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The Truth About Megxit: How Dan Wootton and a ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Scandal Split the Royal Family
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This article was first published in the November 2023 print edition of Byline Times
King Charles withdrew his £700,000 funding deal for son Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s transition to a life in Canada in retaliation for the naming of a top royal aide in legal papers alleging a cash-for-leaks arrangement with the journalist Dan Wootton, Byline Times can reveal.
The financial sanction came after the Duke of Sussex defied the demands of the then Prince of Wales and palace staff by declining to remove the name of former Kensington Palace press secretary Christian Jones from a ‘letter before action’ to Wootton’s former employer The Sun in May 2020.
Jones denies any suggestion of wrongdoing or leaking confidential information about the royal household.
The matters alleged in the letter before action about him appear to have been dropped, but the sudden defunding of the Sussexes in late June 2020 led to the collapse of the ‘Sandringham Agreement’ governing a 12-month trial period as the couple sought to split their time between the UK and Canada and remove themselves from the ‘royal rota’ – the press pool given exclusive inside access to cover the royals.
It came just three months into the trial period and led directly to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex having to enter into private commercial arrangements to pay the estimated £3 million-a-year cost of 24-hour security for their family.
One well-placed source with knowledge of the matter told Byline Times: “They threatened the removal of the funding to try and protect the royal household from a potential courtroom scandal with Jones and Wootton very publicly at the centre. The actual removal of the funding weeks later was about control, and designed to force Harry and Meghan to come back to the senior royal family in the UK where their security would be assured.”
EXCLUSIVE
In Plain Sight: The Picture the Palace Probe Missed
In 2020, Simon Case was tasked to investigate payments from Dan Wootton and The Sun to the partner of a royal press officer, allegedly for information about Prince Harry and Meghan. He found there was no evidence of wrongdoing. But Byline Times can shed further light
Tom Latchem and Dan Evans
The source added: “The greater truth is that Harry and Meghan make better headlines than the King and Camilla or William and Kate. The idea of them still being in public service but abroad and out of the control of the institution and dominating the media narrative just couldn’t happen.
“Senior members of the family wanted them back after the transition period and were ready to continue playing dirty to make this happen. They never thought the trial period would work and tried everything to make it fail, starting with the removal of security and then signing off on a 12-month assault by the UK press on Harry and Meghan and everyone in their orbit.
“As far as the institution of the monarchy went, the Sussexes had either to be safely in the tent in Britain or cast away and castigated as comprehensively as possible in order to reduce the threat of them eclipsing the rest of the family.
“It’s no surprise they have endured such a degrading time from such a willing British media, when the same just isn’t true elsewhere in the world.”
‘The Telling Detail’
As part of a three-year special investigation into the professional and personal conduct of Dan Wootton, Byline Times has spoken to several sources with connections to the royal households about how the partner of Christian Jones, a publicist, came to be paid £4,000 by Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun in August 2019 – allegedly for articles relating to the Sussexes.
It is understood that the professional publicist admits to receiving the payments, but has claimed they were for other stories about a reality television star with a similar name to the Duchess of Sussex.
Jones has always denied being the source of any unauthorised information about the Sussexes getting into the press, including details of a written summary that Prince Harry had given Prince Charles in December 2019 of plans to move his family to North America, which Wootton reported initially on the front page of The Sun on 7 January 2020, before running day after day of negative coverage.
In his bestselling book Spare, the Duke of Sussex said Wootton’s information included a “telling detail” about an offer to relinquish their titles. “There was only one document on Earth in which that detail was mentioned – my private and confidential letter to my father,” he writes. “To which a shockingly, damningly small number of people had access. We hadn’t mentioned it to even our closest friends.”
Byline Times can reveal how the story, so-called Megxit, was published on the same day the Sussexes were planning their own announcement. It prompted a constitutional crisis and wrongly claimed that Prince Harry had blindsided his then 93-year-old grandmother – provoking a widespread public backlash – when, in fact, according to Spare, the Queen had been aware of it since 3 January.
In the book – in which Wootton is referred to as a “sad little man” – Prince Harry revealed how a further meeting set up with the Queen was blocked by palace staff and how she had already signed-off on a previous plan for her grandson and Meghan to move in part to South Africa.
Two well-placed sources have confirmed to this newspaper that Prince Charles’ private secretary Sir Clive Alderton and the then Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel, a close friend of Prince Charles, strongly urged Prince Harry to have Jones’ name stripped from the record.
