<\/p>\n
Michael Gillard, a veteran journalist who closely followed the trial, claimed in his blog that the claimants had been desperately trying to avoid the costly trial last December.<\/p>\n
They turned to James Hanning, a former journalist and deputy editor of The Independent on Sunday, in the hope to open settlement talks.<\/p>\n
Mr Hanning confirmed that he had been instructed, with the knowledge of the claimants and their legal team, to contact Stephen Wright, a former associate editor of the Daily Mail. He did so via a former senior detective known to them both.<\/p>\n
\u201cI acted as a backchannel,\u201d Mr Hanning told Gillard, explaining that it had been felt that a \u201csideways\u201d approach to a settlement could prove successful.<\/p>\n
The offer was a suggestion to \u201ctalk sensibly\u201d, he said, adding: \u201cAny specific headings that were mentioned would have been \u2018for discussion\u2019. There was no suggestion of there being a \u2018take it or leave it\u2019 offer from the claimants.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was not in a position to judge how good\/bad the offer to talk was likely to be, but I do believe it was put forward as a sincere way of reaching an agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Discussions were said to have become \u201cparticularly heated\u201d on Christmas Eve, but Associated, with its reputation on the line, refused to back down.<\/p>\n
A second informal attempt to settle also failed, which was said to have been made using a former News of The World journalist who had worked alongside Graham Johnson, a convicted phone hacker and member of the claimants\u2019 legal research team.<\/p>\n
Having lost the case, the seven claimants are jointly liable for any costs issued against them. They had been warned about the potential financial \u201cconsequences\u201d as the legal costs mounted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Michael Gillard, a veteran journalist who closely followed the trial, claimed in his blog that the claimants had been desperately trying to avoid the costly trial last December. They turned to James Hanning, a former journalist and deputy editor of The Independent on Sunday, in the hope to open settlement talks. Mr Hanning confirmed that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2493978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[391606,349239,21738,22730,22769,344742,24515,356051,382398],"class_list":["post-2493977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-court-cases","tag-daily-mail","tag-news","tag-prince-harry","tag-royal-family","tag-standard","tag-the-royal-family","tag-uk-news","tag-us-content"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Prince-Harry-tried-to-settle-with-Mail-before-court-case.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2493977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2493979,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493977\/revisions\/2493979"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2493978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2493977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2493977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2493977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}