Prince Harry won’t bring Meghan back to Britain because he fears she could become the victim of a knife or acid attack. This attention-grabbing revelation came towards the end of Tabloids on Trial (ITV), a documentary about phone hacking.
You will see that it doesn’t really have anything to do with phone hacking, and therein lay the flaw with this programme: just like the tabloids, its main focus was Harry, and the desire was to get as many news lines from him as possible.
We heard more from him, for example, than from Paul Dadge, whose only ‘crime’ was to be pictured helping tend the injured during the 2005 London terror attacks, and who was hacked as a result. Or Gordon Brown, who believes his records were illegally accessed while Chancellor and Prime Minister. Charlotte Church recounted the awful day that her mother’s suicide attempt was splashed across the newspapers. Paul Gascoigne wept, remembering that he accused his parents of selling stories about him to the press. All had powerful stories to tell.
Tabloids on Trial followed a similar documentary put out last year by the BBC. It was timed to put pressure on the new government to launch a second stage of the Leveson Inquiry – but this morning, Sir Keir Starmer ruled that out, saying it wasn’t a priority.
The list of contributors was impressive, and all were justified in their anger. The behaviour of these newspapers was appalling and outrageous. At times, though, the programme blurred the lines between media interest and illegal activity.
Hugh Grant claimed that his flat was burgled in a search for personal information; nothing was stolen, he said, and a description of the interior and contents of his flat appeared in newspapers a couple of days later (News Group Newspapers denied any involvement).
He also complained that “wherever I went, whatever I did, there could well be a photographer or a journalist waiting” – but if I’m not mistaken, footage of him being besieged by the press followed his arrest for engaging the services of a hooker on Sunset Boulevard, and he’s only got himself to blame for that.
Back to Harry, who came across as worryingly paranoid even if the tabloids really are out to get him. I have always felt sympathy for him – his life still dominated by the crushing loss of his mother – but his claim that the tabloids destroyed his relationship with his family sounded a tad delusional, given everything else that has happened.
At the end, interviewer Rebecca Barry shoehorned in a question about the King and the Princess of Wales having cancer.
“My father and sister-in-law, and me following through on this legal battle, are two completely different things,” said Harry, spotting that, like every journalist, she was fishing for a headline.