AARON PATRICK: Prince Harry’s court defeat to Daily Mail will embolden tabloid journalism

Prince Harry rolled the dice and lost. The consequences will be felt across the celebrity world.

The British High Court’s complete dismissal of his lawsuit against the Daily Mail in London overnight is a pivotal moment in the history of royal-media relations.

Fleet Street, the collective term for the British tabloids, will be emboldened by the decision. The famous and newsworthy, from King Charles III down, have another reason to fear exposure for their quirks, peccadilloes, misdeeds and misfortunes.

Because English is the lingua franca of scandal, and every media outlet is global, the effects could be international.

The 436-page judgement was unequivocal. Prince Harry, singer Elton John, his husband, David Furnish, actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, politician Simon Hughes and Doreen Lawrence, a crime victim’s father, did not prove that 55 articles about them published between 1997 and 2015 were based on information obtained illegally.

The allegations were worthy of a blockbuster tabloid story. The Mail, a right-wing mid-market tabloid that spawned the celebrity-obsessed Daily Mail website, broke into mobile phones and listened to private messages, bugged landlines, outsourced its corrupt news gathering to private investigators and paid off police, they said.

Journalism on trial

Instead of taking the safe option and paying the plaintiffs off — News Corp’s approach to similar litigation — the Mail’s parent company, Associated Newspapers, decided to defend its journalism.

All the articles were based on information obtained through legitimate means from publicists, the internet and people who socialised with the subjects of the articles, it argued in court.

Journalism — one version of it — was placed on trial. The British tabloids are some of the most aggressive on earth. Even minor stories are pursued with a vigour that might be expected in combat or professional sports.

Katherine Deves, a Liberal candidate in the 2022 election who made controversial comments about transgender people, has talked about her gay brother being chased down a street in the US by a photographer for the Mail.

There were many more serious examples. Hurley, the actress, was upset the paper reported on her newly born son’s father’s refusal to acknowledge paternity of their child. She was worried the boy would discover the articles when became old enough to read and use the internet.

One Mail headline about the story read: “Liz Hurley’s love child and the battle for his family’s fortune: How Damian Hurley’s grandparents tried to cut him out of his inheritance ... and his tragic father Steve Bing’s secret fight to win it back”

The product of this energy was compelling journalism attracting millions of readers, but not necessarily improving the world.

While Prince Harry and the other celebrities did not explicitly argue the Mail’s reporting was immoral, the case was predicated on the belief that tabloid journalism had gone too far. They wanted press power curtailed by the courts, a conservative institution often seen by the media as the enemy.

Sympathy for Harry

The High Court refused to play ball. Judge Matthew Nicklin ruled the evidence did not prove the Mail’s journalists broke the law or senior figures lied about their work, including editor-in-chief Paul Dacre, commonly regarded as one of Britain’s most feared men.

After the verdict, Lord Dacre expressed sympathy for the 41-year-old Prince Harry, a “confused and angry young man”, while skewering him.

“Prince Harry wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug taking, and, in cringe-making detail, on 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,” he said in a video message posted online.

“For him, to complain about his privacy being invaded takes, not just a biscuit, but the whole tin.”

The paper’s website handled the news in its typically understated style. ”CONSPIRACY TO DESTROY THE MAIL”, the lead headlined said on Wednesday morning Australian time.

Prince Harry and Baroness Lawrence called the decision a “complete and obvious whitewash”. “The lengths to which the Court has gone to exonerate the Mail is as shocking as it is totally unwarranted,” they wrote.

So the judge was in on the crimes? Maybe they think the Mail had incriminating photos of him.

However readers and non-readers feel about its reporting, the Mail will now be emboldened to pursue stories as hard as ever.

Which is incredibly important for a free society, for who else will tell us that Neil the dangerous seal might be euthanised by Tasmanian authorities or identify wives “who reveal the real reason they stop giving oral sex after marriage”?