Mr Justice Nicklin has dismissed in full the phone-hacking case brought against the Daily Mail's publisher by Prince Harry, Baroness Lawrence and other claimants, ruling their allegations of hacking, burglary and bugging were entirely without merit. The judgment matters because it represents a significant legal defeat for high-profile figures who had accused Associated Newspapers of unlawful information-gathering, and the paper has hailed it as a vindication of its journalism and of Britain's free press.

In his 436-page ruling, the judge repeatedly favoured the "impressive" and "honest" testimony of the Mail's journalists over what he called "unconvincing" and "inconsistent" evidence from the claimants' side, noting the claimants often had only "limited" direct knowledge and were acting on what they had been told. Prince Harry, 41, had alleged that 15 articles stemmed from unlawful activity, six of them written by Royal Editor Rebecca English, whom the judge praised; he threw out a claim she sought Chelsy Davy's flight details and criticised the claimants' lawyers for raising unsupported allegations. Harry and Baroness Lawrence have accused the judge of bias and of delivering a "whitewash".