minogue was sourced from a voicemail.

It also heard from former New Labour Downing Street Communications Director Alastair Campbell, who, according to the judge, gave “compelling evidence” that illegal techniques were used by the Mirror to obtain details of his mortgage.

In addition, Melanie Cantor, an agent and publicist for the presenter and columnist Ulrika Jonsson, said that Morgan “always seemed to be the first person to know about events that had recently happened” involving her clients, and that invoices and phone records demonstrated that she had been repeatedly hacked by Morgan’s Mirror reporters.

The judge concluded that “sensitive information… was passed to Mr Morgan, who must have known how it had been obtained”.

The judge ruled that other key MGN figures, some of whom now hold senior roles at other organisations, were aware or likely aware of illegal activity – including Richard Wallace, now Piers Morgan’s boss at Murdoch-owned TalkTV and Neil Wallis, former Editor of The People who in 2015 was acquitted of phone-hacking charges relating to his time as Deputy Editor at the News of the World.

Others include Morgan’s Mirror Deputy Editor Tina Weaver (for whom he advocated in 2001 to become Sunday Mirror editor), Morgan’s former Features Editor Mark Thomas, and Sunday Mirror and The People Senior Editors Nick Buckley and James Scott – the journalist who handed Morgan one of his biggest Mirror scoops hacked straight from the voicemails of former England football manager Sven Goran Eriksson and television presenter Ulrika Jonsson.

The Duke of Sussex's call for action from the authorities followed a bruising day for MGN in which it was ordered to meet the claimants’ costs of £1.9 million as they demonstrated that MGN had orchestrated a cover-up of illegality involving some former board members and the legal department, which the judge described as “shockingly dishonest”.

Justice Fancourt also rejected an application to appeal against his decision to apply limitation laws to some phone hacking cases – which give claimants a six-year countdown to bring legal action from the time at which they “reasonably” ought to have believed they had been wronged.

However, the matter, relating to the Duke’s co-claimants actress Nikki Sanderson and former wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse, Fiona Wightman, will now be referred to the Court of Appeal directly for a decision on whether the judge’s findings merit review.

Dan Evans is a former employee of MGN and a witness for the claimants in Sussex & Ors vs MGN Ltd

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2023 was a big year for Byline Times. We thought we'd take some time to share some of the major inroads the paper made into exposing wrongdoing - both the egregious and the bizarre - in the UK and elsewhere.

As editor Hardeep Matharu and exec editor Peter Jukes told supporters this week, we faced off against the aggressive lawyers of deep-pocketed public figures, endured direct physical threats to our staff, and chased leads that other papers wouldn’t dare touch.

As always, our brilliant network of supporters carried us along the entire way. So thank you to everyone who read, shared, subscribed, and donated last year. You made all this happen.

We know that 2024 – a major election year both at home and abroad – will bring a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. But first, a look back at some of our biggest stories of last year.

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10. Piers Morgan’s Statement on the Prince Harry Phone Hacking Case - Annotated

In December, the High Court ruled that phone hacking and other unlawful information gathering (“UIG”) occurred throughout Piers Morgan’s editorship at Mirror Group Newspapers - and that Morgan knew about it and published articles he knew came from it.

Morgan denied hacking a phone or telling people to do so - but his statement was mercilessly torn apart by strategist Dan Harris, who worked on the case. Well worth a read.

9. BBC Chairman Donated Tens of Thousands of Pounds to Right-Wing Group Funding Criticism of BBC

Next up among 2023's most-read hits was our investigation into then-BBC chairman Richard Sharp, a Johnson appointee who faced endless scandal during his brief time as chair. 

We found that he had given tens of thousands of pounds through his personal charity to an organisation that funds right-wing organisations in the UK – several of which back the privatisation of the BBC. 

Richard Sharp – who has donated more than £400,000 to the Conservatives – gave the money to the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) think tank, Byline Times reported. He was forced to resign not long after, amid this and other outlets’ reporting on his controversial ties to the Tories. 

8. Dead Cats and Transphobic Lies

In June, pupils at a school in Rye, East Sussex made a recording which, it was claimed, had two students standing up to a teacher over a fellow pupil who ‘identified as a cat’.

The TikTok was swiftly “picked up by the fringe elements of the right-wing and conservative media on both sides of the Atlantic and was spread by a Twitter account claiming to be run by the mother of one of the students.” 

Except, as Otto English revealed, no child had identified as a cat at the school. It was a case of manufactured hysteria - and arguably did great damage to conversations about gender in the UK. 

7. Russia and the US Press: The Article the CJR Didn’t Publish

A few years ago, the Columbia Journalism Review refused to publish Duncan Campbell’s investigation into influential US title The Nation magazine and its apparent support for Vladimir Putin. This wasn't known about until published Campbell's damning response in full. It raised big questions for the publication that is meant to be a watchdog against media wrongdoing.

6. PPE Firm Subject to £122m Recovery Action from UK Government Has Only £4m in Assets

Byline Times was the first publication to reveal in September 2020 that PPE Medpro had won hundreds of millions in Government COVID contracts, just 44 days after being incorporated.

