Prince Harry has been ordered to explain to a High Court judge how private messages to the ghostwriter 

of his memoir were “destroyed” amid their potential relevance to his legal action against the publisher of The Sun.

In a ruling on Thursday, Mr Justice Fancourt said the apparent deletion of the Duke of Sussex ’s exchanges with John Moehringer on the Signal messaging platform, 

as well as drafts of Spare, before the book’s publication was “not transparently clear”. 

The judge ordered Harry’s lawyers to also carry out further searches of his laptop and examinations of his texts 

and Whatsapp and Signal messages from 2005 to January last year, for evidence potentially relevant to the litigation over allegations of unlawful information gathering.

He also ordered the Duke to make an interim payment of £60,000 in legal costs to NGN after ruling largely in favour of the publisher’s bid for a wider search for evidence at a one-day hearing in London. Harry, 39, alleges he was targeted by journalists and private investigators working for NGN, which also published the now-defunct News Of The World. He is among a number of people to bring cases against the publisher, with a full trial of some cases due to be held in January.

The publisher has previously denied unlawful activity took place at The Sun. Mr Justice Fancourt said there was evidence “a large number of potentially relevant documents” and “confidential messages” between Harry and his ghostwriter “were destroyed some time between 2021 and 2023, well after this claim was under way”. “The position is not transparently clear about what exactly happened and needs to be made so by a witness statement from the claimant himself explaining what happened,” he said, adding that this should cover what attempts have been made to retrieve the Signal messages.

Harry’s barrister, David Sherborne, said in written arguments that the duke had not discussed unlawful information gathering via text or WhatsApp with anyone and that his Signal messages with the ghostwriter had been “wiped”. Mr Justice Fancourt said this was “apparently contradicted” by Mr Moehringer who previously said he and the duke were “texting around the clock”.

NGN’s disclosure bid is focused on uncovering any evidence that could relate to whether Harry knew he had a potential case against the publisher earlier than the legal time limit of six years before he filed his claim in September 2019. NGN’s barrister Anthony Hudson KC claimed Harry had to be dragged “kicking and screaming” into allowing his personal emails to be examined for potential evidence.

The court heard some 11,570 emails from the duke’s now-closed hasjpkp.com email account were being reviewed for potential disclosure by his lawyers over the course of 150 hours and at a cost of £50,000. Mr Hudson accused Harry of “obfuscation” and creating an “obstacle course” in the face of NGN’s efforts to source more material.

He said accusations Harry was putting up obstacles was the “height of hypocrisy”, telling the court that NGN had previously deleted “millions of emails” as a way of “hiding incriminating evidence”. In written arguments, Mr Sherborne said Harry had “gone above and beyond his obligations” and had already searched his Californian home for material.

He said Harry no longer had laptops, mobile phones or data backups from before September 2013.

The duke’s Hotmail email address used before 2014 had been deactivated, he said, while there were “no relevant social media accounts that fail to be searched”. Royal aides had also been contacted and “have confirmed they do not hold relevant documents”, Mr Sherborne added.

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Source: Los Angeles Times