"Harry" by Sean Bw Parker
It was a week or so before Christmas, and Prince Harry won his phone-hacking case against the Mirror Newspaper Group. The partial victory, the first of four such cases, means the Duke of Sussex, who is no longer a working royal following his controversial move to California with his wife Meghan Markle, is to be awarded £140,600 pounds. The case is likely to cost the Mirror Group much more than that, since the findings could strengthen the claims of others who have filed suits against the company.
A large part of the British public has strong feelings about Harry, the nation remembering the teenage prince and his elder brother William, walking grief-stricken behind their mother Diana's funeral corsage following her death in 1997. They patiently read tabloid headlines as Harry got very drunk through his youth and young manhood, reaching his nadir when he attended a party in a Nazi uniform. He seemed to straighten out in service in Afghanistan, where he later revealed in his autobiography Spare that he had 'killed many people'.
Many veterans have PTSD following discharge (let alone the death of a parent at a young age). Was it this that led to his Californian awokening? This may never be ascertained, but what's for sure is that he was sufficiently struck by Meghan Markle in the late 2010s to promptly make what was one of this ambitious actress's wildest dreams come true. What Meghan thought about Harry's claim at trial that the pressure had led to the break-up of his relationship with Chelsea Davy is unclear. Surely he simply hadn't yet met 'the one' at that point?
Harry said he was targeted by Mirror Group for fifteen years from 1996, with more than 140 stories which appeared in its papers being the result of phone-hacking or other unlawful behaviour - although the trial only considered 33 of these. As the Judge put it:
"The duke has been one of the most important storylines in town for much of his life".
The Duke of Sussex, the fifth-in-line to the throne, became the first British royal to appear in the witness box since the 1890s when he gave evidence over two days at the start of June.
Newspaper sales, and thus their power, are not what they were. The Leveson phone-hacking inquiry, which brought down Rupert Murdoch's News of the World in 2011, may have had a part in this downturn in fortunes; but much more impactful will have been the 360 degree assault by social media. In March 2005, at their peak, shares in Reach PLC, which owns the Daily and Sunday Mirror and the People, were worth £6.72. Early on the Friday of the announcement of Prince Harry's win, they were valued at 71p.
The case is one of four that Harry is pursuing at London's High Court. He is also suing Murdoch's News Corp's UK operation, News Group Newspapers (NGN), which publishes The Sun. He is also suing Newspapers (ANL, publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday) - along with singer Elton John and five others - over more alleged phone-hacking and illicit privacy breaches. Harry is also suing ANL for libel.
Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Mirror for much of the time Harry's claim covers, had this to say following announcement of the verdict:
“As for him saying this is a good day for truth, the duke has been repeatedly exposed in recent years as someone who wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped him around his California-tanned face”.
When eight million opinions on X can have as much right to reply as any establishment Judge, let alone Talk TV host, Hazza's win asks questions about famous peoples' right to privacy. The claim is that for all H&M's talk of wanting privacy, they're happy enough to talk to the public when they can control the narrative, i.e. on their Oprah Winfrey interview. Harry has a deep and sincerely held conviction that it was media behaviour that led to his mother's death, and he is married to a woman who is prepared to use in-laws chatting about the possible tone of a future mixed-race baby's skin as a lever of criticism.
The effect of this pincer movement on an apparently stubborn, definitely damaged redhead like H was always going to be profound, his pain finally finding affirmation in his glamorously exotic – and no less furious - new partner. The pair were reportedly hurt by the relative lack of success of their big bucks deal Spotify podcast. H&M's struggle against the venal cynicism of the British media from their Montecito mansion will no doubt continue unaffected. Is that another book deal we see on the horizon?
By Sean Bw Parker
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