It followed an internal inquiry conducted by Simon Case, then the private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge, and a close colleague of Jones, who concluded that – having heard him deny the allegations that he leaked confidential information – there was no case to answer.
However, Byline Times has learned that Jones and his partner had already been named specifically in anonymous but highly detailed whistleblower testimony – which included an internal News UK ‘ZC’ contributor accounting code – purportedly from an administrator within The Sun, which was deemed credible enough to warrant referral to the Metropolitan Police, and which was integral to the legal letter.
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Revealed: The Emails Behind the Royal ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Affair
Detailed but anonymous testimony from insiders at The Sun sat at the heart of cash-for-leaks allegations involving a royal official and the newspaper’s former top editor Dan Wootton. Now, Byline Times can publish the details for the first time
Dan Evans
‘No One Wanted that Stuff to End Up in a Courtroom’
Part of the testimony, which was initially supplied to the respected retired investigative journalist Nick Davies, reads: “I think the publicist’s ZC number is ZC634***. My friend thinks there was a payment for £3,000 made around the 15th of July last year [2019] for a story about the Duchess of Sussex and her nannies which was published on 28 June. There was also a payment of £1,000 made for a story about godparents to Meghan’s son.”
A second source with links to the royal households told Byline Times that the “Christian Jones problem promised to drag the hidden dealings between the palaces and the press into the public domain”.
“That was deemed highly undesirable by the offices of Prince Charles and Prince William because there was always lots of horse-trading going on with the editors and their correspondents to ensure favourable coverage and protection when scandals broke,” the source continued. “No one wanted that stuff to end up in a courtroom. Harry and Meghan were expendable, but the heirs and their wives were not.
“It sent a chill through Clarence House [for the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall] and Kensington Palace [for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge]. But the Sussexes – particularly Harry – were very keen to get to the bottom of it all.
“He wanted to know how their private information kept being spun into negative headlines in the biggest newspapers. He and Meghan had been stung very badly by the timing and manner of Wootton’s reporting on their plans to live part of the year abroad, which wasn’t even a new idea as the Queen had previously given her blessing for a move to South Africa, which hadn’t worked out.
“And then detailed intelligence had come up to suggest Wootton was paying the partner of a Kensington Palace official, who had a lot of access, for stories about his family. Harry seemed pretty determined to get to the bottom of it.
“A view was quickly taken within the royal households that everything needed to be brought under control. The removal of the transition funding, which Prince Charles knew was his son’s only lifeline to keeping safe, was considered a very effective way of trying to bring Harry and Meghan to heel in the UK. But it didn’t work.”
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Another source explained the mechanics of the royal institution’s competing media strategies.
They told Byline Times: “You need to understand the competition that is constantly in play between the offices of the senior members of the Royal Family. Each has their own staff and their own agendas. The primary objective is to protect the institution of the monarchy. Charles and Camilla are obviously at the top of the tree, and were even when the Queen was alive; William and Kate next. Anything that threatens the hierarchy, or the public perception of it, is a problem to be dealt with.
“Quite often these problems are tackled through the tactical use of the press. The offices of each family member have their own relationships with the very top people at the newspapers. If there are specific messages they wish to express, then it will usually be through the Mail, Mail on Sunday, and The Sun, or less frequently through The Times and Sunday Times. These papers continually report briefings spoon-fed from the palace without questioning them.
“This is why it was such a problem when Christian Jones was named in those legal letters. Whether it was true or not true that information Jones collected in the course of his work was ending up in The Sun, was not really the point.
“The point is that the Royal Family is doing deals and trades with the press all the time for favourable coverage and protection and to maintain public relevance. The naming of Christian Jones threatened to shine a light on the entire unethical relationship between the institution and the press barons and that could not be tolerated and had to be punished.”
And so it appears that the monarchy chose to side with a press secretary over Prince Harry.
Shifting Allegiances
Despite not holding a formal remit from The Sun to cover royal matters, Wootton – who was the newspaper’s executive editor for show-business and television coverage until he departed in 2021 to become the star presenter for GB News – started taking an increasing interest in royal stories in 2018.
On 13 March 2019, Wootton published an article in The Sun about an alleged falling out between Prince William and Kate and the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley, David Rocksavage and Rose Hanbury, whom the paper dubbed Kate’s “rural rival”. For reasons that are not clear, the article was subsequently removed from The Sun’s website, but remained widely reported elsewhere.
