Daily Mail Royal Editor Denies Using Private Investigator to “Blag” Prince Harry Information

At the High Court this week, the machinery of Britain’s tabloid–royal ecosystem was placed under uncomfortable light.

Rebecca English, royal editor of the Daily Mail, denied ever using a private investigator to unlawfully obtain information about the Duke of Sussex or his former girlfriends. Shown a series of emails during Prince Harry’s case against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), English insisted she had neither requested nor acted upon improperly sourced material.

The allegation centres on Mike Behr, a South Africa–based private investigator. English told the court she understood him to be “a freelance journalist who could help on Africa stories.” Yet emails presented by David Sherborne, lead counsel for the claimants, painted a more complicated picture.

One 2007 email sent to English — and copied to a journalist at the Sun — contained precise flight and seat details for Chelsy Davy, then in a relationship with Prince Harry. Behr asked whether the reporters could “plant someone next to her.”

The Guardian reports that Sherborne argued that someone accessed the airline’s computer system to obtain the information, securing it through “blagging” — the unlawful extraction of confidential data.

English said she did not remember the email and did not request the information. “[Behr] was never asked for anything like this, ever,” she told the court. “That is something I would never even consider doing, now or then.”

When asked about the suggestion of placing someone beside Davy on a flight, English described it as “an absolutely shameful suggestion,” emphasising that there was no reply from her, which, she argued, demonstrated she had not seen or acted on the message.

The court examined further emails from 2006 and 2014. In one, Behr discussed billing arrangements and wrote that he had “billed Rebecca £200 for half the cost.” In another, he argued that a £350 payment for “Harry work” did not reflect the risk involved, adding that extra payment was warranted “not for time spent but for going out on a limb.”

Sherborne suggested this referred to bribes or unlawful data access. English rejected that interpretation, saying payments were day rates and that the later exchange related to monitoring a charity trek in Antarctica. She repeatedly described allegations that she commissioned blagged information as “absolutely untrue.”

ANL denies all wrongdoing and maintains its journalism was legitimate.

Beyond One Editor

This case reaches far beyond one reporter’s inbox. Prince Harry is one of seven claimants alleging that journalists at Associated Newspapers Ltd benefited from unlawful information gathering over decades. The publisher denies the allegations in full. The court will decide the facts.

Yet the evidence aired this week does something else. It exposes the extraordinary closeness between royal reporting and private life: flight manifests, seat numbers, hotel arrangements, holidays, relationships. The granular detail itself is telling. However it was obtained, it reflects a culture in which intensely detailed reporting on a young prince became routine.

That culture did not emerge in isolation. Rebecca English has long positioned herself as both insider and observer of the Duke’s life. In a 2020 feature, she described accompanying him around the world for 15 years and offered intimate reflections on his character. Two years later, during the fraught days following Queen Elizabeth II’s death, she posted, and later deleted, a tweet suggesting Harry and Meghan had not greeted mourners during a Windsor walkabout. Video footage circulated widely showing them engaging with members of the public. The episode intensified perceptions that her coverage had shifted from access to adversarial framing.

In 2022 she also publicly rejected claims that negative stories about the Duchess of Sussex had been “fed” by palace sources, and insisted she had not written critically in the immediate months after the royal wedding. She criticised Harry’s approach to the press, arguing that his hostility had made reporters’ work unnecessarily difficult.

All of that history now forms the backdrop to her High Court testimony. The exchanges revive a question that has hovered over the royal rota for years: where does access end and intrusion begin? Royal correspondents operate in close orbit to palaces, press secretaries and background briefings. But British tabloid history, from phone hacking to data blagging, shows how quickly competitive pressure can push journalism into darker territory.

When confronted with suggestions that payments reflected risk taken “on a limb,” English was unequivocal: “I do not accept that.”

The High Court will determine what it does accept. Its judgment, expected later this year, may resonate far beyond one editor. It may speak to the system that shaped modern royal coverage — and to whether that system has finally reached its reckoning.