Some losses in court don’t just hurt, they reverberate. The kind where one accusation at a time throws out everything you came to prove until the room is very quiet. That’s pretty much what happened to Prince Harry and his co-plaintiffs this week in London’s High Court. Judge Matthew Nicklin threw out their lawsuit against Associated Newspapers, which owns the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.
All 97 claims of illegally gathering information were thrown out. These included listening in on voicemails, tapping landlines, and getting private information by lying. The claimants thought journalists had broken the law, but the court said that guessing is not the same as proof. When someone couldn’t explain where they got information, that didn’t mean they got it illegally. The judge made that very clear.
He said that the verdict was a “complete and obvious whitewash.” In a statement made together with Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, who said that her phone, bank account, and voicemails had all been hacked, he said that they went to court looking for justice and accountability but didn’t get either. Because Lawrence’s family has been through decades of institutional failures, it’s hard not to feel the weight of that phrase.
The situation that led to this decision is what makes it so shocking. This fight isn’t always a loss for Harry. He won his civil case against Mirror Group Newspapers in December 2023. The judge found evidence of “widespread and habitual” phone hacking and gave him £140,600 in damages. In January 2025, Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers reached a settlement with him. They paid him a lot of money and said they were sorry for seriously invading his privacy. Putting all of those past results together made this lawsuit seem like a continuation of something that was working.
But credibility was important in the Associated Newspapers case in a way that it wasn’t in the other cases. Private investigator Gavin Burrows, who was a key witness, is said to have put in a statement in 2021 saying that he had done illegal things for the publisher that affected “possibly thousands” of people. But in court, he said he had never signed such a document and that it was fake and traced. Judge Nicklin said Burrows’ story had been “comprehensively undermined.” When testimony falls apart like that, it tends to bring down everything else.
Associated Newspapers, on the other hand, fought back hard. Their stance stayed the same: the articles in question came from legal sources like press officers, spokespeople, freelancers, and information that had already been published. A representative for the publisher said that the verdict was “a huge win for the Daily Mail and its reporters, as well as for free speech in general.” Paul Dacre, who used to be editor of the Daily Mail, called it a “momentous victory.” For the tabloid business, this verdict seems like a line in the sand after years of phone-hacking scandals that made people lose faith in them.
The effects on the economy could be very bad. Legal fees are likely to be sought by Associated Newspapers. It is thought that the total bill for all plaintiffs, which included Elton John, his husband David Furnish, and actress Liz Hurley, could reach around £50 million. Of course, even for wealthy people, that’s a huge number.
It’s still not clear if there will be an appeal. The press accountability group Hacked Off has already said that the courts might not be the best place to look into the bigger issues with Mail practices. As for Harry, he said it was very personal to testify in front of the High Court as the first royal to do so in 130 years. He cried while giving evidence. Because of the Mail’s stories about his wife Meghan, he said, their lives were “an absolute misery.” No matter what you think of his campaign against the British press, it has never been really clear how he really feels about it.
This verdict most likely shuts a door. Harry’s legal battle against tabloid culture, which began ten years ago in part because he thinks that the way the press behaved led to the death of his mother in 1997, has reached a solid wall. A £50 million loss can change the goals of other potential claimants who are watching this happen. In a broad sense, the fight against the British press is still going on. But I feel like this chapter is over.