A former friend of Wootton’s told Byline Times that the journalist’s allegiance appeared to quickly shift from one prince to another.
“Dan hated Prince William until around May 2019,” they said. “Behind closed doors, he didn’t have a good word for him. He was always talking about his attitude. But Dan never criticised Harry, really. He never seemed to have much interest at all. Then, suddenly in the summer of 2019, he switched. Basically, he was hating on Harry and Meghan. He had previously been obsessed with Prince William. And then he switched to the Sussexes.”
Byline Times put a series of detailed questions to a lawyer for the Royal Family, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Dan Wootton, Christian Jones, Jones’ partner, and Simon Case.
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem are former colleagues of Dan Wootton’s from the News of the World between 2007 and 2011. None of the sources or analysts cited either in this story or wider investigation were paid
‘Reckless to the Point of Madness’: How the Murdoch Empire Hacked British Politics
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This week, News Group Newspapers – the publisher of The Sun and the now defunct News of the World – agreed a six-figure settlement with former Liberal Democrat minister Chris Huhne over a phone-hacking and intrusion claim. It also settled 11 other cases, including those of singer Melanie Chisholm, and actors Keith Allen and Catherine Tate.
Rupert Murdoch's company News Corp has now paid out a total of £1.2 billion in settlement of claims of unlawful privacy intrusion.
In the latest edition of Prospect magazine’s Media Confidential podcast, its Editor Alan Rusbridger – under whose editorship the Guardian newspaper exposed the phone-hacking scandal in 2011 – interviews former Guardian journalist Nick Davies, whose reporting revealed how claims of 'one rogue reporter’ masked the widespread use of hacking at the News of the World.
In this extract from the podcast, Davies explores the significance of the Huhne settlement.
'A Weapon' to Attack those 'Causing a Political Obstruction’
There were two big headlines. First, the Murdoch people carried on hacking voicemails for many years longer than we have previously understood, and did so in a way which was so reckless.
The second big headline is that, whereas all of the hacking we knew about already was about trying to get stories about people's personal lives, this, or at least a significant part of it, appears to have been devoted to advancing Rupert Murdoch's commercial interests, specifically his attempt to take over all of BSkyB.
The implication of that is that there were senior people organising it. It wouldn't be the familiar names from the News of the World newsroom. It would be somebody high up in the hierarchy. And somewhere up there, there's not only Rupert Murdoch but more immediately on the scene his son James.
I would describe it as a strong case of circumstantial evidence, which falls short of anything like a smoking gun. There isn't an email from A to B saying 'guess what, I just hacked Chris Huhne's email and discovered the following info'. So, as circumstantial cases go, it's strong, but I think it's not without doubt.
When we talk about the circumstantial evidence here, some of it is familiar stuff. People saying 'oh yeah, I remember my mobile phone would go, and when I picked it up, there was nobody there'. (If you're going to hack someone's voicemail, you have to get through when they're not answering the phone). 'I would show up for some meeting and there would be a photographer there. How the hell did they know I was going to be there? How on earth did they get this information?' So, there's that kind of foundation layer of circumstantial evidence.
The media company has now paid to settle a claim that alleges the involvement in, or at least the knowledge of, illegal activities by senior executives
Brian Cathcart
There are two other types of evidence extracted from the Murdoch company on the orders of the judge hearing the Huhne case.
First, records of payments to private investigators. And the second – which is the most important – is the records of phone calls made from Murdoch HQ in Wapping to the three senior Lib Dem MPs we're talking about here: Chris Huhne, Vince Cable and Norman Lamb.
What you see over a period of time is nearly 900 calls coming from the Wapping Murdoch building to these three MPs. The three MPs say 'but we weren't getting calls from The Sun or the News of the World', which are the people involved here. 'What are these calls for?' And some of them are suspiciously short. A reporter calls a politician, it's going to be a complicated conversation, at least 10 minutes, maybe longer. This is a minute or two, over and over again.
The private investigator invoices, and the calls from Wapping, happen in clusters. If we apply that circumstantial evidence to a timeline, you see a very interesting picture developing.
