By Editor-June 6th, 2023.
In 2003 Prince Harry took a gap year, between leaving Eton College and attending Sandhurst Military College working on an Australian cattle ranch. The Daily Mirror reported concerns that media attention at the ranch was so intense that it had left the prince sitting indoors at the ranch watching videos to avoid marauding TV camera crews outside.
However other newspapers also covered this story which was not exclusive to The Daily Mirror.
Prince Harry’s witness statement includes a claim that Mirror Group Newspapers paid a private investigator £550 to have him watched in Australia.
But again, the publisher’s lawyer Andrew Green suggests that stories about him were briefed by one of his aides, Mark Dyer, who had concerns about the press attention.
“You’d have to ask the journalist in question,” Prince Harry responds.
In another of the 33 stories being discussed in Prince Harry’s case against Mirror Group Newspapers, Harry says in his witness statement that a 2003 article about a private holiday on a beach published under the headline ‘Beach Bum Harry’ was filled with photographs of him.
“I remember this day so clearly,” he writes.
“It was a public beach, but not busy or popular so I’m unclear how anyone had known we were there, to be in the right place at the right time to take photographs. I wasn’t aware of anyone taking photographs at the time.
“I only learnt recently that the Queen had asked one of her assistant private secretaries to … take a house down the road from where I was staying, without me knowing.
“She was concerned about the extent of the (press) coverage of my trip and wanted someone I knew to be nearby, in case I needed support.”
But the Mirror group’s lawyer Andrew Green says that the London Evening Standard had not been the first to report where he was – and the photographer who took the photos at that beach had sold pictures to numerous other newspapers.
