Prince Harry’s court battle with ‘highly intrusive’ press

Prince Harry has returned to London for a High Court case against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) in which he will allege that the publisher’s behaviour left him “paranoid beyond belief”. The prince’s claims relate to alleged unlawful information gathering used in 14 articles between 2001 and 2013, which ANL “strongly denies”.

‘Highly intrusive’ and ‘damaging’

The prince is one of seven high-profile claimants – including Elton John and Liz Hurley – against ANL, which owns the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, as well as Metro and The i Paper. Other claimants include John’s husband, David Furnish, former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, actor Sadie Frost and Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

ANL journalists are accused of “hacking mobile phone voicemails, tapping landline calls and ‘blagging’ personal information” about subjects without their knowledge or consent, said The Times. The trial is due to last nine weeks, and the total cost is “estimated to be about £40 million”.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

On the second day of the trial, the claimants’ barrister, David Sherborne, claimed that the material the company obtained on Harry’s romantic relationships was “highly intrusive”, “damaging” and had “serious security implications”. Sherborne also alleged that ANL illegally obtained information about Hurley’s paternity battle with Stephen Bing, as well as “incredibly private” information about the surrogacy and care arrangements relating to John’s newborn son, said Sky News.

ANL has argued that the claims “should be dismissed”, owing to a six-year statute of limitations on privacy claims, said The Telegraph. The publisher believes the claimants “knew or should have known” about the existence of the articles in question “long before the cut-off date for claims to be brought”. The company denies using illegal means to obtain information, instead telling the court that Harry’s friends were a “good source of leaks” for journalists, divulging information about his private life.

Questions have also arisen over the reliability of witness evidence, said The Times. Private investigator Gavin Burrows, whose evidence is a “key part” of the claimants’ case, now maintains that he was “never instructed or commissioned by anyone at The Mail on Sunday or the Daily Mail to conduct unlawful information gathering on their behalf”.

‘Personal crusade’

This case is Prince Harry’s third “major court battle” accusing media groups of “unlawful behaviour”, said the BBC. In December 2023, he won 15 claims against Mirror Group Newspapers for “unlawfully gathering information for stories published about him”. In January 2025, The Sun agreed to pay “substantial damages” and issued an apology to the prince over claims of “unlawful intrusion into his life”.

This could be Harry’s final courtroom confrontation with the British press, but it is also his “biggest”, said Sky News. There are “reputations on the line” and “the stakes for all sides are high”. The duke sees this as his “personal crusade”, once saying that “changing the media landscape would be his life's work. That work is well under way.”

“For now, all parties are standing firm,” said The Guardian. The claimants are not backing down, despite the risk of having to pay ANL’s “enormous legal bill” if they fail to convince the court that the “evidence on which they rely is reliable for the purposes of their case”.

As for the defendant, while the Daily Mail banned the use of private investigators in its reporting in 2007, it still faces the “unedifying prospect of having 30 years of its journalistic practices examined in court”. Whatever the result, “the question is whether there really can be any winners”.