First of all, in late 2005, and early 2006, Charles Kennedy was the Leader of the Liberals. There's a problem with alcohol. He loses the leadership. There's an election with four candidates. And there is tremendous activity by the News of the World and The Sun hiring private investigators. We can see the payments going through, and the overwhelming majority of these short, nearly 900, mysterious calls are coming through the main switchboard cluster around the Charles Kennedy story and the election bid.
Two of the targets of that hacking, Simon Hughes and Mark Oaten, have separately settled, and it's been accepted that they were being hacked. Later that year, everything goes wrong when the police bust the News of the World's royal correspondent Clive Goodman in August 2006, seven months after the election hacking. Come the spring of 2009, as far as the official version of events is concerned, all of the phone-hacking has stopped.
Suddenly, the News of the World and The Sun pick up on Chris Huhne as a target. He's seeing somebody he's not married to. Suddenly, you've got this cluster of PI (private investigator) activity and mysterious, short phone calls from the Wapping hub number. That suggests to me that the Murdoch company really does think it's above the law and it can do what the hell it likes.
They carry on doing that with clusters after the Guardian starts publishing these stories that cause them such trouble. Within days of the Milly Dowler story in July 2011, the are clusters of PI activity and mysterious hub calls going into Vince Cable. There’s a phase in December 2011 when Lord Justice Leveson is sitting, hearing evidence based on the material that's come out. They're still hacking phones while that's going on. This is reckless to the point of madness.
There's a really interesting phase around Murdoch's attempt to take over BSkyB.
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We have the election in May 2010; the Coalition is now in Government. On 10 June, the Murdochs’ very smooth French lobbyist, Fred Michel, goes in to see Norman Lamb, a senior Lib Dem MP who is, at this point, parliamentary private secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. And guess what? There are six short hub calls to Lamb's phone on and around that day, 10 June, and six others to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, who's going to decide whether to issue an 'intervention notice' and start investigating the competition implications of the BSkyB bid.
That cluster of phone calls at that moment looks very much like somebody on the commercial side not looking for blackmail stuff and kompromat, but just trying to find out which way the ball is bouncing so that Fred can do better than perhaps he might be able to at the meeting with Norman Lamb.
At the beginning of September 2009, The New York Times (thanks to Alan Rusbridger’s initiative) publish a big story on phone-hacking. CEO Rebekah Brooks writes to Fred Michel an email saying 'what can we do?' Michel writes back in terms, this is slightly chilling: "The key will be for prominent Lib Dems, like Clegg and Huhne, to stay silent on it, and I think they will.”
A few weeks later, Vince Cable says 'I'm issuing an intervention notice. We're going to investigate this bid'. Two things happen.
One, we get lots of hub calls coming in – there's lots and lots of apparent evidence of espionage on Cable, the Business Secretary handling this huge deal, and on Norman Lamb, Nick Clegg's right-hand.
Will Lewis, senior executive in the Murdoch company, persuaded his old pals at the Daily Telegraph to send two young freelance journalists to Vince Cable's constituency meeting, where they secretly recorded him saying, essentially, 'I'm going to stop Murdoch doing this'. That recording meant that Vince Cable lost his job. Vince Cable didn't go quiet, so he lost his job. All of this is surrounded by these hub calls and PI invoices.
Granted, there's an element of doubt. But I think we are entitled to say that the Murdoch company used the News of the World as a weapon to try to attack the people who were causing a political obstruction and to appear to have engaged in illegal criminal activity to gather evidence which would assist them in doing that.
When people criticise Rupert Murdoch, they often think it's all about him intervening in the editorial line of his papers. That's actually the secondary issue. The primary one is Murdoch undermines, and occasionally overthrows, democratically elected governments. And never before, in all the research that I was doing, have we been able to see it happening in such fine detail.
Listen to the full interview in Prospect magazine’s Media Confidential podcast
‘News Corp Was Out to Get Me’: Chris Huhne Condemns Murdoch Empire after Settlement for Phone-Hacking and Intrusion
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The former Liberal Democrat Cabinet minister Chris Huhne today accepted a six-figure sum from the publisher of The Sun and News of the World in settlement of a phone-hacking and intrusion claim – and promptly demanded a new police investigation into the Murdoch company.
In a statement outside court, Huhne accused named executives, including current News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks, of targeting him with the aim of destroying a vocal critic of the media multinational owned by Rupert Murdoch.
