When will Prince Harry admit defeat in his ‘frankly hopeless’ legal case?

Many of us believe that Prince Harry and his recent actions could fairly be described as ‘frankly hopeless’. Now, a High Court judge can be added to their number. Mr Justice Lane has dismissed Harry’s appeal against an earlier judgement that he was not entitled to automatic police protection when he moved abroad. The latest court documents, released yesterday, do not make happy reading for the Duke of Sussex.

The judge has ordered Harry to pay 90 per cent of the government’s costs in the court case (well over £500,000, apparently) and has delivered a stinging rebuke to the Duke and his legal team. Not only did Mr Justice Lane remind Harry that his original case was ‘comprehensively lost’ and ‘failed on all of the pleaded grounds’, but he went on to damn the appeal that his lawyers had put together. He remarked that it relied upon ‘a great deal of unsupported speculation’, and that it continued to ‘[display] precisely the same kind of errors’ that the original application had demonstrated, such as a ‘formalistic’ and ‘inappropriate’ attitude towards the submission.