HOLY SMOKE! Harry’s Team KNEW Burrows Was a Bust. They Sued Anyway. It Could Cost MILLIONS.

A single document produced by Michael Gillard, over at his Substack The Upsetter, in the aftermath of Harry and friends’ catastrophic defeat by the Mail, changes everything.

Regular readers of The Royalist will know that I regard Michael Gillard as one of the finest investigative journalists working anywhere. A veteran of the Sunday Times Insight team and the Guardian’s investigations unit, and the author of three books on policing and organized crime, he has been running The Upsetter since 2021 as a one-man operation covering bent cops, dodgy geezers, sketchy royals and litigious luvvies—routinely outperforming entire newspaper investigation departments while doing so. He has been on the Mail hacking case since the very beginning, back when most of Fleet Street was still taking the claimants’ press releases at face value, and he has been proved right about it at almost every turn.

LAST OF THE FAUXHICANS

His latest piece (published today under the hilarious headline “Last of the Fauxhicans,” a reference to the near-mohican haircut sported by Harry’s solicitor, Callum Galbraith) contains what he rightly calls the most sensational revelation to emerge from last week’s two-day costs hearing: “an admission tucked away in correspondence between the claimants and the judge,” which Gillard, a man who knows his way around the court system and the open justice principles better than most silks, got disclosed. And, at The Royalist’s urging, he has now published the full letter on his Substack for us all to see.

In it, the claimants’ solicitors admit that Harry and his merry band of litigants knew full well that Gavin Burrows, the private investigator on whose “lurid” evidence vast swathes of the case rested (that being the Mail’s word for it, deployed back in 2023 as it denied everything from the outset), had pulled his cooperation before they ever launched proceedings.

Read in better quality on The Upsetter!

The letter, sent to Mr Justice Nicklin on January 26 this year as the trial was getting underway, states that the claimants were first aware Burrows “had probably withdrawn cooperation (and thereby indicated he was unwilling to attend trial on their behalf)” in March 2022. That was the month in which Burrows turned up at the south London home of Graham Johnson (the convicted phone hacker turned lead researcher for the claim) and, according to the letter, “assaulted and threatened Mr Johnson, in front of his family, at the latter’s home, and published a series of tweets and became uncommunicative.” Burrows himself described the incident in court, giving evidence by video link from a lawyer’s office somewhere in Asia—he was, he said, too scared to attend in person—flanked by a solicitor who looked like a debt collector, wearing shorts, swinging on his chair, and mocking the claimants’ lead barrister, David Sherborne, with the memorable jibe: “You ain’t got nothing!”

Four days after the Karate Kid-flavored punch-up with Johnson, on March 22, 2022, the lawyers launched their claim anyway.

The first the wider world knew of Burrows disavowing his evidence was 2025, when a written submission from him disowning his original statement surfaced. What we now know is that the claimants themselves clocked his withdrawal THREE YEARS earlier. And by the solicitors’ own account, they had “conclusive evidence of his withdrawal of co-operation” by March 2023, when the Mail’s side served a witness statement from Burrows denying the matters set out in the claim. That is to say, conclusive proof their star witness had gone, fully two years before trial. And still they pressed on.

When Galbraith and Anjlee Sangani (solicitor for Baroness Lawrence) formally issued the super claim in October 2022, they simultaneously announced to the world that their clients had become aware of “compelling and highly distressing evidence” of “abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy” by the Mail’s publisher. That evidence was, overwhelmingly, Burrows. Six of the seven claimants relied on him (though not, funnily enough, Harry himself). It was Burrows who supplied the far-fetched material about bugged cafés, listening devices on windowsills and shadowy police work that persuaded Baroness Lawrence and Liz Hurley, among others, that they had been victims of a sprawling criminal conspiracy. The press statement made no mention that the man behind it all had gone rogue, was suing Johnson, and was calling him a “conman.”

Four wasted years followed. March 2022 to now: a colossal, £35 million bonfire of legal papers and everybody’s time, money and reputations, pursued in the knowledge that the central pillar of the case had already crumbled. And at the end of it, the extraordinary coda of Harry reacting to the judgment by suggesting the result was a whitewash, that the process itself was somehow fraudulent. It is an argument that becomes considerably harder to sustain when your own solicitors have admitted, in writing, to the judge, that you knew your star witness was gone before you started.

A spokesperson for Harry did not respond to The Royalist’s request for comment, including on the question of whether he intends to appeal.

Which brings us to the money, and here Gillard’s reporting is just as remarkable. He reveals that the claimants applied for their After The Event insurance (£250,000 of cover each, from Temple Legal Protection) on March 21, 2022—three days after the Burrows-Johnson fracas. The letters before action went out the following day. The obvious question, as The Upsetter puts it with restrained understatement: “It is hard to see how the full facts were not pertinent to the underwriting decision.” Can one really imagine Temple’s underwriters signing off on the claim had they been told that the principal witness had just assaulted the lead researcher and stopped returning calls?

The cover was later increased by £1 million per claimant. But with the Mail now claiming £34.8 million in costs, the policy is more than £16 million short even if it pays out in full. And if Temple’s lawyers conclude that material facts were withheld at the point of underwriting, the policy may not pay out at all. If Temple behaves like any other insurance company on earth, extensive inquiries into voiding it will already be underway. In which case the claimants (and, one suspects, their advisers) are in serious, serious trouble.

To make things odder still, Gillard notes that Temple’s “independent counsel” monitoring the merits of the case, Godwin Busuttil, sits in the same chambers as Sherborne (“chambers,” for the uninitiated, being shared offices from which self-employed barristers practice.) Sherborne, remember, is the man whose conduct of the trial the Mail’s counsel described last week as “improper and cavalier,” and who was accused of persisting “in allegations based on the obviously discredited evidence of Mr Burrows to the bitter end.”

Everything now hangs on Mr Justice Nicklin, who will rule in the week beginning August 17 on whether the claimants brought and fought this case in a responsible, reasonable and (frankly) legitimate way, and therefore whether the Mail gets the full indemnity payment of £35 million. The Mail wants an interim payment of £9.95 million by the end of the month. The judge has told the claimants to get their checkbooks ready.

I will be getting into all of this in much more depth with Marcus Johnstone of PCD Solicitors in a video we are recording today, which Ben will produce as a pre-record to go out later in the week. The podcast, meanwhile, goes out this evening at 5 p.m. Eastern, 10 p.m. UK, with special guest Valentine Low discussing Sir Clive Alderton’s departure.

And many thanks for all the birthday wishes yesterday. The free comps are due to end at midnight today so subscribe now and lock in at the current price until one of us dies!