"News Corp was out to get me," he said. "My case is unprecedented because the unlawful information-gathering was directed not by journalists but by News Corp executives. The Metropolitan Police should reopen its investigation."
He had wanted the case to go to trial but late in the day the Murdoch company offered a settlement sufficiently large that he could not refuse it without assuming unacceptable financial risks.
Although the company had earlier drafted a defence challenging some of his allegations, Huhne asked today: "Why would they now pay up if they could prove I was wrong?"
His case is significant in several respects besides the questions it raises about the role of managers.
It is the first of three brought by senior Lib Dem politicians (Sir Vince Cable and Sir Norman Lamb will follow) alleging hacking and other illegal information gathering that was driven by political rather than journalistic motives.
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It takes this intrusive activity into the highest reaches of government. Huhne presented evidence (some of it challenged in the News defence) of an intensive campaign against him that continued when he was a Cabinet minister in the Cameron Coalition Government, and sitting on ministerial committees such as the National Security Committee.
He presented evidence that these activities continued at least until 2011 – five years after the company publicly claimed it had been halted.
It is the latest case to include extensive allegations of illegal activities by The Sun newspaper. Hacking by the now defunct News of the World has long been beyond any possibility of denial, but the Murdoch organisation has yet to admit the involvement of The Sun – despite having already paid large sums to settle a number of claims against it.
As Huhne said in his statement, News has now paid to settle a claim that alleges the involvement in, or at least the knowledge of, illegal activities by senior executives.
"The key News corporation executives were... a director in charge of political and external affairs, and long-standing Murdoch lieutenant Rebekah Brooks. Both were overseen by family member James Murdoch," he said.
A new police investigation should focus on directors and managers, he added.
Brooks was among Murdoch executives tried in 2014 for offences related to illegal news gathering and a subsequent cover-up. She was acquitted, while Andy Coulson – former Sun editor and director of communications for Prime Minister Cameron – was jailed.
Huhne’s own political career ended in 2013 when he was jailed for perverting the course of justice in relation to a motoring offence.
According to the campaigning group Hacked Off, today’s settlement brings the total spent by the Murdoch organisation on settling hacking-related claims and associated legal costs to £1.2 billion over about a dozen years. All of Huhne’s legal costs are being met by The Sun’s holding company, News Group Newspapers.
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His claim against the papers was built largely on information that the company had been legally obliged to disclose, and it painted a picture of multi-faceted surveillance and intrusion by Murdoch employees on a nightmarish scale.
Among the allegations were that:
In two periods of a few days, each in 2009 and 2010, private investigators were paid a total of more than £10,000 to follow him.
Between 2006 and 2011, 222 calls were made from the Murdoch headquarters at Wapping to Huhne’s mobile phone which bore the hallmarks of voicemail interception.
Some 20 private investigators and investigation companies were commissioned for tasks including the illegal accessing of Huhne’s medical records, credit standing, utility bills, bank details and telephone records including his list of ‘friends and family’ numbers.
Messages allegedly accessed included both highly private matters – Huhne’s marriage was breaking up and he was forming a new relationship – and highly sensitive political communications with political figures not only in the Lib Dems but with others such as Labour Home Secretaries Charles Clarke and Alan Johnson.
Huhne said today that the "issues in this case are much wider than previous phone-hacking cases".
Former BBC reporter and producer Patrick Howse explores the damage done to the broadcaster in its attempts to appease enemies that want it destroyed
Patrick Howse
"News Corporation ordered unlawful information gathering in the UK that demonstrated exactly the same contempt for the democratic process shown by Fox when it knowingly lied about Trump winning the presidential election," he added.
"Searching for political kompromat, spying on government ministers for political gain and knowingly telling repeated lies to maintain sales and ratings should all be utterly unacceptable in any responsible media company, yet are the stock in trade of the two Murdoch companies [News and Fox].
"The US, UK and Australian political systems have allowed the Murdochs to become far too powerful. I confidently predict there will be little or no reporting of this settlement in The Times, Sunday Times, Sun, Sun on Sunday, TalkTV, Times Radio, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Marketwatch, Australian, Sky News Australia, News.com.au, Fox News or Fox TV stations because they are all owned by the Murdochs."
A News UK spokeswoman told The Times that Huhne's allegations were denied.
She said: "It is strongly denied that there was any corporate motive or direction to obtain information unlawfully. Huhne was a senior politician and stories published were legitimate and in the public interest."