But it’s always been quite fundamental to the tabloids’ power that, in the absence of a fresh scandal, they can generate a propulsive narrative by pitting one member of the family against another – Diana against Camilla, Kate against Meghan, William against Harry, bold splashes of black and white in which the reader is invited to pick their team. Should Harry maybe give Camilla the benefit of the doubt, given that per his own testimony, multiple members of the family were being hacked? Perhaps.

Jude Law knows, now, that Sadie Frost wasn’t leaking details of their divorce. This is a story familiar to many who were hacked by the News of the World: unable to figure out where the papers were getting their intelligence, victims accused those around them. If the 1993 debacle had established the tabloids as amoral, and left the royals petrified of taking them on, the years of phone hacking that followed destroyed trust within the family. Periodically, some huffing royal watcher would be wheeled out to square the circle, with the line that it was the Queen they felt sorry for, her dignity undermined by the capers of her children. They never saw any moral contradiction between these completely dichotomous stances of respect and contempt, because they weren’t a moral agent, they were a newspaper, whose only logic is to sell itself.

The attitude of the tabloids was brazen: they would perform their elaborate patriotism, revel in the flag-waving, genuflect before the royals, while at the same time never missing an opportunity to heap shame on them. This was a calculated humiliation, and it’s hard to see what the legal recourse would have been for the then Prince Charles, given that the contents of the tape had already surfaced in an Australian weekly.

Sure, maybe there was a public interest case that people ought to know about Charles and Camilla’s affair, but it wasn’t necessary to transcribe this incredibly intimate, embarrassing conversation between them – especially as the affair was already common knowledge. Tampongate, in 1993, was the moment the gloves really came off in the battle with the media. This dynamic has always, until Harry took it on, appeared to be impossible to fight. There are elements of this saga that make no sense – chiefly, if William was paid, what would he need a “very large sum of money” for? In all the privations of his role – of privacy, of self-determination – surely the one thing he’s not short of is a bob or two? But mostly, this appears to be an entirely familiar tale: blackmail of the royals by sections of the print media, diverging from regular extortion only in the respect that it’s happening in plain view, its currency not cash but compliance.

The black prince murdoch