Prince Harry drags Kate and William into court case drama
The Duke of Sussex’s most recent move proves that he has no issue dragging his family into his latest campaign.
COMMENT
In the days of yore – you know, yore, when the Frenchies were always trying to invade Britain and come for the nation’s roast beef and freedoms or the Hapsburgs were trying to nick bits of Europe – there were certain ways a dashing royal prince could have a go at some glory. They all involved a horse or a naval fleet or coming deuced close to getting mud on one’s best breeches.
Not so these days.
Right now in London another royal prince is trying to win a battle of his very own, namely Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and his lifetime foe, the press.
On Thursday in a courtroom in London, Harry and three other celebrities began their case against the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) over allegations of phone hacking.
If you have a horrible sense of deja vu here, wondering if you’re stuck in some sort of Windsor groundhog day of news, fear not.
This is the third case that Harry has starred in, so to speak, in the last two months alone. That is, on top of the other four court cases he and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex have launched since 2019 and the legal action he is bringing against the Home Office over the decision to strip the family of their official security in 2020.
(Note to self: Start a spreadsheet to track Harry’s cases.)
So, here we go again. Again.
Because not only is Harry back at it, swinging his broadsword-in-human-form barrister David Sherborne at the Mirror Group, but the royal family has also been dragged into the melee.
This time, it’s not only the Duke’s name and that of his ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy appearing in documents but also that of his brother and sister-in-law William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales who have unwittingly found themselves co-starring in a court case they have not brought.
But wait it gets messier.
Then came MGN’s barrister Andrew Green who, in denying Harry’s suit, has revealed that many of the tabloid stories about the Duke, “came from information disclosed by or on behalf of royal households or members of the royal family”.
(Or to put it another way, the call was coming from inside the palace.)
William and Kate must end up with lots of unwanted things – flowers and islands off the Cornish coast. Now thanks to Harry they can add to the list their names repeatedly turning up on the lips of extortionately priced barristers in London courtrooms.
Just in case your brain has, post-coronation, been reduced to something equivalent to a blancmange left in the sun, let me remind you of what has happened in only the last seven weeks or so.
First in March we got the rare and unusual sight of Harry back on home soil when he made an unexpected appearance for the opening of the case that he and other celebrities including Elton John and Liz Hurley brought against Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers for alleged unlawful information-gathering.
With this one, we had Harry claiming that the royal family had kept him in the dark about the full extent of hacking perpetrated by the paper and that he had been “conditioned” to accept the royal family’s “never complain, never explain” approach.
Then came April and, what’s this, a new court case! This time it was against the News of the World, which closed in 2011, and The Sun’s parent company, News Group Newspapers (NGN). (NGN is also the owner of this masthead.)
Here things got even messier with Harry submitting a 17,000-word witness statement in which he alleged that there had been a “secret agreement” between the publisher and the royal family to help “smooth the way” for his stepmother, now Queen Camilla.
He also revealed the previously undisclosed juicy morsel that William had secretly settled his own action against the company in 2020 and had received a “huge sum”, which, according to the Telegraph, “was around £1 million” ($A1.8 million).
Now, today, we have Harry’s latest courtroom manoeuvring, and what all three of these cases represent is the raising from the dead parts of recent royal history that Team Crown seem to have no interest in seeing the light of day. If Spare was not embarrassing enough for the House of Windsor, never fear. Harry and his trusty band of lawyers are here to exhume a slew of fresh deeply unflattering facts.
There is of course a grand irony here: That Harry is on a one-duke quest over his own privacy and yet has shown absolutely no compunction about stomping all over his family’s own privacy.
What was Spare, by and large, aside from an insight into Harry’s tortured psyche interspersed with him betraying the confidences of his family? From the countless conversations he had with his brother Prince William and father King Charles to his willingness to include not only personal details about Kate but also even her text messages, protecting the confidences of his family does not seem to have been considered.
Protecting their privacy and preventing One’s laundry, dirty or otherwise, from ending up being tossed around in the Old Bailey is the reason that, of the number of legal cases brought by various members of the royal family, only one has ever gone to court in the UK.
(That was in 1990 when Princess Margaret’s son Earl Snowden sued a paper which had claimed he had gotten a bit rowdy in a pub. In 2017 after a five-year battle, the Waleses won their tabloid case against Closer magazine for publishing topless photos taken of Kate while they were on holiday, but that all took place in France.)
One case. 33 years. Until now. Until Harry.
What the royal family seems to understand is that deciding to declare all-out war on the press and running Rob Roy style straight at them comes with plenty of risks.
Harry fighting his Fleet Street fights has, and could well continue to, open Pandora’s box or at least Pandora’s Bijoux Collection Of Things The Palace Doesn’t Want To Get Out such as William finding a tidy, private way to deal with the Mail.
What Harry has shown is about as much concern for his family as Princess Margaret for her under-butler-in-charge-of-the-drinks-trolley’s sanity.
I suppose though, by now we shouldn’t be surprised by this post-Oprah, post-Netflix, post-Spare.
Harry has picked his priggish particular battles – with his family and with the press – and has yet to show any smidge of losing steam or his simmering outrage lessening. (All the yoga and goji berries don’t seem to be doing much, hey?)
So far, these three cases have not done enough to dredge up stuff that the royal family never wanted in the public domain, but lord knows what could be thrown up when his case against the Home Office is finally heard.
Cue the fireworks!
Last year in Harry’s bid to bring a claim against the Home Office over his security arrangements, it was revealed by his lawyers that there had been “significant tensions” between the Duke and the late queen’s top aide Sir Edward Young. Sir Edward, unbeknown to Harry, was a member of Ravec (full name: Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures) and had been therefore involved in the decision for the Sussexes’ to lose their security.
When this case is heard, the possibility for the inner workings of the royal sausage factory to be laid bare seem even greater still.
Kate and William and Charles and Camilla and their Jack Russells and every aide who was Harry’s Kensington Palace Secret Santa face being sucked into the black hole that is Harry’s courtroom quest upon quest upon quest.
Princes, amiright? Always wanting to slay dragons of their own choosing and never seeming to worry who might get mowed down or covered head-to-toe in mud in the process.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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