Our digging didn't stop there. Stephen Delahunty reported last June that the firm at the centre of UK Government legal action to recover £122m, after it won contracts through the so-called ‘VIP lane’ of suppliers, has posted assets of just over £4m.

The claim, being brought by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), is looking to recover the full multi-million-pound figure from PPE Medpro, under a contract for it to supply 25m sterile surgical gowns that was awarded in June 2020. 

5. Cropped Out: The Curious Tale of the BBC, Brexit and our Missing Vegetables

Patrick Howse’s vital analysis of the real impact of Brexit - and how the true scale had been ignored by UK media - garnered a lot of attention in February. “The shortage of vegetables in the UK has been noticed in Europe, with serious newspapers publishing articles about how Britain’s supermarkets are limiting the number of peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes that customers can buy and featuring photos of the extensive gaps on their shelves.”

There was little such coverage from our own tabloid press, of course. 

4. Prince Harry Takes a Stand for Us All: ‘If They’re Supposedly Policing Society, Who On Earth is Policing Them?’

In 2023, the Duke of Sussex became the first senior member of the Royal Family in more than 130 years to give evidence to a civil court. “He also became one of the British establishment’s own – a prince of the realm, no less – to expose what he alleges was illegal information gathering by one of this country’s major tabloid newspaper groups” - the Mirror Group, an action he subsequently won.

Our editor Hardeep Matharu argued - whatever our views on the royals - he stood up for all of us. 

3. Queen had ‘Secret Agreement’ with Murdoch Papers to Spare Harry Hacking Trial Ordeal, Court Hears

Dan Evans revealed in April that Queen Elizabeth II entered into a “Secret Agreement” with Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids to spare Princes William and Harry from a phone hacking trial, the Duke of Sussex has claimed in new legal papers.

The late monarch and top Buckingham Palace staff approved the deal – allegedly negotiated without legal advice – in 2012 with the publishers of The Sun and News of the World in a bid to avoid “reputational damage” to the Royal “institution”.

2. Laura Kuenssberg’s Time as BBC Political Editor has been a Catastrophic, Systemic Failure

Patrick Howse’s 2022 piece exploring Laura Kuenssberg’s time as BBC Political Editor had a resurgence this year, with the writer arguing that her tenure was a catastrophe. Kuenssberg continues to host her own Sunday BBC show and is likely to feature prominently in this year’s General Election coverage from the public broadcaster.

1. GB News Investigation: Dan Wootton Unmasked

It was our biggest story of the year by far. In July, Dan Evans and Tom Latchem revealed that GB News presenter and MailOnline columnist Dan Wootton hid behind fake online identities to trick and bribe scores of men into revealing compromising sexual material. Evans' and Latchem's three-year special investigation made waves, and the impact continues to be felt in the media. 

For a recap, they found that Wootton, the 40-year-old broadcaster and self-styled voice against ‘woke’ culture - targeted journalistic colleagues, friends and members of the public for at least 10 years through so-called 'catfishing' methods.

In October, following a misogynistic rant on Wootton’s show by actor and hard-right activist Lawrence Fox, GB News axed Wootton. He has now been scrubbed from their presenter rostra online. 

Well over a million people read this many-pronged investigation, and millions more through (eventual) wider media attention. (Wootton continues to deny any allegations of illegality.)

Bonus Picks

"Landmark Ruling in Strasbourg as MPs Challenge UK Government over Failure to Investigate Russian Interference in Brexit"

In response to a glaring lack of electoral and national security, a group of parliamentarians took the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last March, with the support of campaigning journalism organisation The Citizens. 

The cross-party group of MPs – including Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, Labour’s Ben Bradshaw and the SNP’s Alyn Smith – claim the Government is infringing our “right to free and fair elections” by failing to act on the findings of the Russia Report, which found credible evidence of Russian interference in Brexit. Read the details here.

Constituents Launch Campaign to Unseat Conservative Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson for Making ‘Laughing Stock of Area’

We reported in July that constituents of Lee Anderson, Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party, are launching a campaign to build a “fighting fund” to prevent his re-election this year.

Anderson’s controversial style has been the subject of frequent press coverage, with reports of him “bullying” a local radio presenter who asked him about allegations of lying, publicising salaries of his staff, and challenging Remain protester Steve Bray to a boxing match.

The MP for Ashfield has come under scrutiny for his apparent friendship with members of far-right groups. And now his constituents are getting organised…

The Departure Lounge 

Towards the end of last year we said goodbye to a close friend of Byline Times, who wrote regularly for the outlet, James Doleman. Before he passed away, he wrote movingly about his terminal diagnosis and the state of the NHS. Do read it. Rest in peace, James. 

Gary Lineker, Andrew Neil and the BBC’s Real Impartiality Crisis

Our political editor Adam Bienkov wrote: “The treatment of Lineker, like the treatment of other former BBC hosts who felt forced to leave in recent years after coming under pressure for their supposedly ‘left-wing’ views, stands in stark contrast to the much more lenient treatment meted out to other prominent figures at the corporation.” Like, for example, Andrew Neil…

Thanks for reading. If you want to help us continue to investigate cronyism, corruption and chaos in public life, please support our legal crowdfunder. With your support, we can keep digging - and make 2024 our biggest year yet.  

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