Quite what “call me Prince Harry” was expecting when he strode confidently into the High Court just after 9.30am on Tuesday (UK time) is anyone’s guess.
As he was ushered into the Rolls Building from the back of a blacked-out Range Rover, a phalanx of paparazzi snapping his every step, he even managed a smile at the press he claims has been “hostile” towards him since he “was born”.
But as he became the first member of the royal family to appear in the witness box since Edward VII was at the centre of a baccarat scandal in 1891, it soon became apparent that Oprah Winfrey this wasn’t.
Until now the Duke of Sussex (and indeed his wife, Meghan) have relied on feelings over fact when presenting their “truth” to the world via Oprah’s sofa, Netflix’s streaming platform, Harry’s autobiography Spare and various interviews and podcasts.
Allegations against the press and palace - even those later revealed to be, at best, misleading - have largely gone unchallenged by interviewers, hand-picked by the couple to ensure the smoothest possible path to post-Megxit righteousness.
Quest against the media
Yet in Andrew Green KC, Mirror Group Newspapers’ barrister, the 38-year-old Duke finally faced an arch-inquisitor.
As the father-of-two at times struggled to acquaint himself with the reams of evidence in the “paginated bundles” before him, at one point joking “I feel like we’re doing a workout”, there was little doubt Green would be requiring him to do some heavy lifting in defending his phone hacking claim.
The Duke’s 55-page witness statement had already rolled the pitch for what was to come.
“Our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our Government – both of which I believe are at rock bottom,” he said, revealing the scale to which Harry believes his one-man quest to reform the media is bigger than any of us. As he once told ITV’s Tom Bradby: this is his “life’s work”.
But observers could have been forgiven for wondering if he has actually followed the news lately when he added, seemingly in ignorance of Boris Johnson being brought down by Partygate – a tabloid exposé – that “democracy fails when your press fails to scrutinise and hold the Government accountable, and instead choose to get into bed with them so they can ensure the status quo”.
And could he really only have discovered as late as 2014 that James Hewitt met his mother Diana, Princess of Wales, after he was born, thereby negating any suggestion that he was his biological father? Royal correspondents have been debunking the myth on this basis for decades.
The witness statement also betrayed Harry’s growing lack of objectivity in suggesting that the tabloids were the same as trolls and that journalists and editors “had blood on their hands”.
Asked if he was “just reading out something that has been drafted by your solicitors for you”, Harry insisted: “This whole statement was written by me”, despite the error in his description of his father as “His Royal Highness, the King”, rather than “His Majesty”.
The inquisition
Forensic in his approach, and unfailingly polite in his questioning, it was not long before Green, once described as a “cross-examination master”, was deftly putting the Duke through his paces in the vein of an Eton schoolmaster giving a seminar entitled “Journalism 101″.
The crux of the case quickly appeared to boil down to Harry saying that any story where he was unsure of the origin must have been down to phone hacking and Green providing him with other plausible explanations.
Had Harry realised, for example, that the Press Association had reported that Princess Diana was due to visit the Prince for his 12th birthday at Ludgrove school before any of the Mirror titles did?
No, he didn’t.
Was he aware that another story about a rock climbing trip was already in the public domain? Or that an article about him breaking his thumb had been in the Edinburgh Evening News?
No, he wasn’t.
Told he was the source of one of his own complaints after he had revealed his birthday plans and other private information in an embargoed interview, the Duke admitted “I see the similarities, of course”, before suggesting “the timing was suspicious”.
And so it went on.
Despite having repeatedly accused the palace of briefing against him, Harry appeared unwilling to accept that some stories had been published by MGN because the palace had briefed them.
Admitting he had “little to go on” in supporting his claims with actual evidence, Harry repeatedly sought to make broader statements about press intrusion and the impact it caused. “I have no idea how this article or the elements of the article itself made their way into a newspaper”, he conceded at one point, telling the court on numerous occasions: “You’d have to ask the journalist”.
In the world according to Harry, articles are “suspicious” if they don’t carry a byline or contain quotes from unknown “sources” and “insiders”, while even untrue stories could have been hacked by journalists “desperate” to take any royal story further.
He claimed to have “never heard of anyone writing up a story already in the public domain and selling it for £200”, and suggested finding him in Noosa, a popular seaside resort in Queensland, would be like “trying to find a needle in a haystack”, only to be told a local hack had easily tracked him down.
Grasping the nettle, Green asked the Duke midway through proceedings: “Are you suggesting that just because the Mirror has admitted one incident of phone hacking, that every other article was obtained by phone hacking?” to which he replied: “No”.
As the hearing went on, however, the retaliatory royal seemed keen to make it not just a trial about illegal information gathering - but his own Leveson-esque exposé of media snooping and scooping, prompting Green to remind him: “Everybody has enormous sympathy with the amount of press intrusion you have suffered in your life but it does not follow that it was obtained unlawfully”. Nor does it necessarily follow that the likes of Chelsy Davy, his former girlfriend, and that “two faced s***” Paul Burrell, Diana’s former butler, will have enjoyed having their names dragged through court.
Blurred lines
What his first day in the witness box really showed is how blurred the lines have become for a Duke who claims to have been made paranoid by coverage that, by his own admission, he didn’t even read at the time.
In Harry’s mind - it wasn’t just “criminal” that his personal information was allegedly obtained by illegal means. He also seems to view the level of public interest in his life as a crime.
His suggestion that it was the press’ fault that he never achieved much academically, repeatedly got drunk and ended up taking drugs as he tried to live up to his tabloid persona revealed a man who has not just failed to come to terms with his fame – but also completely lost perspective on how he was actually portrayed by newspapers at the time.
For he seems to have totally forgotten how overwhelmingly positive the coverage was, even when he made such public mistakes as dressing as a Nazi, smoking cannabis and cavorting in hot tubs in Las Vegas.
Far from being vilified, such headlines only served to further endear the “playboy prince” to a press and public all too willing to dismiss such antics as “Harry being Harry”.
Few others in public life ever enjoyed so much leeway.
In claiming such stories were “hurtful, mean and cruel”, the Duke laid bare his deep sense of unhappiness – not just with the media – but a life he seems now to wish was lived a different way.
Her memoir One Soul, One Survivor shares her experiences with abuse.
