Opinion: These shots at Prince Harry are cheap – and telling

For a man whose life has been marked by ceaseless public interest in his every move, Prince Harry’s performance over the last few days has felt remarkably amateur. Expectations were perhaps unreasonably high. Harry is the first British royal in 130 years to give evidence in a London court, and his turn in the witness box was especially charged. Following years of heated rebuttals against the media attention — he might call it intrusion — that has dogged him from birth, Harry is accusing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) of hacking his cell phone between 1996 and 2010, when he was in his teens and early 20s.

Holly Thomas - Holly Thomas

As is the case with so much of what he does, Harry has found himself in a position previously occupied by countless others but for which his life has offered him little practice and zero privacy. The general response has also been true to form: a hyper-focus on Harry’s celebrity and perceived shortcomings. That predictable zeal has come at the expense of empathy.

The issue of phone hacking by Britain’s tabloid media is far more insidious than some coverage of Harry’s testimony might suggest. On more than one occasion during the trial this week, Harry has avoided offering specific or in-depth answers to the opposing attorney’s questions — and both media commentary and the general public have understandably homed in on his apparent inability at times to recall relevant details. The picture conjured is one of an inept, paranoid aristocrat making outlandish claims against an imagined aggressor. But Harry is just one of over 100 people suing MGN, which publishes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People tabloids — and the group has caught heat for unlawful activity before.

In 2018, MGN settled a case with Hugh Grant after admitting that all three of its publications hacked the actor’s phone. In 2021, it settled phone hacking claims with other actors including Martin Clunes and David Walliams, and issued an apology. Regarding the current proceedings, MGN has said: “Where historical wrongdoing has taken place, we have made admissions, take full responsibility and apologise unreservedly, but we will vigorously defend against allegations of wrongdoing where our journalists acted lawfully.”

Whenever we’re tempted to act as judge and jury of Harry’s disposition on the stand, it’s worth considering that all of this is just one element of wider historic corruption involving other publishers. The most notorious among these was News Corp., which is headed by Rupert Murdoch. In 2005, a story about Prince William published by the now-defunct News of the World (NOTW), which was owned by News Corp., prompted royal officials to complain to the police about potential phone hacking. In 2012, British police suspected that over 1,000 people had been victims of the practice by various outlets. The scandal’s darkest chapters included a 2011 investigation by the FBI into whether News Corp. hacked the phones of 9/11 victims and the revelation that News of the World journalists had hacked into the phone of murder victim Milly Dowler, causing her parents to believe she was still alive. (News Corp. ultimately paid millions to her family and their designated charities, and Murdoch apologized, saying “I failed” and acknowledging a “cover-up.”)

Even set against this backdrop, Harry’s experience of the British media in the late 1990s and early 2000s was unusually egregious. As he has reiterated ad infinitum, he holds the paparazzi — and by extension, the British tabloid press — responsible for the death of his mother, Princess Diana. However the stories written about Harry in the wake of that loss were obtained, many were undeniably invasive, and in some cases, remarkably cruel. His 16th birthday party, a private lunch, wound up in the papers. Fights and travel plans shared with his then-girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, were reported in assiduous detail. When the pair broke up in 2007, a Sunday Mirror headline read “Hooray Harry’s Dumped.” And when as a younger boy Harry struggled academically at Eton, he was framed as a “thicko” and a “cheat.”

As Harry noted in his witness statement this week, that appraisal in particular has cast a shadow over his whole life. Less than two months ago, the author of a satirical version of Harry’s memoir reflected that it was “easy to mock” Harry, because he’s “a bit stupid.” In the last few days, social media has been awash with references to “dumb Prince Harry.” It’s become so habitual for the press and public to take such statements at face value that they rarely seem to consider their validity. Are the exam results of a boy who’d recently lost his mother under incredibly traumatic circumstances likely to be representative of his intelligence? As Harry noted in his memoir, he spent much of his time at school unable to sit still to read, because quieting his mind enough to concentrate on schoolwork allowed space for unbearable grief. Terrified of this, he did all he could to suppress his memory altogether — a reasonable coping mechanism, but not useful for acing tests.

Removing Harry from the equation, it’s strange that we’ve so readily accepted intelligence as indicative of a person’s worth. Stripped to essentials, cleverness is as superficial as beauty or inherited wealth. Most of us can now recognize how problematic it is to judge people based on their looks, or how rich their family is. Why should someone’s IQ, a quality that’s equally incidental to goodness, carry any more weight?

So much of Harry’s life and experience is unrelatable and apparently contradictory. He loathes the press, but he’s obsessed with it. He wants privacy, but he makes documentaries about himself. His down-to-earth third date with his now-wife was a safari in Botswana. But no matter how hypocritical he may or may not have been, he — like everyone else who brings a claim to court — deserves justice. Disparaging Harry may have become second nature to many, but it’s a reflex that fortifies harmful stereotypes and diminishes the often somber issues at hand. All of us have fallen short at a critical moment. But none of us is ever likely to be judged as exhaustively — or as loudly — as Prince Harry.

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