In his tabloid trench war, Prince Harry is going over the top

Editorial: On his first day in court, the Duke of Sussex unleashed the kind of polemic any tabloid columnist might be proud of

Prince Harry is also prosecuting the media in a very different forum – the court of public opinion (AP)

Not for the first time in recent years, the British press finds itself on trial. Formally, Prince Harry and his co-plaintiffs from the world of entertainment and sport are suing Mirror Group Newspapers in a civil case for alleged instances of phone hacking and other unlawful activity.

Parallel to the sombre proceedings in the High Court, Prince Harry is also prosecuting the media in a very different forum – the court of public opinion. His astonishing attack on “rock bottom” Britain and her government is unprecedented. Let’s not forget that he is a prince of the realm.

The Duke of Sussex, like the other plaintiffs and indeed anyone else, is fully entitled to pursue his grievances through the courts. In his case, he plainly feels that he, his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales, and indeed other members of his family, have been unfairly and sometimes unlawfully pursued by the media since he was a child. No one disputes that the loss of his mother at the age of 12, traumatised him.

There is also no doubt that some elements of the press did generally abuse their power in the past. There have been other trials and a lengthy public inquiry, chaired by Lord Leveson, that laid those malpractices out in all their gruesome detail. Editors, reporters, proprietors and others were made accountable for their actions. The closure of the News of the World followed, as well as substantial reform in the regulation of the press.

Times, in other words, have changed. These are, after all, allegations of a historical nature, though the duke’s obsession with the media is very much a feature of his present frame of mind. We will see what the judge makes of the cases, and the detailed, specific allegations made about the media by Prince Harry, which date back two decades.

However, the prince’s broad – indeed blanket – allegations in his 55-page witness statement about the state of the press, and even the government, seem disproportionate, lurid, overstated, dated, and indeed often unfounded.

They are neither directly related to the case, nor particularly useful as context. The duke, for example, says that the tabloids newspapers are the “mothership of trolling”, where “trolls react and mobilise to stories they create… People have died as a result, and people will continue to kill themselves by suicide when they can’t see any other way out. How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness.”

It is quite an accomplished piece of polemic, one that any tabloid columnist might be proud of. But it is just that: polemic, with little relationship to reality or the way the media actually operates.

Indeed, this fundamental misunderstanding about the functions of a free press is something that has distorted the duke’s arguments, and unwittingly weakened his moral case.

He seems quite unaware that social media is a beast far more feral than the so-called “mainstream media”, and that it needs no encouragement from anyone to organise campaigns of hate or to cook up outlandish conspiracy theories.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex may be right in their belief that there are many people who wish to break up their marriage, but the duke fails to mention the enthusiastic, if not fawning, coverage of their marriage in 2018, a moment of genuine national affection towards the couple. At the time there was great hope that the Sussexes would prove a formidable asset for The Firm and for the country. The press has not in fact had it in for Harry “since he was born” as he states, and he and his own media advisers have found plenty of opportunities to cooperate on stories and photo ops, as was the case for Diana, for much of the time when she was a working member of the family and under proper police protection.

The prince has made legitimate criticisms of the media, but he gains nothing from exaggeration. Since the 1990s the media landscape has been transformed in a way that he scarcely mentions. No doubt for his own honourable reasons, he says that he regards himself as on a “moral” mission, as “a soldier upholding important values”. That is a matter for him.

But he should then be prepared for the incoming bombardment.

When, for example, he made chilling claims about a high-speed chase through Manhattan it provoked memories of his mother.

On closer inspection, though, doubts began to arise about the story, and the credibility of the prince’s account began to erode. So too has the sensational allegation of racism against a family member in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, with the unnamed royal said to have commented on the potential skin colour of Harry’s first child, Archie. That story now appears to have been quietly withdrawn from circulation.

Harry has also lost a good deal of public sympathy for his case for privacy by freely inviting publishers, friendly journalists and Netflix film crews to learn the most intimate details of his private life, and in a commercial context. He even betrayed the usual rules of military decorum by revealing his “kill count” in Afghanistan – which only made him and his family more tempting targets for people far more dangerous than tabloid journalists.

Prince Harry’s is not a conventional lobbying exercise of media reform, arguing the cause through reason and with constructive proposals. It is instead an unrelenting war of vengeance. It is being waged against the press for past wrongs, both real and perceived, with the law as the primary weapon of choice, and media allies such as Netflix providing back-up. It is an exercise that is proving increasingly fruitless, however, and growing to be self-defeating. As he well knows from his time in the forces, you can’t win every battle, still less a war.