Watching Prince Harry in court last week, it was tempting to believe that he had no idea what he had let himself in for. That King Charles’s son had been horribly ill-advised in bringing his phone-hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers to the King’s Bench and therefore committing himself to an unprecedented day and a half’s cross-examination from a forensic King’s Counsel.
Certainly that was the impression that those newspapers which had most at stake in this case seemed keen to advance. Their reports screamed how the Duke of Sussex “was in the land of total speculation”, that he was “rattled and mumbling … as his case fell apart”, and that “he was not aware of any evidence that he had been hacked”. What could he have been thinking?
