Earl Spencer defends Prince Harry’s bitter battle with the tabloids

Earl Spencer, the Duke of Sussex’s uncle, has become the first member of his family to publicly voice support for his nephew’s legal battle against the tabloid press.

The Earl, 58, suggested that the Duke had a strong case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) because the publisher had previously admitted to phone-hacking.

He railed against a tweet by Amanda Platell, the Daily Mail columnist, who asked: “Is Harry still obsessed with former love Chelsy Davy?

“Harry mentions her 118 times in court evidence, Meghan just five times. No wonder Meg’s didn’t show up!”

The Earl, brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, responded in a tweet.

The Duke is suing MGN over 148 articles he alleges came from illegal activity, including phone-hacking.

His claim is restricted to the 15-year period between 1996 and 2011.

The Duke dated Ms Davy from 2004 until 2009 and met Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, in 2016.

The Earl, who at the late Princess’s funeral in 1997 promised to look after both Prince William and Prince Harry, was applauded by hundreds of Twitter users for his stance.

Asked by one: “Can you point me in the direction of the ‘significant evidence’ of phone hacking please?”

He replied:

Earlier this week, the Earl also retweeted several messages from Alastair Campbell, Sir Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, who has given evidence in the Duke’s High Court case, describing how he and his partner were targeted by private investigators working for the publisher.

He accused the newspaper’s former editor Piers Morgan of “two-faced conduct”.

In a series of tweets published in response to the Duke’s first day in the witness stand on Tuesday, Mr Campbell said the royal had made a “very good point” regarding the erosion of trust “in your own circle” that certain stories provoked.

He added: “Harry may not be able to prove that all of the stories referred to in court came from illegal activity. But that illegal activity was being conducted on a near industrial scale by several papers is beyond doubt. That is why I willingly gave evidence.”

The Duke has also received the support of Caroline Flack’s mother Christine, who said he is “very brave” and is “doing it for everybody.”

Appearing on Jeremy Vine’s Channel 5 chat show on Thursday, Mrs Flack said: “Carrie was the same in her life, whenever a story appeared in the paper it causes distrust among your friends and your family, she’d say: ‘Mum, have you said anything?’

“I think Harry is doing it for everybody ... and I think he’s very brave because he is getting such an awful lot of stick as well.”

The Duke is barely speaking to most senior members of the Royal family but has remained close to the Spencers, including the Earl, and his two aunts, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale.

In the epilogue of his memoir Spare, he described the moment he took Meghan to his mother’s grave at her childhood home, Althorp, Northamptonshire, to mark the 25th anniversary of her death last summer.

He said they rowed across a lake to a private island on the estate which marks his mother’s burial place.

“Uncle Charles came down to the water’s edge, gave us a little shove,” he said.

“We waved to him, and to my two aunts. Bye. See you in a bit. Gliding across the pond, I gazed around at Althorp’s rolling fields and ancient trees, the thousands of green acres where my mother grew up, and where, though things weren’t perfect, she’d known some peace.”

In June 2018, the Daily Mail apologised to the Earl and agreed to pay damages and legal costs over a claim he had acted in a callous and unbrotherly way towards his late sister following the breakdown of her marriage to the then Prince Charles in 1992.

Ms Platell’s column, published in January 2017, suggested that he had refused to give the Princess accommodation on his Althorp estate, which the newspaper later accepted was defamatory and untrue.