Six claimants challenge the decisions
Court staff confirmed on Friday, November 6, that the appeal bid had been filed. Joining Harry are Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, his husband David Furnish, and actresses Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost. The seventh claimant in the original case, former Liberal Democrat deputy leader Sir Simon Hughes, is not seeking to appeal.
A spokesperson for the six said they were seeking permission to challenge both Mr Justice Nicklin's dismissal of their claims and his indemnity costs order. The spokesperson said they "respectfully disagree with those unprecedented decisions, which they consider to be legally and factually flawed". Harry previously called the trial a "whitewash".
What the court rejected
Nicklin dismissed all seven claimants' cases on July 7, 2026, after an 11-week trial in London. His judgment was reported to span 436 pages. Legal analysts at Linklaters described it as one of the longest and most significant privacy judgments in recent English legal history.
According to Linklaters, the court concluded that none of the 57 articles or incidents at issue had been shown, on the balance of probabilities, to result from unlawful information gathering.
The allegations concerned work by private investigators, freelance journalists and ANL employees. The claimants' barristers said their methods included intercepting voicemail, tapping landlines and using deception to obtain information, a practice known as "blagging".
ANL, which publishes the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, strongly denied the allegations. Its lawyers said the journalists had provided a "compelling account of a pattern of legitimate sourcing of articles". They attributed the reporting to sources including friends and "leaky" social circles, press officers, spokespeople and freelancers, as well as earlier reporting and material from other newspapers and news agencies.
The court also addressed the filing deadline for specific claims brought by Hughes and Frost. It held that those claims would have been time-barred in any event, because the acts on which they relied occurred more than six years before the claims were brought.
The disputed legal bill
The claimants were ordered to make an interim payment of £9,544,355 to ANL while the full costs are assessed. In his August 2026 costs ruling, Nicklin described their presentation of the claims as "unreasonable to a high degree". He also found it "striking" that "not a single allegation of serious wrongdoing was voluntarily withdrawn" by the seven claimants.
ANL put its defense costs at more than £34 million. According to BBC News, the claimants had insurance covering up to £16.2 million of the publisher's costs, leaving them potentially facing a personal bill of about £18 million after the August ruling.
Nicklin also questioned the size of ANL's bill. He called a costs claim exceeding £34 million "on its face, excessive" and expressed serious concerns about whether the spending was reasonably incurred and the amounts reasonable. He nevertheless declined to cap the costs ANL could recover.
Responding to the August ruling, ANL called it "a devastating critique of an attempt to destroy a newspaper and the reputations of its journalists, editors and executives".
