Inside the ballroom of the Hilton Bankside on Friday evening, the mood among journalists was high. .
Officiating at the annual press awards jamboree was a bow-tie-wearing Dominic Ponsford, the editor-in-chief of the industry journal behind the event, who even took a moment to joke about past clashes with Prince Harry, the fabled "ginger whinger".
Seated at the tables around him were many of those newspaper editors and columnists who have been publicly warring with the King’s errant second child, including Piers Morgan, the former gossip journalist, talent show judge, ex-editor of the Daily Mirror and television presenter.
A day later, and some in the room were facing a potential final reckoning. Could the landlord at that famous "last chance saloon", the watering hole at which Home Office minister David Mellor once warned the "gentlemen" of the popular press they were drinking in, really be shouting out "time, please" once again, 20 years on?
The ruling from Mr Justice Fancourt in the High Court, one which found the Duke had been subjected to damaging, illegal press activity between 2003 and 2009, has had some immediate effects. The Mirror Group of newspapers, in the frame during the legal proceedings, "apologised unreservedly" for "historical wrong-doing" later that day.
But the impact of Fancourt’s 386-page judgement on the reputations of other British newspaper businesses may take a little longer to show.
"Thank goodness for Prince Harry. The police now need to look at this and promptly," media campaigner and Hacked Off founder Brian Cathcart said.
"There are many people involved who are still in prominent, opinion-forming positions on newspapers."
Dr Evan Harris, a former Hacked Off director who has spent the last few years carrying out legal analysis for the claimants in the hacking litigation, also believes the torch of justice has just been relit by the Duke.
"Since the contentious decision by the Crown Prosecution Service in 2015 that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute any Mirror journalist or executive for phone hacking, tens of thousands of documents have been disclosed in this litigation, and as they were deployed in open court, many key documents are available to the police to see."
Writing in Prospect magazine, its editor, Alan Rusbridger, who edited The Guardian when it broke the hacking story in 2009, argues Fancourt’s words have cut through years of deceit.
"We know that newspaper managements at two of our biggest media companies have consistently concealed and denied the truth about what went on.
"They have issued dishonest statements and have lied to parliament, the stock exchange, to other journalists, to regulators and even the Leveson inquiry, set up to establish the truth. And now some have been caught telling porkies in court."
Nick Davies, who first broke the hacking scandal while at The Guardian, was quick to express his more limited hopes for change on social media.
"If the UK were just and democratic, [Rupert] Murdoch’s Talk TV would now have to consider suspending Piers Morgan and Richard Wallace, and the Met police would have to scope an investigation into Mirror Group crime."
More than a billion pounds has already been paid out in costs and damages, Rusbridger emphasised, without any admissions of guilt implicating senior editors or owners. And key emails have been deleted and documents lost.
The focus is now likely to switch to the Daily Mail, against which the Duke of Sussex still has many outstanding allegations. It could even be the beginning of what critics of British "tabloid culture" are heralding as an era of serious redress that, for them, would make up for the dropping of the planned second part of the Leveson inquiry, a decision taken against the judge’s wishes by former Tory culture secretary, Matt Hancock.
Murdoch’s newspaper group, owner of The Sun, does look vulnerable. Many of those implicated in the judge’s ruling are working there. Former editor of the right-wing popular titles The Sun and the defunct News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, who once avoided disgrace, is now chief executive of News UK. Last weekend her rehabilitation looked wobbly.
Morgan, now a presenter on Murdoch’s Talk TV, gave an angry doorstep statement on Saturday and still appears to be banking on dodging bullets. His carefully worded defence did not deny knowledge of the practice of phone hacking and so did not contradict the judgement.
Prince Harry’s attitude to the press diverged from the family path well before the birth of his son Archie in 2019, but he became much bolder after that. Later that year his wife, Meghan Markle, announced that she was suing the Mail on Sunday for printing parts of her letter to her estranged father and Harry also revealed he was taking action over alleged phone hacking.
Two years ago, the prince won an apology from the Mail on Sunday over an article claiming he had turned his back on the military and the High Court in London ruled that the same paper had breached Meghan’s privacy by publishing extracts from her letter. A year ago Harry started a libel claim against the Mail on Sunday over an article claiming he had tried to keep official protection for his family and then, in October last year, he joined the singer Elton John and others in suing the publisher of the Daily Mail, alleging phone tapping and other breaches of privacy.
His unexpected, even historic, appearance at the High Court at the beginning of his lawsuit against the Daily Mail’s publisher took place in March, and then, in early June, he arrived to give evidence at the Mirror Group phone hacking trial, arguing that about 140 articles published from 1996 to 2010 contained information obtained via unlawful methods.
More measured defenders of the press, such as Sir Alan Moses, a former chairman of the Independent Press Standards Association, are concerned about attempts to set up a phoney "licensed press" that would operate only within government restrictions.
Speaking on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he said the press should ideally be "unruly", although subject to the law. There was, Moses argued, an exceptional case to be made for the industry to protect freedom of expression.
— The Observer
