Has Meghan finally won her battle against the press?

The duchess’s landmark victory against The Mail on Sunday marks yet another turning point in the fraught relationship between the royals and the media. Sean O’Grady considers how we reached this stage and what it means for the future

Meghan and Harry were very much taking the initiative and dictating their own terms, rather than being pushed out (Getty)

The judgment issued in the high court was lengthy and withering. After two years of legal wrangling over the privacy case brought by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex against the The Mail on Sunday and MailOnline (Associated Newspapers) Lord Justice Warby had heard quite enough. Associated Newspapers’ case was so weak it didn’t justify a trial, save for one technical point on copyright law. Its defence was chucked out, and a summary judgement issued.

It was uncomplimentary. The Mail on Sunday’s assertion of owning copyright in the letter she sent to her father Thomas in 2018, said the judge with obvious relish, “seems to me to occupy the shadowland between improbability and unreality” – a phrase right up there with Winston Churchill’s “terminological inexactitude” and ripe for the dictionaries of quotations. Any journalist, poignantly, can sense what fun Mr Justuce Warby must have had as he hammered the keyboard in his chambers: “It was, in short, a personal and private letter. The majority of what was published was about the claimant’s own behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour – as she saw it – and the resulting rift between them. These are inherently private and personal matters ... Taken as a whole the disclosures were manifestly excessive and hence unlawful.”

No doubt costs and damages will be awarded to the duchess; more to the point, the hurt and anguish inflicted on Associated Newspapers will be entirely proportional. If The Mail on Sunday has a heart, it too would now be “shattered into a million pieces”, just as Meghan told her dad that hers was.