The Times on Harry’s immature performance at court today :
‘It’s a fight that has taken its toll. Most Brits who move to California make their friends jealous when they pop back for the weekend looking a decade younger. Harry has somehow achieved the opposite. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to wrinkles. Just ask Yoda.
His Royal Highness prickled and bristled. He blinked and nodded. He rocked from side to side in his seat. He seemed every inch the man who prowls the Wetherspoons bar at half past ten on a Friday night, in ever-increasing desperation for someone to spill his pint. There was almost no question put to him that received a straight answer. Instead, this was always “disgusting”, that was always “disgraceful”. Rather than actually answer questions regarding the various witness statements of other participants, he preferred to question their “credibility”.
Eventually, the judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, had to intervene. “You are doing exactly what lots of litigants do,” he told Harry, “which is to argue back to the barrister about the evidence that is being put to you, when your role is simply to answer the questions.”
The prince allowed himself a three-second sulk and, from that point on, tried a slightly new tactic, which was to continue to seek to land his punches, then turn sideways toward the judge for approval each time he did so. It was an unfortunate strategy. His Royal Highness and I happen to be at almost identical points in our ascent of the Hamilton-Norwood scale of male pattern baldness. Head on, staring his interrogator in the eye, the duke could just about pass for a stage three. Each time he turned his head, he leapt directly to seven. After seven, all that’s left is the Bic.
The longer he stared, the more unsettling it became. For more than an hour, his eyes narrowed ever further, to the point where it felt like not only the eyeballs but the sockets themselves had shifted closer together. Cameras aren’t allowed in courts, which was a shame. His eyes alone would have done huge numbers on Instagram as one of those optical-illusion memes in which, believe it or not, the dots aren’t actually moving.
….
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I’ve seen many a tear in a High Court witness box and they tend to come not during cross-examination but at the very end, when the claimant is being led through his evidence by his own legal team, which is exactly what happened here. The bit, in other words, which is always, quite literally, rehearsed.’