Prince Harry and six other prominent figures have lost their High Court case against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), the publisher of the Daily Mail, over allegations that it used unlawful methods to gather information for stories about them. Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all the group's claims in an emphatic 436-page ruling, finding that the claimants had not proved any information was obtained illegally and that the court could not infer wrongdoing where a legitimate route to a story existed. The verdict, seen as likely to mark an end to new litigation from the phone-hacking scandal era, leaves the claimants potentially facing a legal bill of up to £50m as ANL seeks to recover its costs.

The claimants — the Duke of Sussex, Doreen Lawrence, Elton John, David Furnish, Elizabeth Hurley, Sadie Frost and former Liberal Democrat minister Simon Hughes — had accused the publisher of "clear, systematic and sustained" unlawful information-gathering, including phone hacking, bugging and corrupt payments to police, citing 55 articles published between 1997 and 2015. Their case was seriously weakened after a key witness, private investigator Gavin Burrows, disowned his witness statement as a forgery, and the judge found he was "comprehensively undermined" with no independent corroboration. Harry and Lawrence branded the ruling a "complete and obvious whitewash", while ANL called it a "magnificent vindication" of its journalism and former editor Paul Dacre described the case as a "conspiracy" to destroy the paper.