Judge warns he will not permit case ‘to descend into a wide-ranging public inquiry’
The former editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, is to be called as a witness in the legal action brought by the Duke of Sussex and six other household names against the newspaper’s publishers over allegations of unlawful information gathering, the high court was told.
Antony White KC, for Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), said Dacre, 77, now the editor-in-chief of ANL’s DMG Media company, and Peter Wright, a former editor of the Mail on Sunday, could be called as early witnesses in the trial, scheduled to begin on 19 January.
It was “incredibly important for various reasons that Mr Dacre and Mr Wright are able to go out over the top first” to deal with “critically important” allegations “before they send their troops out”, White told the judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, at a pre-trial hearing.
David Sherborne, for the claimants, indicated that ANL wanted to call Dacre first in relation to “evidence he gave to the inquiry”, referring to the 2011-12 Leveson inquiry into press standards.
