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LONDON — It has been a familiar sight over the past decade: Prince Harry on the steps of a British courthouse for the latest round of his battle with a tabloid newspaper.
But if, as expected, he arrives at London’s High Court again on Monday, it could be the final time he takes on the British press, which he has accused of bullying and harassment and has blamed for the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. And some royal watchers say the end of his legal campaign could pave the way for a reconciliation with his father, King Charles III.
“We know that Harry’s various legal issues and trials have been the primary cause of the breakdown in the relationship between Charles and Harry,” NBC News’ royal contributor Daisy McAndrew said in an interview on Monday. “I think a lot of people within the royal family and outside will be hoping that once these court battles are over, Harry can turn his attention to reconciling with his family,” she added.
This time around, Harry will be joined by Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, actors Sadie Frost and Elizabeth Hurley and former lawmaker Simon Hughes in his case against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Baroness Doreen Lawrence, whose son Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in 1993, will also join the claimants. Her inclusion has been seen by some as significant because the Daily Mail campaigned for a long time to bring her son’s killers to justice, famously naming five people as his murderers on its front page. When two of the men, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were eventually convicted, the paper was praised for its coverage.
The group’s lawyers have accused ANL of “grave breaches of privacy” and alleged that the newspaper group commissioned private investigators to unlawfully target their clients, tapped and hacked their phones, and obtained private medical and financial records through deception, chiefly between 1993 and 2011.
Associated Newspapers Limited has strenuously denied the allegations. Asked for comment ahead of the trial on Thursday, the company referred NBC News to a previous statement issued in 2024 that called the claims “preposterous and without foundation.” It added that its defense submission said “the case brought by the Prince and others is ‘an affront to the hard-working journalists whose reputations and integrity, as well as those of Associated itself, are wrongly traduced.’”
Unlike Lawrence, Harry is no stranger to this kind of litigation, having successfully sued Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) in 2023 and last year receiving “substantial damages” and an apology after settling a claim against News Group Newspapers, the publisher of The Sun.
Both companies have paid out tens of millions of dollars to multiple claimants including celebrities, politicians and ordinary people after it emerged that some of their journalists and private investigators employed by their newspapers were hacking into phones and intercepting voicemails in the early 2000s.
Until now, however, Associated Newspapers Limited has not been sued for phone hacking, which, if proved, “will reshape the story of modern British journalism,” according to media lawyer Mark Stephens.
“Harry and his team characterize this as the last major test of the untouchable corner of the British press,” Stephens, who works at the London-based law firm Howard Kennedy LLP, said in a telephone interview last week. “It asks whether a major U.K. publisher has been operating in the shadows or is genuinely clean,” he added, referring to the fact that allegations of this nature have not been made against the Daily Mail or Mail on Sunday before.
The claimants, he said, will be relying on a “mosaic of inferences” that, in their totality, will need to demonstrate that “more probably than not” phone hacking and unlawful information gathering did occur.
It is unlikely that a settlement will be reached before the start of the trial, he said. “I think if it was going to settle, it would have done so by now,” he added. “No newspaper will want to have the scrutiny of this and would have settled if they thought they didn’t have a decent case.”
Whatever the outcome, NBC News’ royal contributor Emily Nash said that once he ends his legal battles, Harry might be able to patch up relations with his family, which became strained after he quit front-line royal duties in 2020, along with his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, before they moved to California.
“Members of the royal family traditionally use the maxim ‘Never complain, never explain,’ but they do pursue legal action if they feel they’ve been wronged,” she said in a video call Monday. “What they tend to do, though, is do it in a far more low-key manner,” she added. “They will settle out of court rather than have their personal information brought up in a public domain.”
Another source of contention has been Harry’s legal battle to have his police protection reinstated when he visits the U.K. The decision to strip him of publicly funded protection was made by the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, known by the acronym RAVEC, which approves security for the royals and VIPs, such as the prime minister.
After he lost a legal challenge to that ruling in May, Harry told the BBC that it was not safe to bring his family back to the U.K. because he could not guarantee their protection.
His father would not speak to him “because of this security stuff,” he said. “I would love reconciliation with my family. There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore,” he added. “I don’t know how much longer my father has.”
Harry, who is expected to testify on Thursday, met with Charles for the first time in 19 months in September, and if he does come to London for the case, it is unlikely they will reconcile, as Charles will be in Scotland for his traditional post-Christmas stay, which typically lasts for most of January.
Either way, it is unclear what will be required for the pair to patch things up, according to McAndrew, NBC News’ royal contributor.
Harry’s brother, Prince William, and Charles “will want some sort of guarantees that Harry will stop talking, ironically, to the press or writing books or doing documentaries and putting his side of the story out there in a way that impacts and sometimes detrimentally harms the rest of the royal family,” she said.
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