It was always going to go this way. Every gambler eventually loses, and the higher profile that loss, the greater the eventual humiliation. But today’s judgement that Prince Harry as well as his other high-profile litigants – including Elton John, Elizabeth Hurley and Baroness Lawrence – have lost their claims completely against Associated Newspapers for unlawful information gathering, thereby bringing to a deeply humiliating and unimaginably expensive end to their crusade against the media, represents the end of the biggest gamble that this litigation-prone prince has ever taken.
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Anyone watching the trial will be unsurprised by the verdict. It was commonly taken as read that Associated, publishers of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers, among others, did not use phone hacking but instead obtained their stories by good old-fashioned journalistic methods, some of which might seem crass, even tawdry – witness the story of the writer Charlotte Griffiths snuggling up to Prince Harry – but are tried and tested means of putting information in the public domain. The case, which was at times farcical, did not paint an emotional Harry in a good light, but he must have hoped that it would not go as badly as it has done. Alas.
