Prince Harry’s legal defeat will be particularly painful

Today, Prince Harry lost a court case. If the law of averages is to be believed, he has involved himself in so many that it was inevitable that at least one was not going to go his way. Still, this particular defeat is likely to be difficult for the Duke of Sussex to take, as it involves one of his most cherished concerns; that of his personal security. The High Court has ruled that the Home Office’s decision that Harry will not be allowed to pay the police to protect him when he is in the United Kingdom is fair and legal. The Home Office had argued that it would be setting a dangerous precedent if the Duke was to be allowed to rent serving police officers, as if they were private security contractors, and a judge agreed with them. 

Even as Harry’s lawyers argued, optimistically, that ‘payment for policing is not inconsistent with the public interest or public confidence in the Metropolitan Police Service’, they must have known that they were on the stickiest of wickets.