he judgement issued in the high court was lengthy and withering. After two years of legal wrangling over the privacy case brought by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex against the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline (Associated Newspapers) Lord Justice Warby had heard quite enough. Associated Newspapers’ case was so weak it didn’t justify a trial, save for one technical point on copyright law. Their defence was chucked out, and a summary judgement issued. It was uncomplimentary. The Mail on Sunday’s assertion of owning copyright in the letter she sent to her father Thomas in 2018, said the judge with obvious relish, “seems to me to occupy the shadowland between improbability and unreality” - a phrase right up there with Winston Churchill’s “terminological inexactitude” and ripe for the dictionaries of quotations. Any journalist, poignantly, can sense what fun Mr Justuce Warby must have had as he hammered the keyboard in his chambers: “It was, in short, a personal and private letter. The majority of what was published was about the claimant’s own behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour - as she saw it - and the resulting rift between them. These are inherently private and personal matters...Taken as a whole the disclosures were manifestly excessive and hence unlawful.”

No doubt costs and damages will be awarded to the Duchess; more to the point, the hurt and anguish inflicted on Associated Newspapers will be entirely proportional. If the Mail on Sunday has a heart, it too would now be “shattered into a million pieces”, just as Meghan told her dad that hers was.