Hugh Grant: 'Someone has had the courage to question [the Mail's] honesty'
Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PAActor Hugh Grant has accused Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday publisher Associated Newspapers of "trashing" anyone who attempts to question the newspaper group's practices.
Grant told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he stood by his remarks, made to the Leveson inquiry, that he believed his phone might have been hacked by the Mail on Sunday in 2007.
The actor has been in a high-profile spat with publisher Associated Newspapers, after it accused him of "mendacious smears" aimed at tarnishing the group's reputation.
Grant said: "I can see why they're cross because for once, someone has had the courage to question their probity and their honesty and, generally speaking, if anyone does that with a paper like the Daily Mail, however much they may go on about freedom of speech, no one is allowed the freedom of speech to question the Daily Mail.
"If you do, you will be trashed and that's what's happened again and again and again to me and to anyone else who has dared to question the Daily Mail."
Associated Newspapers editor-in-chief Paul Dacre told the Leveson inquiry last week that Grant's comments about phone hacking were "explosive and toxic". He said he would withdraw the "mendacious smears" remark "if Mr Grant withdraws his repeated statements about the Daily Mail."
Asked if he would withdraw his phone hacking comments, Grant told the Today programme: "Absolutely not."
He added: "This is the newspaper that many times, in my personal experience, has apologised to me for making things up. It was not the purpose of that little spat, at the Leveson inquiry, to establish the truth of whether they were phone hackers or not.
"It was the purpose to establish, as Lord Justice Leveson said, whether it was fair of me to have inferred that possibly they might [have hacked a phone] and therefore unfair of the Daily Mail to effectively have accused me of perjury."
Grant told the opening day of the Leveson inquiry, in November, that he believed a 2007 Mail on Sunday story about his relationship with Jemima Khan, which referred to phone messages left by a "plummy-voiced" woman, might have been obtained by hacking.
He told the Today programme that he accepted the evidence was "circumstantial", adding: "It's my inference."
The paper has repeatedly denied the allegation, saying the story came via a friend of Khan.
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