The House That Harry Built.

Prince Harry has reached a curious stage of public life. Every few months there seems to be another interview, another legal action, another attempt to settle an argument that has already occupied years of his life. The details change. The cast expands or contracts. The central story rarely does.

This week's defeat in the courts against Associated Newspapers, alongside Elton John, David Furnish, Liz Hurley, Sadie Frost, Baroness Doreen Lawrence and Sir Simon Hughes, was simply the latest chapter. Lawyers will continue debating whether the evidence met the legal threshold. Others will argue about the conduct of newspapers decades ago. The judgment itself is probably less interesting than what it reveals about Harry's place in public life.

Most people still carry the same image of him. A twelve-year-old boy walking behind his mother's coffin. It remains one of those moments that fixed itself in our collective memory. It explains much of what followed. It explains why Harry has always been granted a degree of understanding that few public figures receive.

Nor were all his complaints misplaced. Parts of the British tabloid press behaved disgracefully. Phone hacking, unlawful information gathering and industrial intrusion into private lives have all been established elsewhere. Harry was right about some things long before many newspapers were willing to admit them. Yet sympathy has its own peculiar habit. It can become permanent. There comes a point when an old injury stops explaining a person's choices and starts arranging them.

Dickens understood this perfectly. Miss Havisham was never absurd because she had suffered. She became tragic because she organised her entire existence around the moment she had been wronged. The clocks remained stopped. The wedding breakfast remained untouched. Every room led back to the same unhappy afternoon.

Prince Harry has not stopped the clocks. He has simply spent years returning to them. The memoir returned there. The documentaries returned there. The witness box returned there. The interviews returned there. The lawsuits continue to return there. Whatever the immediate subject, the conversation almost always finds its way back to the same room. Leaving the Royal Family proved considerably easier than leaving the role it had written for him.

There is an irony here that receives surprisingly little attention. Harry has spent years arguing that privacy deserves protection. Few would disagree. Yet much of his public life since leaving Britain has depended upon opening the doors to that same private life. Conversations with his father. Arguments with his brother. Family tensions. Domestic routines. Memories once known only to a handful of people have become memoirs, documentaries, interviews and podcasts. Choosing to reveal something is plainly different from having it stolen. Even so, privacy begins to look rather different once it has acquired a commercial value.

That observation is not a criticism of Harry alone. Modern celebrity increasingly treats privacy as something to be licensed rather than preserved. Exclusive access has become a currency. Harry simply happens to have one of the more valuable catalogues in the business. There are public figures remembered for what they built. Others are remembered for what they changed. Harry increasingly presents himself as a man defined by what happened to him.

That feels an unnecessarily narrow future for someone who once appeared to possess a much wider horizon. The easiest explanation is to blame those around him. It is also the least persuasive. Harry's distrust of the press predates California by many years. These legal battles are not somebody else's project. They are his.

Perhaps that is why this week's defeat feels less significant as a legal event than as another repetition of a familiar pattern. Each case promises resolution. Each case extends the argument. Success never quite finishes it. Failure certainly doesn't.

Dickens understood something else about Miss Havisham. Maintaining the past required constant work. The clocks had to remain unwound. The dust had to remain undisturbed. Every visitor had to understand why the room existed.

Prince Harry has spent years inviting the public inside. One hopes he eventually decides to close the front door.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.