“A whiny, entitled parody of himself”. “A po-faced, sanctimonious, virtue-signalling hypocrite”. “His own worst nightmare, an utter irrelevance.”
These are just a smattering of the choice phrases Piers Morgan has aimed at Prince Harry over the years since their bitter (and very public) feud began — somewhere around the time of his wedding to Meghan Markle in 2018. The brash TalkTV host has been a vocal critic of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex since then, calling them “the world’s most tone-deaf, hypocritical, narcissistic, deluded, whiny brats.” He famously stormed off set and quit his Good Morning Britain gig after saying he did not believe Meghan’s claims she experienced suicidal thoughts during that infamous 2021 Oprah interview, triggering a record 57,121 complaints to Ofcom.
The former Daily Mirror editor — a staunch defender of the Royal family — once admitted he had probably “taken things a bit too far” with his criticism of the couple, but his attacks have continued. He’s described the couple’s Netflix documentary as a “sickening betrayal” of the Royal Family and just this month joked that Harry “got what he deserved”, getting “stuck behind the large red feather plume on Anne’s hat” at his father’s Coronation. But now it’s Harry’s turn — or attempt, at least — to stick the knife in. This week, the duke took to the High Court in his blockbuster legal battle against Morgan’s former employers, Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), over alleged phone hacking.
The case is not solely about Morgan, the paper’s ex-editor — Harry claims multiple reporters at its titles were linked to unlawful information gathering — but the prince was quick to single Morgan out in what is, notably, the first time he has addressed Morgan’s comments in public. “As a consequence of me bringing my Mirror Group claim, both myself and my wife have been subjected to a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation from Piers Morgan,” he told the court this week, adding that the thought of Morgan and his colleagues “earwigging” into his mother’s private messages makes him feel “physically sick”.
Morgan is reported to be named 61 times in just one 92-page court filing outlining the case and commentators say the allegations could be “extremely damaging” to his reputation. “Harry is going to pursue this because he’s absolutely determined,” journalism professor Tim Luckhurst said, ahead of the trial starting. “Thus the Mirror is going to come under intense scrutiny and, if under that scrutiny it falters, it will be extremely damaging to the Mirror and extremely damaging to the editorial team who were in charge at the time.”
So what was Morgan’s relationship with the Sussexes before all of this and triggered this increasingly bitter feud?
A prince plagued by tabloids
Harry has famously always had a strained and complicated relationship with the British press. In court this week, he criticised the “vile” behaviour of British tabloids and said that press intrusion had had a “devastating impact on [his and his wife’s] mental health and wellbeing” — as it had all his life. His relationship with Morgan goes back decades, to 1995 when Morgan became the editor of the Daily Mirror. Harry alleges that the Mirror hacked his phone the following year, in 1996, when he was at Eton, saying articles featured details of his feelings regarding the divorce of his parents and the ill health of a family friend. MGN’s barrister Andrew Green – a fierce cross-examiner nicknamed “the beast” – pointed out that Harry wasn’t issued with a mobile phone until 1998, to which Harry noted that he did have access to a landline phone.
Another key chapter being tackled in the court case is from 2004 to 2010, when Harry was in an “on-off” relationship with ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy. Harry says his and Davy’s holiday to Mozambique was disrupted after journalists from the Mirror “and other tabloids” “blagged” his flight details and hotel bookings by intercepting voicemails. He said that journalists flew out and booked into a nearby hotel “before we got there”.
“We were never on our own and able to enjoy each other’s company away from the prying eyes of the tabloids. This put a huge amount of unnecessary stress and strain on our relationship,” he writes in his witness statement. “Ultimately, these factors led [Chelsy] to make the decision that a Royal life was not for her, which was incredibly upsetting for me at the time.”
Morgan has always denied phone hacking, recently saying that he will not take lectures on privacy invasion from “somebody who has spent the last three years ruthlessly and cynically invading the Royal Family’s privacy for vast commercial gain”.
Ghosted by Meghan
Harry now blames Morgan and his tabloid colleagues for his difficult public upbringing, but the feud is not understood to have become personal until many years later, when Meghan Markle came on the scene. Morgan and Markle weren’t always at loggerheads. Six years after Harry’s relationship with Davy broke down, Harry met Markle, a Suits actress. It just so happened to be the same year – same week, in fact – that Morgan met Markle.
