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 Britain’s chancellor and prime minister. Singer Charlotte Church recounted the awful day her mother’s suicide attempt was splashed across the newspapers.
Footballer 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 Sir Keir Starmer has today 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 blu.
