Meghan: a victory against the tabloids
The Duchess of Sussex’s court victory last week was a disaster for press freedom, said Ross Clark in The Daily Telegraph – and another step on the path towards “rule by judges”. Of course, Meghan was delighted with what she called a “precedent-setting” ruling in her civil action against The Mail on Sunday for publishing extracts of a letter she’d sent to her father, Thomas Markle, shortly after her wedding. The Court of Appeal upheld the High Court’s decision that publication breached her privacy – effectively enshrining a judge-made privacy law. The original judgment “was doubly offensive in that the matter was never allowed to go to a full trial”. The judges in both courts found that the issues in the case were so clear-cut that there was apparently no need for a full hearing. The case certainly seemed murkier than the judges allowed, said Jasper Jackson in The Independent. Meghan’s claim to have an “expectation of privacy” was rather undermined by her acknowledgement that she knew the letter might be leaked. Her case wasn’t helped, either, by her admission that she had misled the court by “forgetting” that she had ever approved briefings to the authors of a friendly biography.
Like it or not, “Meghan was in the right”, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. Yes, she emerged from this court case as rather “insufferable”, but to claim that the case was about “holding the powerful to account” and defending the “ancient liberties of the press” is mere “humbug”. This wasn’t “Watergate”. It was “a Sunday tabloid chancing its arm on a juicy bit of celebrity gossip”. Just because Meghan anticipated that her letter might be leaked doesn’t mean it should have been. The court’s finding is “narrow”, but the principle holds: the story failed the public interest test. “Newspapers don’t get to publish the contents of private letters just because they think folk will get a giggle out of reading them.”
This won’t be the end of it, said Haroon Siddique and Jim Waterson in The Guardian. Last week’s ruling means that public figures now “hold many more cards” when “taking on the British media”. The Mail on Sunday must now decide whether to accept that “the boundaries of British privacy law have tightened” or to risk an even bigger legal bill by taking the case on to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Prince Harry has a court case of his own looming next year, against The Sun, the News of the World and the Daily Mirror over phone-hacking. The Sussexes are deadly serious in their bid to “reshape a tabloid industry” which they loathe.