For four long years, journalists at this newspaper have worked under the shadow of a series of terrible accusations. It was alleged they hacked phones, blagged medical and travel records and did other ‘unlawful information gathering’.
Then they had to endure an 11-week trial and were cross-examined, one by one, about their working lives.
They are not princes. They are hard-working people who have mortgages and school runs and the ordinary dread of an ordinary person who has been publicly accused of something they did not do.
Last week, Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all allegations. Every single one of them.
The man who, as a consequence of his litigation, put those people in that witness box is the same man who has spent the past decade instructing the rest of us to be kind.
The question that interests me is not whether Prince Harry had the evidence to prove what he was alleging – the court has answered that.
As a psychiatrist, what most intrigues me is why he went to court in the first place? Why spend four years and presumably a lot of money on such a misguided crusade?
The answer, I suspect, has almost nothing to do with newspapers. We all know the story. He was 12 years old. He walked behind his mother’s coffin, watched by 100 million people, and he did not cry, because a boy of 12 in that situation understands that he is not permitted to.
As a psychiatrist, what most intrigues Dr Max Pemberton is why Prince Harry went to court in the first place? Prince Harry arrives outside the High Court in London on January 22, 2026
Prince William and Prince Harry at the funeral of their mother Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997
Grief in childhood does not revolve around a neat timetable. It goes underground and it waits. And what it very often waits for is adulthood, because adulthood supplies the one thing a grieving child lacks: the power to act.
What mourning wants, above everything, is to undo; to go back. And since that cannot be done, the wish attaches itself to whatever might provide answers.
A courtroom has that potential. It offers a defendant and it offers a finding of fact and a verdict. It offers the one thing bereavement doesn’t always provide, which is somebody to blame, even if that somebody has done absolutely nothing wrong.
I have seen smaller versions of this play out in my clinic for over 20 years. The widow who devotes a decade to an unfounded complaint against the hospital. The son who cannot let his father be buried until every question has been asked and answered.
Somewhere along the way the pursuit stops being a route through the grief and becomes the place where the grief now lives. And while the case is still open, the loss seems somehow less final.
And there is something else that happens to people gripped by what they perceive to be a righteous cause, and this is the part I find hardest to forgive.
They stop seeing the people standing inside it.
Not because they are deliberately cruel, but due to a narrowing of vision that is so complete, other human beings drop out of the frame.
The reporter lying awake at 3am is not someone Harry has been unkind to. They are someone he is treating as if he has not noticed them at all.
I am not sure which is worse. From the lofty heights of the moral high ground, the little people can seem even smaller.
Harry has spoken often about the years of therapy he has had, and I don’t doubt a word of it.
But it prompts an uncomfortable thought about my own profession. There is a kind of therapy that hands a person a beautiful vocabulary for their injury, but then never once asks them to put it back down again.
They emerge able to describe their wound in exquisite detail, fluent, articulate, but entirely unhealed. Insight is not the same thing as change.
I have seen several people who after years of therapy remain obsessed with their trauma to the extent that they are unable to heal and move on with their lives.
Good therapy should, in the end, leave you rather less interested in your own story than you were when you started. Harry couldn’t get what he really wanted from this case. Not only because this newspaper hadn’t done what he alleged, but because there is no order any judge in England can sign that says: your mother should not have died, and you were only 12.
Nobody can give him that. Not this newspaper, not his father and not a High Court judge.
What might help is duller, and harder and free. It is the slow, unglamorous work of mourning something that cannot be returned. It is the only way of laying down a weight that has been carried since childhood.
The truth about infertility
New research has found that infertility among women aged 35 to 49 has been rising steadily since 1990, and is projected to keep climbing.
Notice how the coverage of such findings always carries a faint note of reproach. As though women had put off having children for the fun of it. As though there were a cohort of thirtysomethings who chose the second holiday over the first baby.
I’ve never met her. What I have met is women who could not afford a home with a second bedroom. Women on rolling contracts who knew exactly what a pregnancy would do to their prospects.
Women still paying off a degree they were told to get. And women who simply had not met anyone.
Eva Beaujouan, of the University of Vienna, points to longer years of study, economic insecurity and unemployment.
We ask women to establish themselves in the years when their fertility is at its best, then we tut when the sums don’t work.
Not one woman I have sat with chose to run out of time.
I once had a patient in her 50s and every 20 seconds or so she would shift in her chair and wince. Her scans were clear. So for years she had been told there was nothing wrong with her. This is why a study from Johns Hopkins University into back pain matters. Working with mice, the team found that in a degenerating spine, pain-sensing nerve fibres grow into places they should not be in. But a hormone called PTH prompts bone cells to produce a protein that pushes them back out. So, we now have a mechanism for why back pain occurs and a possible solution.
Ministers have promised to end corridor care in hospitals by the end of this parliament. But Jason Killens, of the London Ambulance Service, says some are simply moving the problem outdoors… to the car park. More than 20,000 patients a month are at risk of harm from handovers delayed beyond an hour. Clearing corridors might still help no one.
Altruist sunscreen
Most of us apply nowhere near enough sunscreen. Studies suggest we use a quarter to half of the amount that SPF was tested at, which turns your SPF 50 into something far weaker. And the reason we are so stingy is that the bottle cost us £30.
So cheap suncream is not a lesser suncream; it is the sort most people will use properly. Altruist was founded by Dr Andrew Birnie, a consultant dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon, to provide excellent suncream at the lowest possible price (from £6.36, altruistsun.com).
As a man who has had skin cancer surgery himself, I buy it. For every tube sold, they send suncream to children with albinism in Africa, who develop skin cancers young. That amounts to almost £1.4million worth so far.
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