Prince Harry and others ordered to pay £9.54m to Daily Mail publisher

Prince Harry and six other high-profile figures have been ordered to pay an initial £9.54 million to the publisher of the Daily Mail after losing their long-running privacy case. The ruling, issued by High Court Judge Mr. Justice Nicklin on Friday, August 21, 2026, requires the claimants to make the interim payment to Associated Newspapers Limited by August 28.

The payment is part of the publisher's total legal costs, which it has stated amount to approximately £34.5 million. The judge's decision follows his dismissal of the group's lawsuit in a judgment on July 7, 2026. In that ruling, Nicklin found that the claimants had failed to prove their allegations that the publisher had engaged in widespread unlawful information gathering, such as phone hacking, over several decades.

The group of claimants includes the Duke of Sussex, Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish, actresses Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, and former Liberal Democrat MP Sir Simon Hughes. They had accused Associated Newspapers of illegal practices in obtaining private information for stories published between 1997 and 2015.

In his costs judgment, Nicklin was highly critical of...