After losing to the Mail, Prince Harry seems doomed to a sad life in California. And he did it to himself | Stephen Bates

It really hasn’t been a very good week for Harry. The fifth in line to the throne will retire to Montecito, his gated California fastness – not, as seemed at least possible a week ago, having visited his mother country to public sympathy and applause, mending a few broken fences and seeing his old dad again. Now instead it will be a retreat in confusion, not having stayed in a palace, or seeing his busy pater, and worst of all, bested at huge cost by the Daily Mail, the bete noire of all bete noires.

The prince might reflect that he has brought many of his troubles on himself. He will leave with the rightwing press chortling that, for a crusader for personal privacy, he has outed himself much more comprehensively than they ever managed with his rancorous TV interviews about how horrible his family has been to him, his glutinous Netflix series and, most of all, his memoir Spare, with its revelation, among much else, about his frostbitten penis.

Worse still, his obsessive campaign against the tabloid press has dragged other people, most notably Doreen Lawrence, with him into a legal case he was unlikely ever to win. As Mr Justice Nicklin pointed out in his 436-page ruling at the end of the three-month phone-hacking trial, inference and hearsay are not enough: hard evidence is needed. Perhaps his lawyers should have pointed that out and perhaps they did, and he didn’t listen. It was unfortunate that the chief witness, Gavin Burrows, retracted his evidence that he had been paid to hack celebrity phones 20-odd years ago, but without him the case was fatally undermined.

The Daily Mail front page on Wednesday.

Harry, or his lawyers, should known that newspapers don’t like to be challenged and employ their own legal teams to check details painstakingly closely before publication (the legal director was a former Labour shadow attorney general when I worked there). The Mail simply could not afford to lose, especially against the prince, and it was relentless in fighting the case. No wonder its former editor, Paul Dacre, was crowing on Tuesday night as the paper lavished the story across 11 pages with sententious moralising about the freedom of the press.

The ruling may well kick press regulation further into the weeds, so Harry’s hopes of wielding the simple sword of truth – as Jonathan Aitken, a former, spectacularly unsuccessful litigant against the Guardian, once had it – would seem to be indefinitely delayed. Instead, on 29 July a hearing will begin to give a ruling on the reported £50m legal costs of the action, much more than Harry alone can afford and enough to blast a large hole in Elton John’s bank balance – let alone those of Doreen Lawrence, so revered in the UK for her anti racism campaigning, or the former MP Simon Hughes, both of whom were fellow claimants. Dacre was particularly hurt by Lawrence after the Mail championed the family when their son Stephen was killed by white south London thugs in 1993. There was talk yesterday of an appeal against Nicklin’s judgment, but with the judge having dismissed all 97 allegations against the Mail, this would seem to be wishful thinking.

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, 28 October 2025. Photograph: Joe Scarnici/MLB Photos/Getty Images

It is unlikely that King Charles will help to pay his estranged son’s debts as the late Queen apparently did his uncle Andrew’s, after the Virginia Giuffre case. At least, the king may reflect, Harry did not learn the news while staying at Buckingham Palace.

Harry’s rancour against all those he believes have persecuted him have long since cost him most public sympathy, in the UK at least. The world does not see him on his terms. His demands for special treatment, including police protection for his family while he is in Britain, are unlikely to be met while he is not performing royal duties, and his apparent spurning of the offer of a bed in one of the 52 state bedrooms at Buckingham Palace on his current visit will not elicit much understanding.

He seems doomed to eke out a sad life in California, and we may not see either his wife Meghan or his children Archie and Lilibet here any time soon. Maybe the young ones will only see the family realm a decade or more hence if they come backpacking as students – but that might be good for them and the royal family. Perhaps Uncle William will put them up. Time heals.

• Stephen Bates formerly wrote about the royal family for the Guardian.

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