167: Cash Harry

0:00We're back in the private eye studio and Adam Macqueen has an update for us on the Prince Harry v. The Daily Mail trial of all sorts of invasion of privacy. There have been all sorts of phone hackers having their day in court, as has Prince Harry. And you have an update for us, I believe. I do indeed. I think it was the last podcast about Prince Harry and others' case currently going against the Daily Mail. And one of the big issues in that being payments being made to lots of witnesses on behalf of the claimants. Do you remember this? Yes, payments for books and things like that. All sorts of things, not specifically for their witness statements, but for effectively telling those same stories that then appeared in their witness statements in the form of various books published by Graham Johnson, an ex-Sunday Mirror hack and hacker, phone hacker, convicted phone hacker, who's kind of been specialising in this stuff ever since with the help of Hacked Off.

0:47The word hack appears so many times, doesn't it? We can't need a new one. Hacked Off, I like to refer to them as the anti-press campaigners who were led for a while by Evan Harris, the former Lib Dem MP. Both Johnson and Evan Harris appeared in the witness box at the Royal Courts of Justice last week and cleared up a few details about that. So specifically, Gavin Burrows, who you might remember is the private detective who gave a witness statement to one side saying he'd been hacking and doing all sorts of illegal things on behalf of the Daily Mail and then did a witness statement for the Daily Mail saying that he'd never done any of that, he'd never said that and that that first witness statement was fake and it wasn't his signature on it.

1:22he got£75 ,000 from Graham Johnson we've got Glenn Mulcair who you might remember convicted, the very first person to be convicted of phone hacking at the News of the World all the way back in 2007 paid£22 ,000, Greg Miskew who was his boss at the News of the World£12 ,000 Steve Whittemore who way back in 2005 I remember writing about having his private investigator's office raided by the information commissioner and all sorts of illegal things going on £5 ,000 he got and Daniel Portley-Hanks US-based private investigator who claims to have hacked Megan and all sorts of people £6 ,000 for work on a book as well as a few hundred dollars for his archive and even worse than that he had to go out for dinner with John Cleese which is a suffering that none of us should have to go through Christine Hart I know she's the psychic investigator the one who got the messages from the Nordics by opening the Stargates she's fun £5 ,000 as well where did this money come from?

2:16We were speculating a little while back well we now have the answer Mr Max Mosley that favourite champion of a free press was funding Graham Johnson to the tune of£500 ,000 specifically to investigate the Daily Mail. And the money from Max Mosley £500 ,000 specifically to go for the Daily Mail. Yes, Max Mosley famously had already taken the News of the World to court over their exclusive of a S &M orgy The German theme German themed, yes, with people having their heads shaved and checked for lies and things, but which definitely, definitely had nothing to do with the Nazis, which of course is a sensitive subject with Max Mosley because his dad was one.

3:02And the mail came into his sights because they did not accept this verdict as sensible. They weren't that keen on the verdict and they weren't that keen on Max Mosley generally either. He reckoned Paul Dacre had a problem with his sex life specifically. I would suggest that Max Mosley may be motivated not just by having a sex life exposed, but if you're the boss of Formula One, there might be some other things that you're quite keen not to have journalists looking into, given some of the dodgy dealings that have gone on over that. And his business partner, Bernie Aquastone, of course, most famously taken to court, convicted of fraud, but in a separate case was taken to court in Germany for bribery.

3:44Do you remember how he got out of that one? he tried to bribe the court he successfully paid 60 million into the court to make his trial for bribery go away so at some point you just have to respect it so can I just check Max Mosley is paying this money to Graham Johnson Graham Johnson is then paying it out to these hacks who've been making statements about how they did a lot of dreadful hacking been writing books about then completely coincidentally happened to make the same claims in witness statements but they weren't specifically paid for those and we know this because they took legal advice on the separation between witness statements and what they and and the work they were doing for graham johnson from hugh tomlinson casey chairman of the hacked off campaign so the royal who should be in court still isn't no and the one who we'd like to knock it off is still in court yeah i should say this case is going to go on for several more weeks we're going to hear all sorts of stuff from the daily mail themselves about what their stories from their end and all the various dodgy things that they're accused of and what may have been going on.

4:46So I will do my best to keep you updated both here and in the pages of Private Eye. Can I just say, Harry Harry, while shock's lost.