Prince Harry’s loss is a victory for free speech

Prince Harry is having a bad week, and it is impossible not to be delighted. First, he learnt that taxpayers would not be footing the security bill for his family’s trip to the UK. Then he was refused a last-minute request for a room at Buckingham Palace. And now, best of all, in a rare victory for press freedom, the Duke of Sussex has lost his long-running legal case against the Daily Mail. I make that 3-0 to us commoners.

The High Court’s dismissal of all the claims that Harry and his posh pals brought against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, is worth celebrating. The judge in the case ruled that neither the prince nor Elton John, Liz Hurley, nor any of the other censorious celebs who accused journalists of phone hacking and blagging private medical records, could prove their claims. In fact, Mr Justice Nicklin told the claimants, just because information published about them was private did not mean that it ‘must have been unlawfully sourced’. Harry’s loss is a win for the journalists who were dragged into court and had their lives turned upside down by false allegations. And it is a victory for everyone who wants a free press rather than a media devoted to sycophantic propaganda.

In truth, the outcome of this case should never have been in doubt. The ginger whinger’s evidence never stood up to scrutiny. Sadie Frost may have given the performance of her life, summoning up tears in the witness box, but it turns out that legal cases are still won on the basis of facts rather than emotions. Yet time and again, Harry showed he’s not capable of recognising ‘the truth’ when it smacks him in the face.

Those he was close to would never leak stories about him, the prince told the court, even though he had previously accused friends of doing exactly that – and text messages showed he knew that this was happening. Harry also claimed he had cut off all contact with a woman when he found out she was a journalist, despite Facebook messages revealing this was absolutely not the case. He would not share information about his love life with strangers, he insisted, only for this to be disproved by his own tell-all, 400-page autobiography.

A sympathetic explanation might be that, despite receiving the best education money can buy, Harry is simply not that bright. But there’s more to these ‘untruths’ and contradictions than mere lapses of memory. Harry’s courtroom testimony, and the fact that the legal case burnt through an estimated £50million on lawyers’ fees, suggest the Duke of Montecito is not merely dumb but has an overinflated sense of his own importance. It’s not that Harry doesn’t know what’s true and what’s not – it is just the truth is far less important than getting his own way. He is self-entitled enough to expect journalists and judges, the legal system and the press to bend to his will.

He may be a spoilt brat, but let’s not forget that Harry was encouraged to engage in this expensive, time-wasting litigation by a coterie of lawyers, luvvies and a former Lib Dem MP associated with Hacked Off, a campaign group founded by Hugh Grant, to curtail press freedom. In delivering today’s ruling, the judge went so far as to brand Hacked Off adviser Dr Evan Harris as ‘dishonest’ for a plan he cooked up to hide the fact that one of the cases put before the court was beyond the statute of limitations. ‘At root, that proposal involved a deception’, the judge declared. Damning indeed.

If things had gone Harry’s way, he would now be celebrating a victory for money, influence and titles. What’s more, he hoped to be doing this from within Buckingham Palace.

Thankfully, his father had already kiboshed that part of the plan. The king, or at the very least a senior royal adviser, seems to have grown sick and tired of Harry’s constant to-ing and fro-ing over which members of his family will be coming to the UK and where they will stay. For the best part of a fortnight, we’ve been treated to a minute-by-minute account of Harry and Meghan’s ever-changing travel plans, revealed – without any hint of irony – by the privacy-loving couple themselves.

The duke and duchess originally proffered a meet-up with Archie and Lilibet, the king’s grandchildren, only to withdraw the offer when it became clear they were not going to get the bells-and-whistles security detail they wanted. Having first accepted, then rejected the offer of rooms at Buckingham Palace, Harry again changed his mind when it dawned on him that the royal surroundings would make a suitable backdrop for what he assumed would be a victory speech. Good on Charles for acting like any sensible parent and turning down the last-minute request and putting a stop to the whole circus.

As Harry heads off to Birmingham for the Invictus Games and in search of the one remaining reporter prepared to offer a positive spin on his endeavours, the rest of us should raise a glass to press freedom and demand the right to read what politicians, royals and celebrities would rather we did not know.