By bizn_fun 
Sir Simon Hughes is being questioned about the following line in the 11 July 2019 email to him (read the full text in our previous post):
To deter the Mail from arguing “limitation” (ie you knew about this 6 years ago) Atkins Thomson think it best for stories to be written in Byline which can be referred as the basis for claims being raised.
He says: “I wouldn’t, as a matter of principle, countenance anything based on this kind of argument.”
Asked why, he says it would be “improper”.
Antony White KC, for Associated Newspapers Ltd, suggests the objective was to deter the Mail’s publisher from making an argument on limitation – that the claim was brought too late – by falsely pretending the 2020 Byline article had first made Sir Simon aware of the situation.
The former MP says it’s “not anything I would support” and he “certainly would not countenance” doing this.
White suggests he would only need such a deterrence if he had been aware of the relevant facts for some time, and reiterates that he only saw evidence in 2022.
“There was nothing in my mind then or subsequently that would lead me to think my claim would be subject to an argument it was time limited,” he says.
White says that when that suggestion was made, he would’ve been “very concerned”.
But Sir Simon says he hasn’t tried to find out who gave that advice at his solicitors’ firm Atkins Thomson.
He says it wasn’t something “I agreed with then or would’ve agreed with” so wasn’t an issue that needed to be investigated at that time.
The court is then shown another 11 July email from Graham Johnson about three draft articles, including one summarised:
Killer emails between Britain’s most prolific phone hacking operation and the Mail on Sunday evidence a criminal conspiracy.
Sir Simon says he didn’t look in detail at the articles, which didn’t appear for a year and the evidence to back it up didn’t come until 2022.