Piers Morgan responds to Prince Harry hacking trial as duke claims he ‘encouraged’ Diana phone tapping

Piers Morgan has commented on Prince Harry’s phone hacking preliminary hearing after the royal claimed Morgan “knew about and encouraged” the illegal hacking of Princess Diana.

The Duke of Sussex is currently suing Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) over alleged unlawful information gathering at its titles. You can follow The Independent’s live blog here.

In proposed amendments to his phone hacking claim against Murdoch’s company obtained by The Guardian on Wednesday (26 April), Harry alleges that Morgan “knew about, encouraged and concealed” when he was editor of the News of the World.

When Harry’s application was argued in the High Court on Tuesday (25 April), the judge overseeing the case called Harry’s new testimony “troubling”, questioning “factual inaccuracies” in the case.

Resharing a story about the judge’s comments on Thursday (27 April) morning, Morgan tweeted: “Oh dear, are Prince Privacy’s recollections varying again?

“When is this permanently angry, narcissistic little twerp going to stop whining, stop suing, stop trashing his family, stop damaging the Monarchy, and just shut up?”

The Independent has contacted Harry’s representatives for comment.

The duke claims that stories in the paper and The Sun stemmed from illegally obtained private text messages and phone calls, listing a number of articles from January 1994 to August 1995 he says were based on them.

Harry says that journalists also obtained messages from Diana’s secret personal pager.

In the legal documents, Harry alleges that Morgan and other editors knew about this illegal targeting of his mother, as well as King Charles and the Queen Consort.

Murdoch’s NGN wants the cases brought by Harry and actor Hugh Grant struck out, saying they should have been raised earlier.

Morgan has a long-standing history with the Prince, having briefly been friends with his wife Meghan Markle and later leaving Good Morning Britain following comments he made about her on air.

However, he has always denied being aware of phone hacking when he was editor of the News of the World or the Daily Mirror.

Elsewhere in the documents, Harry says that he’d felt like the tabloid press was a “third party” in all of his relationships.

“At no point did I have a girlfriend or a relationship with anyone without the tabloids getting involved and ultimately ruining it, or trying to ruin it, using whatever unlawful means at their disposal,” he claims.

However, the High Court has heard that Harry was largedly “kept out of the loop” regarding phone hacking at the time.

On Wednesday, his lawyer said that before 2012, the duke believed there was only one voicemail which his brother left for him that had been intercepted.