Prince Harry’s monumental settlement deal with Rupert Murdoch and The Sun has potentially eased tensions with his family and opened up an eventual path to reconciliation.
His decision to reach an out-of-court settlement with News Group Newspapers, (NGN) the paper’s publisher, has prevented some extensive washing of the Royal Family’s dirty linen in court, a development which will no doubt have caused the King and his senior advisers to breathe a sigh of relief.
Harry had wanted to expose what he believes were shabby backroom deals between the palace and the Murdoch organisation. The Duke of Sussex has previously accused his family or their aides of trading private information about him in return for favourable treatment of others by the Murdoch press, including Queen Camilla – claims that have been denied by senior royal sources.
For this trial he had sought access to emails between NGN executives and senior figures at the palace, including the late Queen’s private secretaries, intending to argue that his father “acted to discourage and stymie” him from taking legal action against the Murdoch press even though his late grandmother Queen Elizabeth had been supportive.
Buckingham Palace declined to say whether it had been involved in any discussions that led to the deal with Murdoch, but friends hope the settlement can be a first step towards helping to bring them all closer again at some point.
Prince Harry and his barrister David Sherborne leave the Royal Courts of Justice in London at a previous hearing in 2023 (Photo: Ben Stansall/AFP)
After victories over The Mirror and now settlement with The Sun, Harry, 40, believes he has been vindicated in his determination to take on Britain’s tabloid media over the way they have covered him and his family for the past 30 years. His determination to do that was, he says, a big part of the rift that has developed between the Sussexes and the rest of the family.
In July last year he told the ITV programme Tabloids on Trial that his war with the media was “a central piece” of the breakdown of his relations with his family. “It’s caused, as you say, part of the rift,” he said.
Whether his relatives will now admit that he was right to take his battle to court in the glare of publicity remains to be seen. He wanted them to do it together as a family.
Although they are public figures and accept there will always be someone criticising them, many of the senior royals sympathised with Harry and Meghan because they too have had spells where they have been portrayed as the black sheep of the family in the national soap opera that is the Windsors.
But it was the tactics they disagreed with, fearing that the monarchy as an institution would suffer if it declared open war on the British media. At the palace there is a recognition that, although newspapers have less power than they used to, the monarchy needs publicity to thrive and needs to work with the national and local media.
From left, Kate, Prince Louis, Princess Charlotte, William, and Prince George attend the Christmas Day service at St Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, Norfolk (Photo: Aaron Chown/PA)
William and Kate may be estranged from the Sussexes but they take a very similar line in seeking to protect their own and their children’s privacy. They choose to go about it in a less confrontational way.
However, although they all want to limit coverage of their lives off duty, the rift between the Duke of Sussex, and his father the King and brother Prince William, now runs deep. There has been a breakdown of trust on both sides.
Harry believes the media were fed stories about him and his girlfriends in return for making his father and stepmother Camilla look better. Royal insiders say his family believes he cannot be trusted to keep conversations private after the number of damaging disclosures, and disputed claims he made about them in his memoir Spare and in a Netflix series with Meghan.
Another big source of tension between father and son awaits, with the prospect of a second case in April, in which Harry will appeal against a High Court ruling dismissing his challenge to the Home Office over its refusal to automatically allow him and his family police protection when they come to Britain.
Harry, Meghan, and Archie during a 2019 visit to South Africa (Photo: Samir Hussein/Pool/WireImage)
The King is said to find it embarrassing that his son is taking legal action against His Majesty’s Government. He is also said to find it infuriating that Harry claims his father is in a position to overturn the decision to refuse him guaranteed police protection. “He’s the King, he could sort that out any time he wants,” one source in Harry’s camp claimed.
But although several senior courtiers sit on the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec), they do not hold sway on the committee, which falls under the remit of the Home Office.
Harry will come back to Britain intermittently, but he has said he will not bring his family unless they are guaranteed police protection. So far there is no sign of a deal on that one, and the chance of King Charles seeing his grandchildren, Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three, remains remote for the time being.
A case against another newspaper group beckons in January next year, when Harry is due to join six others, including Sir Elton John and Baroness Lawrence, in taking on Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, alleging unlawful information gathering, which the group strenuously denies. On top of that, the Duke and Lord (Tom) Watson hope that the Metropolitan Police will accept some of their evidence and begin a criminal investigation into News Group Newspapers.
So there may be a few more bumps in the road yet. Nobody close to anyone inside the Royal Family is prepared to make sweeping predictions about reconciliation just yet, after five years of open warfare.
But for now at least Harry can bask in the glory of a landmark settlement thought to be worth more than £10m (including costs), having forced The Sun to apologise and admit for the first time that some of its private investigators engaged in unlawful information gathering (albeit not phone hacking).
The Duke has rarely been one to play his cards close to his chest. He had insisted very publicly that he was prepared to forsake any settlement and foot a bill amounting to millions so that all of the evidence could be aired.
He did not get his day in court, but the chances are that Prince Harry will be celebrating harder than Rupert Murdoch today.
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