Prince Harry is a Marmite figure. That much is clear by now. For some he is a hero, the scourge of tabloids and positive voice on mental health. For others, he is to be derided as either a tragic Prince or the Royal who deserted his family.
Wherever you stand, it is unarguable that today is Harry’s day. A stunning victory in the High Court over Rupert Murdoch, a grovelling apology, and the first ever admission of unlawful wrongdoing at The Sun.
The apology itself is a remarkable piece of writing — a single page which tore apart years of denials from News Group Newspapers (NGN) that The Sun had done anything wrong.
Private investigators hired to dig up dirt on the paper’s targets used unlawful means to gather the information.
Harry secured a degree of justice for his mother, Princess Diana, with an apology for the media intrusions into her privacy in the final years of her life.
And there was also a shocking admission that the News of the World breached Lord Tom Watson’s privacy when he was a government minister and actually investigating wrongdoing at the tabloid between 2009 and 2011.
There are some people who will feel robbed of a full High Court trial, to put the activities at The Sun in the full public glare. Senior Murdoch figures like Rebekah Brooks and Will Lewis would have faced intense scrutiny.
Bosses at NGN will likely be relieved at this outcome, in spite of the humiliation, as it avoids ten weeks of courtroom drama and relevations that would surely have inflicted lasting damage on the company. Murdoch himself was set to face claims he “turned a blind eye” to phone hacking.
That narrative has been permanently changed as a result of Harry’s pursuit in the courts
For Harry himself, his critics will surely attempt to pick apart the victory, claim he failed to truly hold his tabloid enemies to account, and then return to lambasting every aspect of his life in California.
But we should not lose sight of what he has achieved in this legal war: an admission of 15 years of wrongdoing at one of Britain’s most powerful newspapers.
Some 1,300 civil claims have been filed against NGN since the phone hacking scandal first erupted in 2011. Phone hacking at the News of the World has long been an accepted fact. But illicit activities under The Sun’s umbrella were always fiercely denied.
Claim after claim was settled, sometimes for eye-watering sums of money, often with variations on the same court statement: “No admission of liability in relation to The Sun.”
That narrative has been permanently changed as a result of Harry’s pursuit in the courts.
Brooks told a criminal trial in 2014 that she ran a “clean ship” at The Sun when editor. But the High Court record now shows that the hull of the boat was dirty, whether she knew about it or not.
The heat of the phone hacking scandal has long-since been extinguished, with only a dedicated few still digging into how newspapers got their celebrity scoops in the 90s.
But the Prince Harry case still carries weight. He was targeted from 1996, when he was a 12-year-old boy. His mother, Princess Diana, was hounded by the media in the last years of her life, and there is now an apology for that behaviour.
Harry suffered the trauma of losing his mother at a young age, and then had to cope with the stresses of effectively being under constant surveillance as a young man.
Being a prominent member of the Royal Family is a privilege, but it also meant his entire life was considered fair game for the tabloids. As we now know, unlawful means were deployed in the hope of the next scoop.
We should also pause to consider the way our justice system worked in the NGN civil litigation cases.
TV stars, politicians, sports people, reality stars — they all lined up to sue the media company for years of trauma, distress, intrusions of privacy, and their confidential details being splashed over the front page.
And one by one, they settled out-of-court without a trial.
Harry was the only one who had the resources to pursue a claim and the stubborn drive to keep going, no matter the consequences
Armed with an apology of sorts and a payout, some would take to the pavement outside the High Court Rolls Building in central London to make allegations against The Sun which had not been accepted in the official court statement.
They had brought legal action to get to the truth, but that drive was eventually and inevitably overridden by the need to settle, without some of the admissions of liability they wanted.
In British law, if someone makes a civil claim for damages and pushes the case to a full trial, rejecting a settlement offer, they are at risk of paying the whole cost of the trial.
If the settlement offer was bigger than the eventual damages they win, the claimant ends up footing the bill. And if the defendant company, with all its resources, makes an offer so large that the damages at trial would never match it, settlement is the only real option.
Even Hugh Grant, who has spent years berating the tabloids, had to settle his case, admitting that the £10 million bill he would face — win or lose — was simply too ruinous.
Harry was the only one who had the resources to pursue a claim and the stubborn drive to keep going, no matter the consequences.
Only that combination could push NGN to the brink of a trial and into an admission of wrongdoing on their flagship British newspaper, a precious jewel that had been protected for so long.
When the dust settles, it’s worth reflecting whether the justice system itself is doing enough to get to the truth. You could argue David sometimes doesn’t stand a chance against Goliath in our courts, if it’s the full truth they are after. And there aren’t many Princes who are willing and able to fight the battles instead.
Tristan Kirk is the London Standard’s courts correspondent
