Piers Morgan Hits Back at Prince Harry After Royal Phone-Hacking Claims 

British broadcaster and former tabloid newspaper editor Piers Morgan has hit out at Prince Harry after his name was raised as part of the royal's phone-hacking lawsuit against publishers of the Daily Mirror.

Harry is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), publishers of the Daily Mirror and Sunday People titles, over alleged cases of unlawful information gathering used to inform stories. These include phone-hacking, bugging and blagging (acquiring information under a false pretense).

In a court filing seen by Newsweek on Wednesday, Harry's lawyers included testimony supplied by author and journalist Omid Scobie, who claimed while working for the Sunday People he was instructed how to hack phones and overheard conversations while at the Daily Mirror about stories based on illegally sourced material.

At the time Scobie was working at the Daily Mirror, Morgan was the tabloid's editor.

Scobie is best known for authoring the biography Finding Freedom, linked to Harry, and told the court he did not carry out the request to hack phones as he viewed the practice as immoral.

Morgan, a vocal critic of both Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, who has denied he ever hacked or ordered the hacking of phones, hit out at the prince following the revelations on Wednesday afternoon.

The broadcaster, who now fronts his own show on Rupert Murdoch owned TalkTV, took to Twitter to post a screen grab from the recent episode of adult animated comedy South Park which mercilessly spoofed Harry and Meghan.

Posted without a caption, the image showed the episode's characters based on the royal couple holding signs reading "stop looking at us," and "we want our privacy."

Morgan gave a more explicit reaction later in the day when he was questioned by a British news crew outside his London home.

"All I'm going to say is I'm not going to take lectures on privacy invasion from Prince Harry," he told the ITV network. "Somebody who has spent the last three years ruthlessly and cynically invading the royal family's privacy for vast commercial gain and told a pack of lies about them. So, I suggest he gets out of court and apologizes to his family for the disgraceful invasion of privacy that he's been perpetrating."

When asked if he would ever apologize to the prince, Morgan responded: "Apologize? I think Prince Harry should be apologizing for his disgraceful invasion of privacy of the royal family and others by the way."

Morgan's claims that Harry has invaded the privacy of his family come from the prince's publication of his tell-all memoir Spare in January and his six-part Netflix docuseries in December 2022.

Harry faced backlash for openly criticizing members of his family—most explicitly Prince William and Queen Camilla—and was asked about the potential hypocrisy of revealing information about their private lives and conversations while actively pursuing privacy legal cases.

Sitting down with British broadcaster Tom Bradby to promote his book, Harry was asked: "Some people will say you have railed against invasions of your privacy all your life. The accusation will be here are you invading the privacy of your most nearest and dearest without permission, that'll be the accusation, right?"

To this, Harry suggested it was a situation which left him feeling the need to put his side of the story out that he felt had so far been controlled narratively by leaks from his family members themselves.

"That'll be the accusation from the people that don't understand, or haven't, or don't want to believe that my family have been briefing the press solidly for well over a decade," he said. "So, I'm sorry that me owning my story and being able to tell my own story is upsetting to some people.

"But I have to rely on the truth, and I have done everything humanly possible in private for it not to get to this stage, but now I get to tell my story and as I said, Tom, none of this is intentionally to harm anyone in my family. But I certainly feel...that we never needed to be here."

MGN admitted partial wrongdoing and offered apologies in relation to some of the claims brought against it on Wednesday by Harry and a group of other defendants, however it denied the allegation of phone-hacking and vowed to defend itself in court.

A spokesperson for the group said, per the BBC: "Where historical wrongdoing has taken place we have made admissions, take full responsibility and apologize unreservedly, but we will vigorously defend against allegations of wrongdoing where our journalists acted lawfully.

"MGN is now part of a very different company. We are committed to acting with integrity and our objective in this trial is to allow both the business and our journalists to move forward from events that took place many years ago."

As part of the court trial, which is expected to last up to six weeks, Harry himself will take to the stand to give evidence.

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek's royal reporter based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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