Florence Wildblood was outside the Royal Courts Of Justice on the first day of one of the most explosive hearings in media history.
Associated Newspapers Ltd, which is the owner of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, is being sued by a host of British household names, including Prince Harry and Baroness Doreen Lawrence.
There are multiple entrances to the Royal Courts of Justice and, if you were aiming to keep a low profile, you certainly wouldn’t go through the main one, particularly if you knew that there were hoardes of paparazzi waiting on the off chance that you were going to arrive.
However, that’s exactly what Prince Harry did yesterday. Cameras, step ladders, swarming journos: these are all things that Prince Harry has made a point of avoiding since he took a step back from the royal family, and launched a – simultaneously deeply personal and deeply politically important – fight against the British media.
Harry didn’t have to attend the hearing yesterday, which, at the moment is mostly concerned with formalities and technicalities. And he also certainly didn’t have to turn up at the main entrance, meeting the paparazzi with a ‘good morning’.
But he did, because he’s now entrenched in a new phase of public life, one that revolves around facing the press as a player rather than a pawn.
We saw this with the release of his much-anticipated and very divisive memoir Spare at the start of this year.
This was an attempt to tell his own story – to put his own version of events on record – after years and years of having that story told for him. And we saw him yesterday because he knows the impact his presence in the court will have on what he last year termed his “life’s work”.
In the years following the Leveson Inquiry, a huge amount of additional evidence has come to light, suggesting that unlawful intelligence gathering was both much more widespread and much more serious than we first thought.
There have also been hundreds of civil claims brought against British newspaper groups, but you don’t really see this covered in the mainstream media for a variety of reasons, partially because it’s thought of as old news, partially because the press has a hesitancy to looking inward and analysing itself.
With Harry in court, this silence is no longer justifiable, and it’s particularly glaring in the case of the, primarily celebrity-oriented, outlets that normally cover his every move.
Sadie Frost also sat in court for the whole day, and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Elton John and David Furnish made appearances in the afternoon. There’s a sense that these individuals want this issue to be in the spotlight – and they know what to do in order to get it there.
Not only was Prince Harry in court, but his lawyers spent yesterday arguing against reporting restrictions the Mail was hoping to impose on the rest of the press.
