The surprise appearance of the Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry, at the High Court at London on Monday brings into focus the escalating stakes between the Sussexes, who have stepped back from their royal duties but seemingly search out the spotlight, and the British press, which finds them irresistible copy. 

Absent from the estranged prince’s public agenda were any meetings with his father, King Charles III, or his brother William, the Prince of Wales. Buckingham Palace noted that the senior royals had no plans to meet with Prince Harry, who has reportedly requested such a meeting —  and an apology from his family —  as a condition for attending his father’s May 6 coronation.  

Today’s court appearance relates to a set of preliminary hearings, which are expected to conclude on Thursday and involve a group of seven celebrities — including Elton John and Jude Law’s ex-wife, Sadie Frost of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” who both attended court today —  who accuse Associated Newspapers Ltd., publishers of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, of “breaking and entry into private property” via wiretapping and other unlawful tactics.

Prince Harry’s attorneys argued that Associated Newspapers’s actions engendered “suspicion and paranoia” and that he was  “deprived of important aspects of his teenage years.” He told a journalist of ITV News, Tom Bradby, earlier this year that reforming Britain’s media is now his “life’s work.” 

The celebrities assert that they are the “victims of abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy.” Associated Newspapers calls the accusations “preposterous smears.” PA Media, a British news outlet, reports that Prince Harry sat “towards the back of the courtroom, occasionally taking notes in a small black notebook.”

The Daily Mail has always fiercely denied it had anything to do with the phone hacking in the 1990s that would years later engulf other British tabloids and bring down Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World in 2011. The Daily Mail has never been conclusively linked to the hacking. Its owner, Associated Newspapers, today slammed Prince Harry and his cohort for trying to drag it down into that mire.

This case is only one that the Duke has launched against Associated Newspapers and Fleet Street more broadly. The rancorous royal is also suing Associated Newspapers for disclosing details of his negotiations with the Home Office relating to his security detail. Then there is a separate phone hacking case against Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and tabloid rival the Daily Mirror, due for trial in May. 

The Daily Mail also recently lost a case brought against it by the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, over its printing of an angry letter she sent her father about his contacts with the press and that she argued was her “personal property.” The Mail has agreed to pay her one pound in damages though it may have to pay her an unspecified additional sum for “copyright infringement.”

In court on Monday, Sky News reports that the “Duke of Sussex sat just three chairs away from a line of journalists,” but that proximity is belied by a history of antagonism that precedes this  full court press against the press. In his memoir, “Spare,” he castigates the press for  “showing such contempt, such vile disrespect to the woman I loved.” That would be his wife. 

Prince Harry goes on to blame a “dreadful mob of dweebs and crones and cut-rate criminals and clinically diagnosable sadists along Fleet Street” who “feel the need to get their jollies and plump their profits — and work out their personal issues — by tormenting one very large, very ancient, very dysfunctional family.”

The duke has also accused members of that family of getting “into bed with the devil,” meaning members of the British press. In particular, he points a finger at the Queen Consort, formerly Camilla Parker Bowles, who he calls “dangerous because of the connections that she was forging” with journalists, which yielded “people or bodies left in the street.”

It’s been reported that the one thing the King had asked the Prince not to do in his book was to criticize the Queen Consort. Observers note that shortly after the book was released, the Sussexes were notified by the Palace they were being evicted from their Windsor residence, Frogmore Cottage.

Still unclear today is how Harry’s security arrangements were made, as the Prince has quarreled fiercely with the Home Office over the matter. Also unclear is whether the Prince is staying at Frogmore Cottage, which is securely within the embrace of Windsor Castle’s royal grounds, and where the Palace is said to be allowing the Duke to domicile at prior to eviction.

Duchess Meghan is believed to have stayed behind with their children at the family’s $15 million Montecito, California mansion, which is heavily secured.

Prince Harry ties his own antipathy to the press to how scribes treated his mother Diana, Princess of Wales. In a statement in support of Meghan, he warned that “I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”