Rupert Murdoch is breathing a sigh of relief over Prince Harry

Harry had been determined to bring the case to court, and to have the evidence set out and witnesses called in front of the world’s media. But on what should have been the first day of the trial – a day years in the making – a last-second settlement was reached. 

News Group Newspapers will pay a settlement that is reported to be between £10m and £20m, along with all of the legal costs of Harry and his fellow complainant, Tom Watson, the Labour politician, which could be another £10m. The publisher also read an apology in court that admitted News of the World journalists had been involved in phone hacking, and that private investigators for the Sun had engaged in “unlawful” surveillance practices.

How could that be anything other than a total victory for Prince Harry? The answer is a little complicated, but it’s largely because Harry was almost certainly sincere when he insisted for years that what he most wanted was his day in court, so that the people who orchestrated illegal acts – and who engaged in what Harry’s legal team alleged was a deliberate cover-up of those acts – would be named and shamed in court, and might face scrutiny.

Some of the key figures in senior roles at News Group are still significant figures in the British media. Rebekah Brooks was editor of the Sun and then CEO of News Group – a job she now once again holds. Victoria Newton was editor of the Sun’s gossip column Bizarre for much of the period covered by the case, and is now the newspaper’s editor. 

Will Lewis was a senior News Group executive who is now publisher of the Washington Post. All have consistently denied wrongdoing, but Harry’s legal team long suggested the trial would involve embarrassing or damaging revelations about the conduct of senior executives.

The issue of media wrongdoing is an extremely personal one to the prince, for obvious reasons. The death of his mother in 1997 in a high-speed car chase with paparazzi would be enough of a motivator for anyone, but in addition to that, Harry reportedly remains furious over the British media’s treatment of his wife Meghan. 

Prince Harry was not the first person to say that his motivation for suing News Group wasn’t financial, only then to settle at the last minute – Hugh Grant did exactly the same. Both men have subsequently faced attacks from critics that their motivations weren’t sincere – if they wanted their day in court so much, they ask, then why did they take the money?

The answer is that the legal system essentially forced them to do so. Trials are expensive and so the legal system features incentives designed to encourage people to settle their disputes out of court. The purpose of these cases is not supposed to be to say who was right or wrong in a dispute, but rather if one party damaged another in a way that violated the law, and what compensation was due if so.

One mechanism for avoiding a trial is that if one party wants to settle, they can formally let the court know this and disclose what offer they made – so News Group can inform the court it had offered Prince Harry an out-of-court settlement. 

Harry would have been free to continue with the case, but if the financial damages awarded to him were less than the settlement News Group offered, he would have been liable for his own legal costs from after the offer was refused – but would also have to pay News Group’s costs. 

In most cases, this works well as it is designed to stop people accepting reasonable or generous offers – but it leaves the option open in situations like this for a company like News Group to simply offer more than a judge would ever be likely to award in damages. That means that even if Harry had fought the case and won, he could still have found himself liable to pay millions more in costs than he won in damages.

Because of this, the fact that Hugh Grant and Prince Harry accepted their settlement offers doesn’t mean they saw dollar signs in their eyes and greedily took the cash. It means they got offers they almost literally couldn’t refuse, as otherwise even a win might have left them millions of pounds in the red.

What does News Group get out of paying so much to avoid legal cases, then? On the face of it, the apology the company issued to Prince Harry looks very comprehensive, but in practice it maintains a position that the company has held for years. 

The statement admits that News of the World journalists engaged in phone hacking – but given more than one went to prison for this, that’s hardly new information. It also admits that private investigators working for the Sun engaged in “unlawful” practices, but doesn’t specify what any of these were.

Crucially, it does not admit that even a single Sun journalist or employee was involved in phone hacking or any unlawful practice. News Group has paid more than a billion pounds settling claims over phone hacking and other practices, but without any admission of liability. By settling today, it has managed to hold that line against the last lawsuit – there are no more cases in the works.

Furthermore, News Group has avoided a trial that was set to last weeks and involve witness after witness testifying as to who did what, and which senior executives knew what when. It would have considered how 30 million emails got deleted, and how backups were wiped during the police investigation. It would have had the chance to make its own case, and offer its own explanations for all of those actions, but the bad PR against the company and some of its most senior figures would have been unavoidable.

And so that’s where the years-long battle between Prince Harry and the Sun ends. Harry might be walking away with his legal bills paid, and £10 million or more heading his way – but he failed to settle any real scores against the newspaper or its executives, or even to embarrass them in the trial.

News Group is likely to have had to shell out even more money given the new admissions have been made, but it has now seen off the last and greatest of its 15 years of legal cases. This could be the beginning of the end of the phone hacking scandal, too.

Leveson 2 is almost certainly not going to happen. In certain corners of the internet, its name alone has taken on an almost mythical status, as if it would be a broad inquiry into the entire conduct of the media.

The more mundane reality of Leveson 2 was that it would focus specifically on the nature of the relationship between the Met police and newspapers in the 2000s. This might have served a serious purpose nearer the time, but in reality, the Labour government is unlikely to spend political capital raking over a decades-old story with yet another inquiry. There are simply better battles to pick.

New police investigations into the phone hacking scandal or any alleged cover-ups also seem vanishingly unlikely to take place.

It might not be the kind of victory that gets celebrated in the movies, but make no mistake: despite the financial cost, News Group and Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers will be counting this outcome as one hell of a win.