Sir Keir Starmer’s landslide victory in the U.K. elections on Thursday may hold a key lesson for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in their fraught dealings with the media.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex effectively declared open warfare on the British press with a series of lawsuits in 2019 and accused the wider royal family of betrayal for not publicly supporting them.

However, since their more confrontational approach to the media began, their popularity in the U.K. has collapsed, raising questions about whether their decision to fight was a good one.

Over the same period, Britain’s Labour Party leadership has transitioned from Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist who also battled the press but sunk to a crushing defeat, to Starmer, a center-left leader who won a landslide victory in Thursday’s vote.

The new prime minister endured a major campaign against him from some of the very same newspapers that have targeted Harry and Meghan but—like the monarchy—never fought back.

Furthermore, polling indicates Starmer maintained significant support among the readerships of those very newspapers, confounding a key plank of Harry’s argument about the media.

Prince Harry and the British Press

Harry has set out his views on the media in a detailed witness statement filed as part of his lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

“Whoever you are,” Harry wrote, “if you are of interest to the press at that time, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, whoever you’re with—if you’re in private or if you’re in public—you are a target. There is nowhere to hide.

“You become a victim of their business model. They claim to hold public figures to account, but they pick and choose depending on what they can get in return, (e.g. access/favours/influence) while refusing to hold themselves accountable,” the prince added.

“If they’re supposedly policing society, who on earth is policing them, when even successive governments are scared of alienating the press because position is power, and the closeness of relationship and lack of accountability between the two, means democracy as we know it fails? It is incredibly worrying for the entire U.K.

“Our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our government,” Harry continued, “both of whose reputations I believe are currently at rock bottom due to this apparent co-dependency.

“Democracy fails when your press fails to scrutinize and hold the government accountable, and instead choose to get into bed with them so they can ensure the status quo.”

Harry also gave insight into his view of the relationship between press and public in his March 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview: “If the source of the information is inherently corrupt or racist or biased, then that filters out to the rest of society.”

In other words, Harry views the media as forming a corrupt pact with politicians they believe they can benefit from in a way that then suffocates democracy by poisoning the well of information.

From that perspective, it is easy to see why Harry would want to fight to defeat this malign force. However, there is an alternate view that the bond between readers and media brands is more informal, with the former perfectly capable of ignoring the latter.

How Readers Supported Starmer Despite Newspaper Preference

Polling by Redfield & Wilton in the U.K. showed as recently as June that readers of the very newspapers that vehemently criticized the Labour leader were preparing to go out and vote for him.

And among readers of The Sun, Murdoch’s U.K. newspaper, which Harry is suing, 43 percent said they planned to vote Labour, compared to 22 percent for the Conservatives.

The data is striking not only because Starmer survived a tidal wave of negativity from right-wing newspapers but also because he did so without particularly fighting back.

And that speaks to the core fissure between Harry and his family. The prince was asking the royals to enter open conflict with the press in defense of Meghan, but King Charles III held to their famous “never complain, never explain” mantra.

Harry, though, said that silence was “betrayal.” None of this necessarily means the prince was wrong to accuse the media of bias, but it does challenge his own cure for the malaise.

How the Rise of Keir Starmer Tells a Different Story

No two life stories are entirely the same, and the barrage Starmer received from the British press has both similarities and differences to Harry and Meghan’s experience.

The prince’s determination to take on the media has its roots in his mother Princess Diana’s death, Meghan’s experiences of racism, and his own defense of his privacy, all of which is unique to him.

Starmer, though, was also subjected to a prolonged campaign to undermine him, including by the Daily Mail; in 2022, the U.K. newspaper ran days of coverage of what it termed the “beergate” scandal.

The Daily Mail, whose publisher was sued four times by Harry and Meghan, tried to get Starmer a criminal conviction during the coronavirus pandemic after he was photographed having a beer with his curry during a meeting with colleagues.

Starmer was cleared by the police after he said it was a work event during local election campaigning and therefore within lockdown rules. The scandal was mocked by many on social media for the way editors chronicled the number of days of coverage they had provided. For example, one Mail front page recorded that it was “Beergate: Day 13.”