Hugh Grant has called for the U.K. police to open a new criminal investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers.
The actor joins a growing chorus of people who, in the wake of Prince Harry’s historical settlement with the company — which included admissions of guilt into phone hacking at The Sun newspaper — are now calling for renewed police action.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Grant — who himself settled with NGN in 2024 — said the job was not done “by any means” after the Prince Harry case, adding that NGN had “gamed” the civil courts to silence complainants and that a criminal investigation was needed.
“That’s what they’ve done consistently over the last 10 years,” he said. “They’ve spent £1 billion to make sure these things are never looked at in court… and you don’t get proper judicial findings. I think what they’re terrified of is that those findings would trigger a new criminal inquiry.”
Grant had accused The Sun newspaper of using private investigators to tap his phone and burgle his house, but said he settled because he could have faced a multi-million dollar bill even if he had won. NGN had denied the allegations, saying the settlement was reached “without admission of liability.”
For Grant, a new investigation was necessary because people working at The Sun at the time were “still in positions great power.”
“A lot of the foot soldiers for those newspapers have now come over to our side… to say this is awful,” he said. “We’ve been punished, we’ve been to prison, we’ve paid fines, we’ve lost our jobs. But the people who commanded all this, they’re still there.”
Tom Watson, the former politician who also settled with NGN, said his legal team would be passing a dossier to the U.K. Metropolitan Police, but the force told the BBC there were no active investigations.
“We await any correspondence from the parties involved, which we will respond to in due course,” a spokesperson told the BBC.
Earlier this week, Prince Harry and NGN reached a settlement believed to be worth more than $10 million. The company also issued an apology that, for the first time, admitted to criminal activity at The Sun. However, in a follow up statement, it said that this had been carried out by “private investigators, not journalists” working at the newspaper.
In quotes sent to Variety from NGN, Met Police commissioner Mark Rowley told LBC radio on Friday that “much of the material” in Prince Harry’s civil litigation came from investigations made over a decade ago into phone hacking and unlawful surveillance at Murdoch’s newspapers.
“There were many prosecutions, those investigations were closed, if they send us a bunch of material, we’ll reflect on that and make our judgments,” he said.
Grant’s intervention sparked a minor war of words on Friday between the actor and Piers Morgan, who himself became embroiled in the phone hacking scandal connected to his time as editor of “The Mirror.”
Following his comments on Radio 4, Morgan wrote on X that Grant had “taken many millions of pounds from Rupert Murdoch to make movies for him.” The accusation was immediately refuted by Grant, who wrote that he last worked for a Murdoch-owned company in 1994, “which was long before I knew anything about his papers’ methods” and since then had “turned down every single job offer emanating from a Murdoch owned company.” Morgan replied by saying “Florence Foster Jenkins,” in which Grant starred, was distributed by Fox — then owned by Murdoch — in the U.K. Morgan also posted a picture of Grant’s infamous mug shot from his 1995 arrest in LA.
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