As Prince Harry walked into the High Court for his second day of cross-examination, he might have been forgiven for approaching the stand with trepidation. The Duke of Sussex’s first day being grilled by Andrew Green KC did not cover him in glory. It is unlikely that the Prince has ever found himself under such close public scrutiny before in his life. Soft interviews, with the likes of old pal Tom Bradby and new chum Oprah Winfrey, did not prepare him for Green’s polite but probing questioning. Although Harry never gave into the petulance and anger he has displayed on other occasions, his shrugging utterances of ‘I don’t remember’ and ‘I can’t be sure. You would have to ask the journalists themselves’ made him seem a less than impressive witness.
Yet it is clear that Harry’s appearance in court is not solely about whether he wins or loses the phone-hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), but more an opportunity to state his credo in public once again. There was an undeniable charge to the bitterness with which he wrote in his witness statement how he’d been traduced in the media as a ‘playboy prince’, ‘failure’, ‘dropout’, ‘thicko’, ‘cheat’, ‘underage drinker’, and ‘irresponsible drug taker’.
The authorship of that witness statement came under questioning in court: Harry stated that he wrote it himself, although Green suggested that it was moulded, at the very least, by his lawyers. But whoever ultimately did put pen to paper, one thing is clear: the Duke of Sussex relished the opportunity to present his loathing of both the press and the British government in court. Rishi Sunak, to his credit, replied to Harry’s denunciation of his ‘rock bottom’ government by saying: ‘We have a longstanding convention that prime ministers don’t comment on members of the royal family.’
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