Hugh Grant Settles Phone-Hacking Claim Against Mirror Group Newspapers

Paddington 2 star Hugh Grant has settled his long-gestating claim of phone-hacking against Mirror Group Newspapers and has understood to have been awarded a six-figure sum.

British actor Grant, known for his roles in rom-coms such as Love Actually and Notting Hill, is set to donate the settlement win to the Hacked Off pressure group, of which he is a high-profile member. The closure of the case comes after Grant won a similar settlement against the now-closed News of the World newspaper in 2012.

His lawyer Anjlee Saigol, of the firm Taylor Hampton Solicitors, told the judge that the case was brought after Grant alleged his voicemails were hacked by the company’s newspapers, which include daily tabloid The Daily Mirror.

“Mr Grant brought this action in relation to alleged illegal misuses of his private information, obtained by hacking into his voicemails, as well as blagging and surveillance, committed by MGN’s journalists at all three of its newspapers over, as MGN now accepts, many years.”

She added: “Although Mr Grant now has some clarity as to the extent of MGN’s unlawful activities in relation to him, one of his principal reasons for pursuing this case was to uncover and establish the wider truth about MGN’s investigations into and knowledge of its unlawful activities before it finally admitted these practices in September 2014.”

At a BAFTA Life In Pictures event in December, said of the campaign: “It’s equal measures terrifying and refreshing. It’s nice to be in a world where no one is being nice to you because you’re a star or ex-star or an actor. It’s a cruel jungle, politics.” The enemy in this campaign, “is quite frightening. If you’re up against [Daily Mail editor] Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch, they’re not that cuddly as enemies.”

Grant, who recently starred opposite Meryl Streep in Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins, has just completed work on Frears’ next TV project, BBC One miniseries A Very English Scandal, about the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, alongside Ben Whishaw.