Prince Harry’s Suit Against Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. Tabloids Set to Start

Prince Harry will get his long-awaited day in court against Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids on Monday, as his lawsuit against News Group Newspapers for unlawful gathering of private information finally goes on trial in London.

Harry himself is not expected to take the stand for at least the first two weeks of the trial, which will be devoted to “generic issues” relating to the practices of the papers from the 1990s to the early 2010s, when lawyers say their reporters routinely hacked the prince’s cellphone and those of other celebrities to dig up intimate details.

The hearings could nonetheless prove damaging to Mr. Murdoch and several of his former lieutenants. Lawyers for Harry, 40, the younger son of King Charles III, will set out to show that the News Group executives concealed and sought to destroy evidence of hacking and other improper practices.

Harry is one of only two plaintiffs left from an original group of about 40; the rest, including the actor Hugh Grant, have settled with News Group. The other plaintiff, who is also scheduled to take the stand, is Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, who alleges that News Group hacked his phone and targeted him for political reasons.

Harry has so far refused to settle, casting his suit as a last chance to hold the British press to account for one of its darkest periods. In addition to hacking phones, the tabloids hired private detectives and encouraged journalists to lie and misrepresent themselves to gain access to highly personal data.

“One of the main reasons for seeing this through is accountability, because I am the last person that can actually achieve that,” Harry said last month in an interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit.