The enemy of my enemy is my friend, according to the old adage; and so it stands that someone who you find generally objectionable can also, occasionally, be correct. Many people who would not count themselves fans of Prince Harry would find it hard not to sympathise with his ongoing campaign against more scurrilous elements of the tabloid press. As a new ITV documentary, Tabloids On Trial, suggests, the media’s actions amounted to a horrendous invasion of privacy for Harry and many others in the public eye over a period of years. Yet, as ever, it is considerably harder to sympathise with him than it is the other victims, purely because of the manner in which he conducts himself.

A taste of this comes early on in the documentary, in which the prince pugnaciously declares: ‘This is a David vs Goliath situation…the Davids are the claimants and the Goliaths are this vast media enterprise.’

“When you’re vindicated it proves you weren’t being paranoid”

Prince Harry says he experienced the same paranoia as his mother Princess Diana.@BeccaBarry‘s exclusive interview features in Tabloids on Trial on ITV1 at 9pm on Thursday.

Read more here: https://t.co/w0oO0UXal5 pic.twitter.com/y0k0UXI4Ep

— ITV News (@itvnews) July 24, 2024

Few would regard Prince Harry as a poor, put-upon figure, scrabbling about in his Montecito mansion to make ends meet. So immediately the usual self-delusion and grandiosity is in play, a sense compounded when he says: ‘I don’t think there is anyone in the world who is better suited and placed to see this through than myself.’

From a publicity perspective, this is undoubtedly true. Harry’s many, many legal cases against various media organisations have attracted worldwide attention. They continue to do so, in a way that the likes of Hugh Grant and Charlotte Church – both interviewed in the programme, both understandably angry about the whole-scale invasion of their privacy – cannot.

Yet Grant and Church are also more straightforwardly sympathetic figures. Harry, especially in his post-Britain, post-working royal phase, cannot simply claim that he is a wronged victim of the media, trying to lead a blameless private life with his family. Such figures do not open their hearts and homes to Netflix, nor do they publish sensational biographies in which they dish the dirt on all around them. Tabloids on Trial – which clearly, and justifiably, regarded the centrepiece interview between Rebecca Barry and Harry as its selling point – offers a sympathetic account of his travails, creating a feeling of intimacy by frequently filming him speaking directly into the camera. Yet it is also telling that Barry, without going full Frost/Nixon on the Duke of Sussex, dared to ask him some more penetrating questions than the kid-gloved likes of Oprah Winfrey and Tom Bradby ever did.

Was it fair, for instance, to suggest that there was an element of payback involved in a quest that makes Captain Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick look like a harmless pleasure cruise? Harry blinked, as if surprised, and stressed that the press themselves were retaliating against him for his effrontery in exposing their chicanery.

He was also very swift to stress that his mother had been hacked and that her paranoia regarding the press was fully justified: ‘I think paranoia is a very interesting word, but when you’re vindicated, it proves you weren’t paranoid.’

It’s hard not to see this as a barbed allusion to Prince William’s 2021 statement that Diana had ‘fear, paranoia and isolation’ in her life, albeit as the result of the BBC and Martin Bashir’s actions in forging documents in order to obtain a revelatory interview from her. Even from afar, the feud still continues.

Towards the end of the conversation, Harry, who has promised a high-profile case against the Sun next year, was asked about his wider relations with his estranged relatives. With unintentional bathos, he remarked, of his apparently interminable legal wranglings, ‘it would be nice if we did it as a family’. It’s as if intensive High Court cases were a bonding experience akin to going out for a picnic, but he is at least resolute in his own determination: ‘For me, the mission continues.’

The evil press were firmly blamed for the estrangement that has occurred rather than any actions of him or his wife. There was a minor revelation when Harry said: ‘I won’t bring my wife back to this country’, citing his fear of knife or acid attacks if Meghan was to return here, perhaps bearing the latest produce from her America Riviera Orchard sideline. Ridicule is more likely.

It is hard not to feel sympathy for a man who is clearly deeply troubled and unhappy, and whose determination to keep fighting increasingly expensive and emotionally demanding court cases increasingly seems like a quixotic and self-indulgent quest.

Harry may thrive on the publicity, the battles and the attention that his undeniably righteous anger deserves. But, on this evidence, he is in severe danger of becoming monomaniacally fixated on an issue that shows no signs of ever being resolved to his satisfaction.