This was Prince Harry’s highly-anticipated day in court – and by the end he sounded increasingly weary, but still doggedly sticking to his arguments.
There were no clear-cut knock-out arguments, no courtroom fireworks, no angry outbursts – instead it was a rather intense stalemate.
The Mirror’s barrister Andrew Green has been described as a “beast” in court, but in this case he was more of a well-mannered bulldozer, repeatedly ramming into the prince’s allegations of phone hacking.
Prince Harry sat behind a desk and computer screen, water at hand, quietly answering questions for hours about tabloid news stories that mirrored his life since childhood.
“My mind’s gone blank for a second,” he said at one point, but there was no bristling or irritation about the cross-examining, when royals might be accustomed to more stagey, softball interviews.
The historic hearing was in a modern, open-plan courtroom, full of strip-lighting, modular furniture and boxes of paper, more like the set of The Office than a Victorian court drama.
Like everything else in Prince Harry’s life, there was huge press attention here, with a packed courtroom, hovering helicopters and banks of TV cameras and photographers crowded around the court entrance, fighting to get the best pictures for this press intrusion story.
When the hearing had begun this morning, Prince Harry initially seemed hesitant, but he changed the mood with a nervous joke about juggling with so many files of documents.
“You’ve got me doing a work-out,” he told the court.
And he seemed to grow in confidence, with an increasingly frequently repeated reply to questions about his hacking claims.
When Prince Harry was asked whether he thought the disputed news stories were based on unlawfully gathered information – he said why not ask the journalists who wrote them.
“I do not believe that as a witness it’s my job to deconstruct the article or be able to answer which parts are unlawfully obtained and which aren’t. I think the journalist themselves should be doing that,” he said in one reply.
The Mirror’s barrister kept drilling away at the foundations of Prince Harry’s claims – saying they were “in the realms of total speculation”.
In particular he highlighted that a number of these disputed Mirror news stories had already been published in other newspapers or news agencies.
Or in the case of a story about Prince Harry’s role in a school army cadet force, the Mirror’s lawyer said the story seemed to have come directly from a Palace press release, rather than any more nefarious sources.
The question left hanging in the air was why would hacking have even been necessary if the key information in these stories had already been openly published elsewhere?
Prince Harry’s approach was not to get dragged into the detail – “if you say so” – he said ironically a number of times in response to questions.
Instead he got in some spiky barbs of his own. He cast much doubt on the credibility of the terms “royal sources” and “insiders” used in royal reporting.
And he talked about the “paranoia” created by the constant sense of intrusion into his private life, making him suspicious of everyone around him. Even going to the doctor at school was a worry for him, in case medical information was leaked.
There were unexpectedly wide attacks in his witness statement –claiming that the state of the government, as well as the press, was at “rock bottom”, and this was from someone who remains a counsellor of state, although no longer a “working royal”.
He has an almost evangelical ire, driving him forward, with his battle to change the media his “life’s work”.
There were glimpses too into the sheer oddness of his life.
“I don’t walk down the street,” he said emphatically, in questions about a news story about meeting friends in a Fulham restaurant.
That was because of security and he said it as if it were an obvious matter of fact, that the everyday pavements were off limits to him.
While the focus of the High Court was on the machinery of the legal process, there’s no escaping that the public fascination in this spectacle was to see a senior royal facing questioning as a witness in open court.
The last time it was Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, in the 19th Century. It’s been something of a taboo for royals in modern times, for fear of uncorking something that couldn’t be put back into the bottle.
It’s also a lonely place, in court on his own, with the gulf from the rest of the Royal Family seeming even wider.
But Prince Harry emerged from court so far unscathed, got into his car and was driven away into the London streets, where he says he never feels able to walk.
He’ll be back for more of this journey, even further away from his comfort zone than his Californian home, for further questions on Wednesday morning.
