Daily Mail’s Stephen Wright ‘devastated’ by Doreen Lawrence hacking claims

FormerDaily Mailcrime editor Stephen Wright has said he was “devastated” by allegations that he deployed illegal newsgathering in the Stephen Lawrence case.

Wright played a key role in the Mail’s longstanding campaign to secure justice for Stephen after the Met Police bungled an investigation into his racist murder in 1993.

Stephen’s mother Baroness Doreen Lawrence has accused Mail journalists ofcynically pretending to befriend her family in order to sell newspapers. Her privacy claim accuses the paper of hacking and tapping her phone lines, illegally accessing her bank records and using deception to “blag” information out of her.A more serious allegation of commissioning burglary to order was dropped before the privacy trial commenced.

Baroness Lawrence decided to sue the Mail after being presented with evidence byPrince Harry’slegal research team largely based on testimony from private detectives. She is part of the ongoing privacy trial against Mail publisher Associated Newspapers alongside co-defendants Prince Harry, Sir Elton John, David Furnish, Liz Hurley and Sir Simon Hughes.

One of those detectives, Gavin Burrows,was paid tens of thousands by Prince Harry’s research team and has now recanted all the testimony he gave to Prince Harry’s legal team.

Mail publisher Associated Newspapers contends that all the claims of hacking and tapping against the Mail are based on “inference” and “guesswork”.

In his witness statement, Wright said: “Fighting and exposing racism, police incompetence and the cause of the underdog has been a theme of my long career.”

Wright joined Mail as a reporter in 1993, became crime editor in 2006, associate news editor in 2010, associate editor (investigations) in 2021 and took redundancy in September 2025.

Wright said he has used search agencies to locate people he needed to speak to and has arranged payments for tips and interviews.

But he said: “I have never paid a serving police officer or known any police officer to be paid by the Daily Mail. To do so would be wholly unacceptable.”

Source: Press Gazette