Golden Lawyer Tarnished: Sherborne’s High-Stakes Privacy Battle Ends in Humiliation
Celebrity barrister David Sherborne, long the go-to “barrister to the stars” with the permanent tan, wind-swept locks and A-list Rolodex,has taken a severe bruising after the comprehensive collapse of Prince Harry’s privacy claim against Associated Newspapers.
The Times reported his recent appearance in fancy Belgravia Square, noting his “unusual figure” – “His somewhat dishevelled appearance was far from the smooth, coiffed and tanned image he had developed over the years, when he represented celebrities ranging from Diana, Princess of Wales, to Sir Paul McCartney in the High Court,” the newspaper reported.
The High Court dismissed every allegation of unlawful information-gathering (phone hacking, blagging, bugging and the rest) brought by the Duke of Sussex and co-claimants including Sir Elton John, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Elizabeth Hurley and others.
Mr Justice Nicklin’s extensive judgment made clear that suspicion and inference were not enough to support the claim with the claimants failing to prove their case on the evidence.
The result has been widely described as an “utter, utter humiliation” for a lawyer whose pursuit of a claim critics say “should never have been brought” has left his golden reputation looking distinctly tarnished.
Big Wins
Sherborne had previously delivered big wins for Harry including a landmark phone-hacking victory against Mirror Group Newspapers and a substantial settlement (with full apology) from News Group Newspapers.
Those earlier successes burnished his reputation as the ultimate privacy and media-law operator, securiing clients ranging from the late Princess Diana to Johnny Depp, Coleen Rooney, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. LawFuel has covered that stellar run before.
This time the script flipped. The case against the Mail titles unravelled, key evidence (including from a private investigator) failed to land, and the claimants now face a massive costs bill with initial interim payments already ordered in the millions, with total exposure potentially far higher.
The initial payment of £9.5 million must be paid by August 28 but Associated Newspapers claims its costs total nearly £34.5 million, an amount that may be reduced but the claimants are potential up for a bill far in excess of the £16.2 million insurance cover they have.
Harry’s team called the outcome a “whitewash”, which hardly went down well with both lawyers or the British establishment, while the court and the successful defendants saw it as a decisive vindication of journalistic sourcing and a reminder that serious allegations require solid proof.
For Sherborne, the high-profile defeat marks a rare public setback after years of headline-making victories and a career spent at the sharp end of privacy, defamation and Leveson-era litigation.
The questions being asked of Sherborne are why he ever took the case, apart from the profile it added to his photo-friendly inclinations. After all, Justice Nicklin had some powerful words on the ‘merits’ of the case he brought:
“Standing back this was litigation conceived and pleaded on an unjustifiably wide canvas. With limited exceptions, it was speculative at origin and depended substantially on inference. Serious allegations, including allegations amounting to criminal conduct, were maintained over a prolonged period and pursued up to and including closing submissions, in circumstances where the evidential foundation for many of them was inadequate, where some were inconsistent with contemporaneous documents, and where the claimants failed to take the steps that a reasonable litigant should have taken to narrow, withdraw or abandon allegations as the case developed.”