The pair developed a virtual friendship when he followed her on Twitter and she reportedly messaged him saying she was a fan of his, later meeting for a drink in London when Meghan was visiting the UK to watch Serena Williams at Wimbledon.
“We had two hours in the pub, she had a couple of dirty martinis and pints - we got on brilliantly,” he once said of the meeting during an appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden. “Then I put her in a cab, and it turns out it was the cab that took her to a party where she met Prince Harry. The next night they had a solo dinner and that was the last I ever heard from Meghan Markle. I never heard from her again - Meghan Markle ghosted me.”
The week Harry and Meghan went public with their relationship, Morgan wrote a tell-all article about his “two hours in the pub with Harry’s new girlfriend”, concluding that he thought she was “a slight social climber”. In the months and years that followed he called her a “fake”, a “ruthless social climber” and accused her of using her marriage to “get to the top” as well as being “a grasping, selfish, scheming Kardashian wannabe” and “narcissistic whiny brat.”
Ofcom, a “danger to the future of the monarchy” and Harry’s day in court
So did it all really start with a so-called ghosting? It depends who you ask. In January 2020 – four years after his encounter with Markle – Morgan told GQ magazine he’d felt strongly about Harry and Meghan for about 18 months, “ever since I could see the way the wind was blowing”.
“The truth about Meghan Markle is that she’s a social climbing piece of work and all the people rushing to her defence have not, I’ve noticed, had any personal dealings with her,” he said at the time, accusing her of cutting out a long line of friends and family and “trying to extricate Harry from the royal family”.
“I think she represents a clear and present danger to the future of the monarchy and I don’t say that lightly,” he continued. “If you are going to have two renegade celebrity part-time royals bestriding the globe cashing in on their royal status, I think that could accelerate an atmosphere of republicanism that can be very dangerous to the existence of the monarchy. There are very important issues here and I think it’s something people should be emotive about if they, like me, value the monarchy and the royal family.”
As someone who makes a living out of controversial views and has long been a staunch defender of the institution that is the Royal Family, Morgan’s comments were in many ways unsurprising. But what has surprised many people is quite how extreme his views have become. In typically bullish fashion, the TV host has labelled them everything from “the world’s most tone-deaf, hypocritical, narcissistic, deluded, whiny brats” to “appallingly bitter, staggeringly self-obsessed, utterly deluded, and woefully tone-deaf laughing stocks”.
He famously stepped down from his hosting gig on Good Morning Britain after saying he did not believe Meghan’s claims she experienced suicidal thoughts during her and Harry’s “a two-hour trash-a-thon of our royal family” with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, triggering a record numbers of complaints.
In the years since, his public vendetta against the couple has ramped up further. His most scathing attacks against the couple include that they “bullied” the Queen into allowing them to leave the Royal Family, that their Netflix documentary was a “sickening betrayal” and that Harry “got what he deserved”, getting “stuck behind the large red feather plume on Anne’s hat” at his father’s Coronation.
”Harry is not just persona non grata, he’s also become his own worst nightmare, an utter irrelevance,” Morgan wrote in the Sun following the Coronation. “The sad truth for him is that for all his attention-seeking antics before, during and after the Coronation, nobody really cared whether he was there or not.”
Harry has stayed largely silent on the subject of Morgan – until now. This week, he told the court that he and Meghan had been subjected to “a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation from Piers Morgan” – the first time he has personally name-checked the TV host in all his years of fighting over press intrusion. “The thought of Piers Morgan and his band of journalists earwigging into my mother’s private and sensitive messages (in the same way as they have me) and then having given her a ‘nightmare time’ three months prior to her death in Paris, makes me feel physically sick and even more determined to hold those responsible, including Mr Morgan, accountable for their vile and entirely unjustified behaviour,” he added.
Harry’s witness statement also included an assumption that Morgan’s attacks were “presumably in retaliation and in the hope that I will back down”. If it wasn’t clear before, this week’s court appearance is the prince’s clearest signal that he has no intention of backing down.
“I wish him luck with his privacy campaign,” said Morgan. “I look forward to reading it in his next book.”
