The publisher of the Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), has won a decisive High Court victory in a £50m privacy case brought by a group of high-profile claimants including Prince Harry, Doreen Lawrence, Elton John, David Furnish, Liz Hurley, Sadie Frost and former minister Simon Hughes. Mr Justice Nicklin, in a 436-page judgment, dismissed the most serious allegations — including bugging, phone hacking and corrupt payments to police — and found the claimants had failed to prove the Mail engaged in any unlawful activity at all. The ruling matters as an apparent end to a long-running reckoning over British journalism's phone-hacking era, and leaves the claimants facing a substantial legal bill.

The case unravelled over 11 weeks at the Royal Courts of Justice, with the claimants' allegations steadily narrowing. Central to the collapse was their key witness, apparent whistleblower Gavin Burrows, whose statement contained dramatic admissions but which he insisted before and during the trial was a forgery. The judge was unable to accept the statement as genuine, criticising both how it was compiled — through unminuted meetings and memos by Graham Johnson, a former phone hacker paid by press regulation campaigners — and Burrows's own evidence, which he called "argumentative, evasive" and "inconsistent". The solicitor who signed off the statement, Anjlee Sangani, was found to have shown a "serious error of professional judgment".