Harry’s press vendetta is doomed to fail

For a brief spell during the first day of Harry’s court appearance this week I felt sorry for him. Clearly out of his depth against Andrew Green, the formidable KC acting for Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the prince seemed a pawn in a wider legal battle, ill-advised and poorly prepared.

When he revealed he had been prompted to sue the tabloids only after meeting his barrister, David Sherborne, at Elton John’s pad in France, even the judge was taken aback.

It was Sherborne, who made his name representing celebrities during the Leveson Inquiry into press intrusion, who suggested Harry could hire his own lawyer to take on the press.

Of course it was. Sherborne has already secured multi-million-pound payments for some of his starry clients, who include Elton John, and adding Harry to his books would raise his profile even further.

What a coup for the lawyer, but what was in it for Harry? If he hadn’t fallen out with his father and elder brother, they would surely have had a stern word and saved him from the greedy counsel’s clutches and from himself.

But any sympathy for the Duke of Sussex quickly fell away as he reminded us who he was. His sense of entitlement, his special pleading, his pomposity – California may have added a thin veneer of hippy cool but you can’t take the chippy royal out of Harry.

From day one, when he failed to show up – Sherborne told the court Harry was “obviously in a different category” to other witnesses, to his sticking to protocol over how to address him (Your Royal Highness in the first instance, and Prince Harry thereafter), Harry demonstrated that “fifth in line to the throne” remains his day job.

How else would he have the temerity to think he could save journalism as a profession? In his decision to sue MGN over articles he alleges came from phone hacking – and in other claims against the Sun and the Mail – he is not merely seeking legal redress but is on a mission.

Now, the trade is not without its faults and needs regulators (IPSO and Ofcom) to police its transgressions. Although the period Harry is concerned with covers a pre-Leveson era between 1996 and 2011, the practices of those times left a stain on the reputation of British tabloids.

But if reform, rather than vigilance, is still necessary, the expat Duke is hardly the man to lead it. For a start, he is woefully ignorant about how papers operate, admitting in court that he didn’t know that stories are regularly rehashed from one title to another.

Embarrassingly, for him, the Mirror’s KC was easily able to show that scoops Harry claimed came from phone hacking had already appeared in other outlets, were released by the Palace or, in one instance, had come from an interview he had given.

From his privileged perspective and, it must be said, his lack of intellectual curiosity, he cannot imagine a world where people, even vile reporters, have to work at their jobs.

Royal correspondents, the bane of Harrys’ life, cultivate their sources assiduously, and it is an insult to their hard-nosed ingenuity to imply their news gathering comes from cheating. Palace staff, friends of the royals, friends of the royals’ girlfriends, black sheep uncles; no-one is out of bounds if they have juicy information to share.

Harry also undervalues the importance of a free press, as do many spoilt celebrities who find they can’t control what’s written about them.

Just as journalists undo political miscreants – something else lost on Harry (“democracy fails when your press fails to scrutinise and hold the government accountable”, he opined in court) – they sniff out hypocrisy among the elite, and that includes the Windsors.

It is telling that Harry and Meghan embarked on their legal battles with the press after their tour of South Africa in 2019. This was the pivotal moment when relations soured between the couple and British newspapers, which Harry, in his memoir Spare, accused of “disgraceful conduct”.

That conduct involved questioning the timing of Meghan’s “no-one asks how I am” interview with ITV journalist (and family friend) Tom Bradby against the backdrop of an impoverished African township.

And it included headlines about the jet setting lifestyle of the pair, who made four “gas-guzzling” trips on private planes in less than a fortnight in 2019, despite their commitment to saving the planet.

Harry said his motivation to sue the tabloids over historic phone hacking was to protect his wife. Perhaps in the confines of their Montecito mansion, or holidaying with the Johns and their lawyer pals, they persuaded themselves that in settling their own scores they would stand up for the wronged everywhere, change the culture of British newspapers and gain power to silence the press when the coverage is unfavourable.

After living his entire life in the spotlight Harry still doesn’t get it. His bid to correct any narrative that casts him (and now Meghan) in an unflattering light is doomed to failure, no matter what strings he pulls.

In the US too, where a photographic agency rebuffed his demand to hand over its films of that New York “car chase”, an independent press must hold the mighty to account.

Harry told Andrew Green he would be feel “some injustice” if the Mirror Group was found not to have hacked his phones. When he left court after his second and final day of giving evidence, he looked pleased. Like Prince Andrew straight after his Newsnight grilling by Emily Maitlis, he probably thought it had all gone rather well.

Poor deluded chap. Whether he wins, which is unlikely, or loses, his vendetta will change nothing. Tales about the rich and famous, of great import or insubstantial nonsense, will always be tabloid fodder, and hooray to that.

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