Royal family hacking: Prince William privately settled hacking claim, court told

A "secret agreement" was allegedly reached between the institution of the royal family and the publisher of The Sun to prevent William and Harry from bringing phone hacking claims, the High Court has been told.

The Duke of Sussex is suing News Group Newspapers (NGN), publisher of The Sun and the now-defunct News Of The World, over alleged unlawful information gathering at its titles.

On Tuesday, NGN made a bid for a judge to throw out the case, as well as a similar claim brought against the publisher by actor Hugh Grant.

Harry's lawyers said the bid was an attempt to go behind a "secret agreement" between the royal family as an institution and NGN – or its parent companies News UK and News Corp – which the duke was informed of in 2012.

The Prince of Wales (centre) attends the dawn service in commemoration for Anzac Day at the Australia Memorial at Hyde Park Corner in London. Picture: Yui Mok/PA Wire

The High Court in London heard this alleged agreement prevented the duke and the Prince of Wales from bringing phone hacking claims against the publisher at the time.

However, NGN has denied Harry's claim there was an agreement.

In his witness statement, the duke alleged it was agreed royals would bring claims at the end of a series of cases about phone hacking and their cases would be resolved without trials.

Harry said: "My brother and I were also told by either the institution's solicitor, or someone else from the institution, that there was no possibility of either of us bringing a claim against NGN for phone hacking at that time.

"The rationale behind this was that a secret agreement had been reached between the institution and senior executives at NGN whereby members of the royal family would bring phone hacking claims only at the conclusion of the mobile telephone voicemail interception litigation and at that stage the claims would be admitted or settled with an apology."

Harry claimed the agreement was to avoid having a member of the royal family going into a witness box and describing the "private and highly sensitive voicemails" that had been intercepted.

He continued: "The institution was incredibly nervous about this and wanted to avoid at all costs the sort of reputational damage that it had suffered in 1993 when The Sun and another tabloid had unlawfully obtained and published details of an intimate telephone conversation that took place between my father and step-mother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother."

Harry later said the alleged agreement "including the promises from NGN for delayed resolution was, obviously, a major factor as to why no claim was brought by me at that time".

The duke also said: "To say that I was frustrated and disappointed would be something of an understatement."

His barrister, David Sherborne, said in written submissions that "discussions and authorisation" from the royal family over the agreement included the late Queen and two of her private secretaries, as well as private secretaries for both William and Harry.

However, Anthony Hudson KC, for NGN, said the duke's allegation there was a secret agreement is "flatly inconsistent" with other parts of his case.

He said in written submissions: "The allegation that the Duke of Sussex was told of such an agreement in around 2012 flies in the face of a contention that, by the same date, he lacked knowledge of facts sufficient to identify a worthwhile claim or to justify embarking on the preliminaries to a claim."

Mr Hudson said Harry has a "belated reliance on the asserted, unpleaded secret agreement between the institution and NGN".