Prince Harry arrives at London court for final showdown with British tabloids

LONDON — This is Prince Harry’s latest confrontation with the British tabloids.

The former royal arrived at London’s High Court on Monday for his latest legal battle with one of Britain’s biggest news agencies.

Cameras were lined up and correspondents prepared outside as he entered the Victorian Gothic building. Harry felt “confident and ready,” a spokesperson told NBC News ahead of the trial, which is expected to last nine weeks.

The Duke of Sussex leads a group of seven high-profile claimants, including Elton John and actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost. They accuse Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday newspapers, of using illegal methods to spy on them for sensational headlines.

The publisher denied the allegations and called them absurd.

Speculation is rife as to whether Harry’s final stand against Britain’s fearsome newspaper publishers could lead to a reconciliation with his father, King Charles III, after years of growing royal tensions.

But Harry’s spokesperson declined to say whether the prince planned to meet his family during the visit from his home in the United States with his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and their children.

The King is in Scotland this week.

Harry’s appearance in the witness box will be his second, having broken with royal tradition three years ago to give evidence. His attempt to tame the tabloid press, which he blames for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and the treatment of his wife, is widely seen as having contributed to tensions within his family.

He entered the court early Monday through a side entrance in a black SUV.

As the crowd of camera lenses raised in unison, he stepped out into the cold London morning, dressed in a navy blue suit, with a serious look on his face. But as reporters shouted “hello”, Harry smiled and waved before entering the building.

He was joined in Court 76 of the Royal Courts of Justice in London by some of his fellow claimants. John and his husband, David Furnish, are expected to testify remotely. Hurley was seen arriving at court Monday and Frost also joined him.

Former MP Simon Hughes and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, whose son Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in 1993, have also joined the claimants.

The group’s lawyers accused ANL of “serious invasions of privacy” and alleged that the media group commissioned private investigators to illegally target its clients, wiretapped and hacked their phones, and obtained private medical and financial records through deception, primarily between 1993 and 2011.

Opening the trial, their lawyer David Sherborne said there was “a clear, systematic and sustained use of illegal news gathering in both the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday”.

While ANL swore “they were a clean ship”, he said the publisher “knew these categorical denials were not true” and “they had skeletons in their closet”.

The company’s vigorous denials, destruction of records and “masses of missing documents” prevented the plaintiffs from learning what the papers had done, he added.

Associated Newspapers Limited has vigorously denied the allegations. Asked for comment Thursday before the trial, the company referred NBC News to a previous statement issued in 2024 that called the claims “absurd and baseless.”

He added that his defense arguments indicated that “the case brought by the prince and others is ‘an affront to hard-working journalists, whose reputation and integrity, as well as those of Associated itself, are wrongly defamed’.”