As the Duke of Sussex claimed victory in his hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers, it was clear he felt vindication for his tortuous, long-running legal battles against sections of the British media.
“I’ve been told that slaying dragons will get you burned,” he said in a statement, before adding a defiant: “The mission continues.”
Prince Harry has long despaired of the royal family’s failure to take on the press. His father, King Charles, had told him it would be a “suicide mission”.
And he does seem to have been burned. When he appeared in the witness box in June, the first senior British royal for 130 years to do so in court at a trial, he was asked about the toll his fight was taking. He fell silent, his head dropped, and he appeared to be fighting tears. “It’s a lot,” he finally answered.
But since the Duchess of Sussex appeared on the scene, and utterly haunted by the risk of his wife suffering a similar fate to his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, Harry has been resolute in pursuing his cause.
In his impassioned witness statement and oral evidence to the court, he spoke of how tabloid coverage had affected him since childhood. You start off as a “blank canvas”, he said. As the newspapers hone how they will define you, “you’re then either the ‘playboy prince’, the ‘failure’, the ‘dropout’ or, in my case, the ‘thicko’, the ‘cheat’, the ‘underage drinker’, the ‘irresponsible drug taker’, the list goes on”.
He had felt “under constant surveillance, hunted by the media”. He was bullied at Eton after reports of a routine rugby injury led him to be singled out “for being a ‘sicknote’ or a ‘pussy’”.As a 20-year-old, the “paparazzi seemed to turn up” wherever he went, forcing him to resort, on occasion, to hiding in a car boot.
Unfounded rumours Charles was not his father felt “very damaging”, “hurtful, mean and cruel” and left him questioning the motives behind them. “Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so I might be ousted from the royal family?”
He blamed the “devastating” impact of the media for contributing to the breakup of his relationship with Chelsy Davy. He believed articles about his relationship with Caroline Flack, the late television presenter, were obtained by phone hacking.
Given all this, it is not surprising his first shot across the bows came shortly after his relationship with Meghan Markle became public. Defying the royal mantra “never complain, never explain”, he fired off a furious public statement in November 2016.
Coverage had “seen a line crossed”, he said. His girlfriend had been “subject to a wave of abuse and harassment” in newspapers and “racial undertones” in comment pieces. He had “felt it necessary to speak publicly”, and clearly hoped his warning would put newspapers on notice. He banned the rota royal correspondent from being in the church for his 2018 wedding.
If all this was a big departure from royal protocol, more was to come in 2019 when the Sussexes ended their hugely successful tour of South Africa with the bombshell announcement that Meghan was suing the Mail on Sunday, a case she later won, over publication of her private letter to her estranged father, Thomas Markle. Days later, Harry announced he was taking action against the Sun and the Daily Mirror for alleged phone hacking.
Harry is excoriating on the press in his memoir, Spare, and of what he sees as the royal family’s connivance with the media through alleged leaking. He believes himself to be collateral damage, particularly, he claimed, in the campaign orchestrated in the late 90s and early 00s to rehabilitate Charles and pave the way for marriage to Camilla.
He wrote that he told his father and brother: “I might learn to endure the press, even forgive their abuse, I might, but my own family’s complicity, that was going to take longer to get over. Pa’s office, Willy’s office, enabling these fiends, if not outright collaborating.”
Earlier this year, in an interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby, he described his mission to overhaul the British media as his “life’s work”.
In Spare, he is withering about his father’s own failure to take on the media – “the same shoddy bastards who’d portrayed him as a clown”, “his tormentors, his bullies” – and who were now “tormenting and bullying” him and Meghan.
According to the royal author Omid Scobie’s book Endgame, the duke may now be revising his views, and plans to make sure his court battles with the media do not take over his life. He is not naive enough to think that even winning these cases will change how the media writes about him, Scobie wrote, quoting Harry telling a friend: “That’s never going to happen. Unfortunately, we sell them too many newspapers and too many clicks.” However, he wants to see it through to a conclusion.
And lest people think he is just hell-bent on revenge, he professed a purer, higher motive in court, saying in his witness statement: “If they’re [the press] supposedly policing society, who on earth is policing them, when even the government is scared of alienating them because position is power? It is incredibly worrying for the entire UK.”
He sued News Group Newspapers, publisher of the Sun, over unlawful information gathering including the use of private investigators and phone hacking, claiming he could not have sued earlier because of a “secret agreement” between the royal family and NGN. The high court ruled in July that Harry could not sue NGN for alleged phone hacking and rejected his argument that there was a secret deal. But the remainder of his case was allowed to continue, with a trial likely in early 2024.
He is one of seven high-profile figures suing Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Mail and Mail on Sunday, over allegations of phone tapping and other unlawful activities.
Harry successfully sued Associated Newspapers for libel in 2020 over an article that accused him of having snubbed the Royal Marines, with the publisher apologising and paying damages.
He launched another lawsuit against the company in February 2022, over a Mail on Sunday article that accused him of trying to mislead the public about a separate legal battle with the government over his police protection. The high court ruled earlier this month that the case will go to trial – raising the prospect of Harry entering the witness box again at some point in 2024.
