Don’t believe what you may have read or heard elsewhere. That the contest between Prince Harry and Rupert Murdoch somehow ended in a draw. That Mr Justice Fancourt stepped into the ring after this long and bloody battle and raised each of these implacable adversaries’ arms aloft. Honours even? This was nothing of the sort: it was a comprehensive, unambiguous and crushing victory for the Duke of Sussex, one that inflicted serious wounds on his heavyweight opponent.
This is not about the money paid to Prince Harry, believed to be more than £10m. A huge sum for an individual, yes, but a mere rounding error for Murdoch’s organisation, News Group Newspapers (NGN), who have already paid in excess of £1bn in 1,300 out of court settlements with people – ordinary citizens as well as those in the public eye – who, like Prince Harry, believed their privacy had been invaded by illegal actions at the now defunct News of the World and the very much alive The Sun.
A good proportion of the amount agreed on the steps of the High Court yesterday will go to m’learned friends, anyway, but what Harry really sought in reparation for the distress he suffered at the hands of these newspapers could not be measured in pounds and pence: he wanted justice, accountability and, yes, revenge.
He had been determined not to settle his case out of court. He wanted to put Murdoch’s senior executives on the stand to answer his allegation that phone hacking had been endemic throughout the organisation, and that those at the highest level knew it was happening. To try and prove what Dan Evans, a former News of the World reporter, had said in court in 2014, that “even the office cat knew” about phone hacking.
Harry had previously said that he was “the last person” standing, determined that this affair should be examined under oath. The fact that he settled at the very last minute was not because he had “caved in”, as his (many) opponents in the media had presented it. Like the actor Hugh Grant before him, Harry may simply have come face-to-face with one of the iniquities of the British legal system.
While we do not know for sure, it is reasonable to assume that at various points in this six-year legal battle, Harry had been offered a sum in settlement by NGN and he had rejected them all. And then, just as his case was to be heard, a harsh reality relating to the rules of civil litigation intruded. Had the judge awarded Harry a penny less in damages than had been offered out of court by NGN, he could have been ordered to pay the legal costs of both sides. No matter if every single word of his allegation had been proven, he’d have had to pay costs which might have been more than £20m. Even for a Prince with a Netflix deal, this was a bit too rich.
The purpose of this rule is to achieve a settlement without the requirement of a court hearing and the expense that entails. But what it fails to give is justice and accountability and transparency. In some cases, its effect is to allow big organisations to keep any wrongdoing secret, and to give the impression that the claimant doesn’t have confidence in their arguments (a line which some are pressing in relation to Harry).
Harry, the Lost Boy, is still frozen in astonished aspic
Read MoreHarry, however, got the next best thing, which is why he’s a winner. His apology – “full and unequivocal” – from NGN was further than the organisation had gone before, admitting for the first time that The Sun was party to “serious intrusion… between 1996 and 2011 into his private life”. It is still a live possibility that NGN will face criminal charges.
But the thing that will really strike a chord with the public is this section in NGN’s statement: “NGN further apologises to the Duke for the impact on him of the extensive coverage and serious intrusion into his private life as well as the private life of Diana, Princess of Wales, his late mother, in particular during his younger years.”
Harry wasn’t even a teenager when the pursuit of Diana was in full spate. It has shaped his life, overwhelmingly for the worse. Who cannot feel admiration for him today that he has showed the determination to get this acknowledged before the world by others richer and more powerful than him? He was brave to have taken them on, to have seen it through until the system was stacked against him, and, crucially, to have won his fight.
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