Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.
Some of you will recognise that as the famous opening sentence of Janet Malcolm’s 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer. She lists the ways in which journalists justify what she sees as their treachery: “The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art, the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”
Hold that quotation in mind as we reflect on the 10-week marathon battle in court 76 at the Royal Courts of Justice, which has just limped to an end, with a judgment expected later this year. A handful of celebrities, along with one former MP and the campaigner Doreen Lawrence, have been suing Associated Newspapers (ANL), publishers of the Daily Mail.
Of course, the main celebrity is Prince Harry, and this is by no means his first rodeo. He’s been at this for a few years now, winning sizeable damages from the Mirror Group in 2023/24 and extracting an admission of unlawful behaviour and a grovelling apology from the publishers of the Sun and the News of the World in 2025.
These cases were mere appetisers for the recent gargantuan wrestling match against Associated Newspapers Limited, the publisher of the Mail and Mail on Sunday. In this battle, the claimants sought to prove that the journalists of those publications had gone far beyond phone-hacking in writing multiple stories which they say invaded their privacy.
I have not been in court, and the case has been strangely underreported, but it seems clear that the claimants have struggled to produce clinching evidence to support some of the more outlandish claims. Much weight was placed on the supposed testimony of a private investigator, one Gavin Burrows, who subsequently claimed his signed statement was a forgery.
This time, Prince Harry and his band of claimants may not win big—as with the Sun and Mirror. Or, to put it another way, they may even lose. In which case, the Mail can be expected to administer the monstering of all monsterings to Prince Harry and co. It will be an epic punishment beating. Several cubic kilometres of brown stuff will be enthusiastically tipped over His Former Royal Highness’s head. He must be taught a lesson.
Churchill urged “magnanimity in victory”. This is unlikely given some British tabloids’ track record of rampaging hostility towards Harry and his wife, Meghan. If magnanimity is beyond them, how about a little kindness?
I have never met Harry and hold no particular brief for him. But I think it is perfectly reasonable for him to hate, and, to some extent, fear the British press. It’s perfectly reasonable for him to believe that, but for the British tabloids and their paparazzi outriders, his mother might still be alive. It’s perfectly reasonable for him to want to shield his wife from the sort of brutal and intrusive treatment dished out to his late mother.
He’s proved in two sets of previous legal proceedings that some tabloids would stop at nothing—including criminal means—to weasel out stories about him and his family. The Mail proceedings established that, at one stage, it was spending vast sums on private investigators. The figure of £3m was not contested, though it was uncertain over what period this accounted for.
The Mail claims that all this was for legal purposes. In a magnificent Dickensian riposte to cross-examination about unlawful information gathering, the former editor in chief of the Mail titles, Paul Dacre, dismissed questioning as “a piece of semantic legerdemain”.
Take one sample passage from Harry’s book Spare. It’s late 2016, and he and Meghan have been dating—or trying their best to date—for about five months. Wherever Meghan goes in Canada, she is swarmed by paparazzi. Driving home from work one evening, on icy roads, she notices five cars following her. They are tailgating her, cutting her off, spinning around as they take pictures of her at the wheel.
Panicked, she rings Harry. He instantly has a flashback to his mother’s death as she fled from pursuing paparazzi in Paris. The Canadian police decline to help—she’s a public figure, they say. She makes it home, only to have to endure hours of so-called journalists ringing her doorbell. After midnight things die down, but she spots men sleeping in cars outside, engines running.
It’s a tiny cameo, and far from the worst intrusion that couple have faced. Years and years of it. Meghan’s family and neighbours as well. And, even on the Mail’s innocent explanation—what, me guv?—we can see ranks of newshounds cultivating as many sources as they can to snoop out any morsel that might make a page lead.
The worst offenders at this stuff claim to be the most ardent supporters of the monarchy. Maybe there is a warped logic in identifying Harry as a threat to the royal family and a feeling it’s their loyal duty relentlessly to expose him?
But one of the lessons of Harry’s book is the sheer unpleasantness and pointlessness of being born into a family where you’re unlikely ever to have a meaningful job and where your nearest and dearest will be subjected to daily intrusion and torrents of vindictive commentary.
Another lesson from the book, to anyone with a modicum of humanity, is the toll on the fragile state of Harry’s mental health. Yes, he was born into a position of immense wealth and material comfort. But he has found the strains of life—and death—in this particularly gilded goldfish bowl at times intolerable.
So, how about a little kindness and understanding? Mr Dacre, under cross-examination, talked of his “upset and fury” at the anguish his reporters had experienced during the course of the proceedings. He himself had been “reduced to rage in the small hours of the night.”
Asked if, by contrast, he felt any sympathy for the victims of his journalists’ activities, Mr Dacre carefully responded that “my heart bleeds for Baroness Doreen Lawrence.”
Not for any of the other claimants, some of whom had been in tears as they told of how traumatising press intrusion into the most intimate aspects of a life can be. Not for Sadie Frost, who cried as she told how she found a reporter preparing a story about her ectopic pregnancy and how she aborted it. Frost had not even told her mother or sisters. But the Mail on Sunday knew.
Was this as a result of a private investigator blagging confidential medical information? Perish the thought. It was, the court was told, just a reporter with a “very, very good source in [Frost’s] inner circle”.
So, no sympathy for her, or Harry or any of the others. Just Doreen Lawrence.
Was Janet Malcolm right—that journalists know that what we do is morally indefensible? Is it pompous to talk about freedom of speech and the public’s right to know?
Whatever your views on Prince Harry, he has held up an unforgiving mirror to some loathsome aspects of tabloid press behaviour. Yet those tabloids—yes, including the Mail titles—also employ journalists and editors who have done brave and important journalism.
How refreshing if would be if they themselves used this moment to show that—rather than erecting a blank wall of defiance—they can tell the difference.
