What Prince Harry’s Settlement Means for Him and Britain’s Royal Family

Prince Harry’s last-minute settlement of a long-running suit with Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids was on the front page of a handful of London papers on Thursday, though conspicuously, not on any owned by Mr. Murdoch.

The Sun, which admitted illegal activity by private investigators it hired more than a decade ago to dig up personal information on Harry, didn’t get to the story until Page 6. The Times of London, Mr. Murdoch’s broadsheet, covered it at the bottom of Page 12, next to a report about the failing eyesight of the actress Judi Dench.

The Daily Mail, whose publisher, Associated Newspapers, is also being sued by Harry for hacking his cellphone and invading his privacy, reported the news on an inside page, as did The Daily Mirror, whose publisher, Mirror Group Newspapers, lost a phone hacking lawsuit to Harry in 2023.

Such are the hard realities of going to war with Britain’s tabloids, as Harry essentially did in 2019, when he filed the first of multiple lawsuits against three powerful publishers: Associated Newspapers, Mirror Group and Mr. Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers. The Daily Mail case is expected to go to trial next year.

Even papers that are not in litigation with Harry, like the right-wing Daily Telegraph, treated the deal dismissively. The Telegraph, in a front-page article, said “Harry climbs down after eight-figure payout,” adding, “His quest to bring down part of the Murdoch empire has ended in a fizzle rather than a bang.”

Critics of the press coverage said it played down the significance of what Harry had extracted. Crucially, that included the first admission by News Group Newspapers that unlawful activity had occurred, not just at The News of the World, a tabloid Mr. Murdoch shut down in 2011, but also at The Sun, his flagship British tabloid.

News Group emphasized that its admission applied to private investigators, not to editors or reporters at The Sun. But the paper was edited during several of these years by Rebekah Brooks, who is currently the chief executive of News U.K. (News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of News U.K., publishes The Sun.)

Harry’s fellow plaintiff, Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, said he would hand a dossier outlining evidence of criminal conduct to the police. Harry’s lawyer, David Sherborne, urged the police and Parliament to investigate not just the unlawful activity at The Sun, but also evidence of perjury and a cover-up by current and former News executives.

“If you’re interested in an accountable media, Harry’s was actually an act done in the public interest, at considerable cost to himself,” said Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent at the BBC. “He’s gotten them to accept something they’ve refused to accept for years.”

“The dispiriting thing for him is that the public don’t appreciate that,” Mr. Hunt added. “A lot of their understanding of what Harry’s up to is through the lens of a media that is implacably hostile to him.”

Press coverage of Harry and his wife, Meghan, turned unremittingly negative after they announced plans to leave Britain in 2020. It has taken a heavy toll on their popularity: In a survey by the polling firm YouGov late last year in Britain, Harry’s approval rating was 32 percent, compared to 74 percent for his brother, William. Meghan’s rating was 19 percent, rock bottom for a prominent royal.

“The blackening of Prince Harry’s name and his wife by large chunks of Fleet Street has been really awful to watch,” Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, said to Channel 4 on Wednesday, referring to London’s traditional thoroughfare for newspaper publishing. “It seems like an almost deliberate tactic to destroy the credibility of somebody who is a threat to them.”

In this case, Harry may have deepened his predicament by stressing the necessity of a trial. Speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook summit last month, he explained that under English law, plaintiffs who reject settlements that are larger than what they are awarded by the court are on the hook for the legal costs of both sides. News Group Newspapers had already spent more than a billion dollars on settling 1,300 phone hacking claims, leaving only Harry and Mr. Watson determined to take their claims to court.

“They’ve settled because they had to settle,” Harry said. “So therefore, one of the main reasons for seeing this through is accountability, because I am the last person that can actually achieve that.”

Yet moments before the trial began, Harry agreed to a settlement worth at least 10 million pounds ($12.3 million). As Piers Morgan, a broadcaster and vocal critic of the prince, posted on social media, “So ‘moral crusader’ Prince Harry took the cash.”

Harry has not said what he plans to do with the money. His legal bills will be formidable, though Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer, said these are usually covered by the party offering the settlement in a separate payment. He has not commented beyond a statement that was read out for him by Mr. Sherborne.

In one respect, however, Harry’s decision to settle could ease tensions with his family. He said last year that his campaign against the tabloids was a central cause of the rift with his brother, William, and his father, King Charles III.

Harry claimed that they had a “secret agreement” with News Group under which they agreed to hold off on, or settle, legal claims to avoid having to testify about potentially embarrassing details from their intercepted voice mail messages. William, his brother noted in a legal filing, settled with News Group for a “huge sum of money” in 2020.

Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where William has his office, declined to comment on the settlement.

By joining his brother in taking a deal, Harry will avoid another embarrassing spectacle for the royal family. But Mr. Hunt and other royal watchers cautioned against concluding that this alone will heal a rift that includes painful issues like the family’s treatment of Meghan and the airing of dirty laundry in his memoir, “Spare.”

“The damage runs so deep that one court case is not going to be enough to resolve it,” Mr. Hunt said. “The fissures run wide.”