A key whistleblower supporting a legal claim headed by Prince Harry and Doreen Lawrence against the publisher of the Daily Mail appears to have dealt a last-minute blow to the case against the media group.
Just weeks before a high court trial, Jonathan Rees, a private investigator who has supported claims of unlawful news gathering at Associated Newspapers, has contradicted a central allegation in the claimants’ case.
Speaking to C4’s Dispatches, Rees denied admitting to Lawrence that he was involved in bugging her after the racially motivated murder of her 18-year-old son, Stephen, in 1993.
Lawrence had claimed in a witness statement drafted before trial that private investigators had admitted tapping her landlines, hacking her voicemails and bugging a cafe where she used to hold meetings.
Her statement goes on to say that Rees, who has been previously convicted of perverting of the course of justice, confirmed to her that he had done work for the Daily Mail aimed at secretly stealing information about her.
Speaking to C4’s Cathy Newman, Rees said that this was not the case. “I’d been offered by other agents to assist in this surveillance,” he said. “But I didn’t get involved.”
Challenged by Newman that Lawrence’s witness statement was “based on your confirmation that you had done the bugging operation for the Mail”, Rees responds: “Right, well they’re going to have to rethink that, and their legal team is going to have to re-think that.”
Asked if his comments “blow a hole” in the case against Associated Newspapers, Rees responds: “Not really because it was done. All I can say to support that woman is yes I did hear about it, yes I was invited to be a part of the team, yes I saw, I did see, factual transcripts, I know it was going on, I know that the surveillance teams were being used against her and her family. But I can’t provide any documentary evidence for that.”
Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) is accused by seven claimants, including Sir Elton John and his husband, David Furnish; Elizabeth Hurley; Sadie Frost and Sir Simon Hughes, of carrying out or commissioning unlawful activities such as hiring private investigators to place listening devices inside cars, “blagging” private records and accessing private phone conversations.
ANL denies the allegations and is defending the legal action. ANL has said that allegations of unlawful information gathering in relation to Lawrence are “appalling and utterly groundless smears”.
Last month, a second private investigator central to the legal action by the Duke of Sussex and others against the publisher of the Daily Mail claimed that his signature on an earlier witness statement was a “forgery”.
Gavin Burrows, linked to the most serious allegations of unlawful information, retracted his alleged confession, saying it was “completely false”.
Burrows had allegedly claimed in a 2021 witness statement that he and his team obtained information by hacking voicemails, tapping landline phones and bugging cars. He also allegedly said he had worked on behalf of the Mail on Sunday.
Five of the claimants have told the high court they embarked on the legal action against ANL based on evidence apparently obtained by Burrows.
Burrows previously retracted his alleged statement in 2023. In a fresh, 30-page witness statement made on 25 September 2025, and released by the high court last month, he restated his denial, saying he had never carried out any illegal activity on behalf of ANL.
The Dispatches programme, broadcast on Thursday, also provided new details as to the funding of those helping Harry and Lawrence build a legal case against Associated Newspapers.
According to the programme, the father of James Stunt, long a target of Daily Mail investigations, provided money to Graham Johnson, a former News of the World journalist, who has been assisting as a researcher. James Stunt is the former of husband of Petra Ecclestone.
Geoff Stunt told Dispatches that any claim that he “funded research into illegal activities at the Daily Mail as some kind of ‘revenge’ … is false and misconceived”.
He told the programme that he had “funded research into whether he and his family members had been subject to ANL’s unlawful information gathering activities” but that he “has never funded research into illegal activities at the Daily Mail for the purposes of the present claims”.
The actor Hugh Grant also told the programme that he funded Johnson’s research into rumours the paper had offered money to the Soham murderer Ian Huntley.
He said: “In 2015 Graham Johnson asked me to help fund research into … reports that Daily Mail journalists had offered payments to Ian Huntley, subsequently convicted of the murder of two young girls at Soham.
“If the research had established the truth of these reports it would have been a matter for the police, not the civil courts … I have never used the services of Graham Johnson, whether directly or indirectly, for evidence gathering for litigation of any kind.”
