Prince Harry defeated in phone hacking legal battle against Daily Mail publisher
Prince Harry and a group of six other high-profile household names have lost a long-running legal battle against Associated Newspapers over allegations of illegal information gathering, including phone hacking, after an 11-week trial earlier this year.
Mr Justice Nicklin said in a 436-page judgment the group of claimants had failed to prove the allegations and therefore dismissed all their claims, noting the evidence “did not prove that the relevant information must have been obtained unlawfully”.
“In assessing Prince Harry’s evidence overall, it was apparent that he wished the Court to understand the personal impact of the matters in issue,” Mr Justice Nicklin said, adding that “at times, this led him beyond giving factual evidence into advancing arguments on the issues.”
He said that as he “indicated to Prince Harry at the time, that is not uncommon: many litigants feel a strong instinct to argue their case themselves.”
“Overall, this did not affect the quality of Prince Harry’s evidence, which I accept. As with each of the claimants, Prince Harry has limited evidence to give on the contentious matters in dispute,” he added.
‘An overwhelming vindication of our journalism’, says paper chief
Editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, Paul Dacre, said in a lengthy statement that the ruling was “an overwhelming vindication of our journalism”.
He went on to state that “Prince Harry wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug-taking and, in cringe-making detail, how he lost his virginity. There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family. For him, to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin.”
‘The truth is that this trumped-up action – which has cost well over £50m and wasted a huge amount of valuable court time – should never have been brought to trial. That it did raises profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession,” he added.
The Duke of Sussex, Sir Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, actresses Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost, campaigner Doreen Lawrence, and former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes brought a lawsuit in 2022 against Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Daily Mail, claiming serious privacy breaches dating back over 30 years.
Prince Harry’s claim centres on 14 articles published between 2001 and 2013, focusing heavily on his private life and relationships prior to meeting his wife Megan Markle.
The Duke of Sussex alleged that journalists used landline tapping and voicemail interception, and obtained information deceptively through impersonation techniques known as ‘blagging’ to access confidential records such as flight details and travel plans.
The judgment follows a trial which began in the High Court in January with over 40 witnesses giving evidence for the publisher, which strongly denied all the claims against it and said it “has established a complete defence to all parts of the claims on the merits”, and that the cases have been brought too late.
This comes after Prince Harry failed to strike out part of a libel claim in December 2023 against Associated Newspapers over a February 2022 article about his lawsuit against the Home Office over his downgraded UK security arrangements, and was ordered to pay the publishers’ lawyers £50,000.
Andrew Fremlin-Key, partner at City law firm Withers, said that although this marks a victory for Associated Newspapers, “financially, there is no real winner in this trial.”
“With reported legal costs of around £40-50m, this has been a very expensive privacy case. The claimants will almost certainly be considering an appeal, but there is no automatic right to one. They will need permission from the court, and the Court of Appeal will not simply re-run the trial,” Fremlin-Key said.
A host of hacking claims
This marks the third legal dispute brought by Prince Harry against a newspaper group, which previously sued News Group Newspapers, which publishes The Sun and Rupert Murdoch’s defunct News of the World, and publisher of The Mirror, Mirror Group Newspapers, over allegations of illegally gathering information.
A High Court judge in December 2023 found there was “extensive” phone hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers, which is owned by Reach Plc, and awarded the Prince £140,600 in damages in February 2024, when the duke agreed to settle the case.
Prince Harry settled the case in January 2025 as the publisher offered “an unequivocal apology” for the phone hacking.