Well, send him victorious-ish. In what amounts to an early Christmas present for Prince Harry, Mr Justice Fancourt has ruled today at the High Court that there was, in his stern description, ‘extensive’ phone hacking that took place at the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) between 2006 to 2011, and even, hilariously, that this continued to occur ‘to some extent’ during the Leveson enquiry into media standards, suggesting the company was so entirely unabashed by the idea that they would be held up to scrutiny by the forces of the law that their murky little business continued.
Still, it was not a total victory for Prince Harry, much as he might have liked it to be. His case was said to be ‘proved in part’, rather than wholly. This was reflected in the amount that he has been granted in damages: £140,600. This is a considerable sum – bolstered by the detail that directors of MGN not only knew about the phone hacking, but ‘turned a blind eye and positively concealed it.’ Those who have it in for MGN – especially its alumnus Piers Morgan, who stepped down as editor of the Daily Mirror in 2004 – will undoubtedly be delighted by this. But it should also be remembered that Harry and his lawyers initially asked for £440,000 in damages, and so the Duke has received rather less than a third of that.
Of the 33 articles that were presented in court, just under half were decided to be the result of hacking or unlawful information gathering at the hands of private investigators, who were scornfully described as ‘an integral part of the system’. Eighteen articles – including stories about Harry having a sixteenth birthday dinner at a gastropub in Chelsea – were decided to have been the result of good old-fashioned (and, more to the point, legal) journalistic information gathering.
The Duke’s paranoid tendencies did come in for some coded criticism, too. The judge noted that it was a habit on the part of the Duke to assume that every single story about him that made it into the papers had been acquired by phone hacking and that this was incorrect, as in fact – as the judgement suggested – over half the stories were obtained through legitimate, if potentially ethically unsavoury, means. Those who wish to find fault with Harry’s tendency to use the British law courts as a means of taking out his anger and frustration on those who he believes have wronged him will be able to take some crumbs of consolation from the verdict.
Set against this, a partial victory is still a great deal better than a defeat, and Harry will no doubt (and understandably) view this as a vindication of a strategy that has often seemed belligerent and uncompromising. His presence in the witness box in June this year came in for a great deal of discussion, even criticism, as he was an emotional, often angry litigant, and eventually said at the end of an eight-hour session of testimony that it had been ‘a lot’.
He was the first royal to give testimony in a law court since 1891, when Edward VII gave testimony in a libel case, and so the stakes were notably high should he have failed. He had publicly stated that it would be an ‘injustice’ should the case go against him and in favour of MGN, so while the entire media industry will be digesting the news – and no doubt some newspaper groups will be nervously wondering what awaits them in the coming years – Prince Harry can, for the first time in quite a while, breathe a long, deep sigh of relief before heading off into the next fray on his metaphorical white charger.
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