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"The Duke of Sussex seemed every inch the man who prowls Wetherspoons, desperately looking for someone to spill his pint"

Wednesday January 21 2026, 6.15pm The Times TOM PECK

“With your lordship’s permission I call my first witness, the Duke of Sussex,” said Prince Harry’s barrister, the ever-fragrant David Sherborne. The duke took a few short steps to the witness box and, as is customary, placed his right hand on a waiting King James Bible, which is about as close as he’s got to a member of the royal family in quite some time.

Harry has previously described his five-years-and-counting battle with the newspapers he believes to have wronged him as “the fight of his life”. It soon became clear that, as far as the fight was concerned, this was the round he had been especially looking forward to. 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 (3). Each time he turned his head, he leapt directly to seven (7). After seven (7), 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.

Harry no longer lives within the confines of the decades-old royal mantra of “never complain, never explain”. It must be hard, never intervening as your life is turned into a soap opera. But complaining has its downsides too, principally because you can end up here, in the Royal Courts of Justice, denying having ever sent direct messages to women on Facebook under the pseudonym “Mr Mischief”. If you don’t complain, you don’t have to explain.

But Harry loves explaining, as long as it’s on his own terms. He can explain his life in great detail in bestselling autobiographies or in seven-part Netflix documentaries of which he is executive producer. The Beckhams did a couple of those recently. Let’s just say evidence has subsequently emerged they may not have been telling what swearers on the King James Bible call “the whole truth.”

At one point, he was shown an old newspaper article about a conversation he had had about his former girlfriend Chelsy Davy around a campfire in Botswana. Sherborne, who was Coleen Rooney’s barrister not that long ago, can certainly recall the toe-curling scenes at the “Wagatha Christie” libel trial in which almost everything Rebekah Vardy denied doing was then shown to the court, clear as day, in WhatsApp messages she and her agent had written. At least in that case Team Vardy had the good sense to try to throw the evidence off a boat during a sightseeing trip in Aberdeenshire. Unfortunately for Harry, various details of conversations he denied having taken place he wrote about in his autobiography, which were then read out to him.

We were also told of a shocking incident, in a national park in Malawi, in which a freelance journalist paid a guide to take her to a place where she somehow knew Harry to be. It was never made quite clear whether it was Harry’s view that it is, or should be, illegal to pay a guide to take you round a national park in Malawi. Some clarity on this is urgently required. If Harry is right, I may be able to get about a third of my gap year refunded.

His appearance had been scheduled to last for at least a day, possibly a day and a half. In the end, it was over in two hours. It ended in a momentary flash of tears, as he recalled the suffering of his wife and the “misery” her life has become. Look, I’m sure they’ve been through a lot, but his wife doesn’t look all that miserable in either series of her relentlessly upbeat Netflix lifestyle show With Love, Meghan, apart from maybe the bit where she hosts a children’s party in the notable absence of any children. Watching a woman in her forties (40s) eating a ladybird 🐞 crostini in an empty wendy house is enough to break anyone’s heart.

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 The royal tear was the final act of a lightning-fast day. As they don’t quite say in Montecito, he was in and out faster than an In-N-Out burger. We were late starting and early finishing, the time on the courtroom clock showing half past two. The flame of justice burns bright in the no-longer flame-haired one. On Thursday, the torch shall be passed to Liz Hurley.

BECAUSE "ANIMAL" OF ANTI-NOWHERE LEAGUE WAS "MATEY'S" WITH LEMMY -- READ ON TO FIND OUT MORE.

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on Nick "Animal" Culmer of UK punk rock band ANTI-NOWHERE LEAGUE performing live in the early '80s, plus Lemmy Kilmister of MOTÖRHEAD performing live at Reading Rock Festival 1982 (with Dee Snyder of TWISTED SISTER in the background).

100% ROCK: "In the very early days, the punk and the metal crowds were quite hostile, weren’t they? They rarely mingled together. But you guys managed to straddle both camps really well. Perhaps only like Lemmy before you could do."

NICK "ANIMAL" CULMER: "It’s funny, I was matey's with Lemmy – we used to hang out a lot in London, in my early days. He knew a lot of the [Hell’s] Angels and stuff in London, obviously a lot of the gangs I knew, we used to get on really well, Lemmy and I. He used to have a boat on the Thames, and we used to spend many happy evenings doing illegal things. We used to go out on the town, we go out and see THE DAMNED play. It’s all in the book…

Lemmy and I fell out because we – it’s in the book – but in the mid-‘80s, when punk music got sort of stale and Lemmy was still doing MOTÖRHEAD, we went out, and he looked at me and said, "what the fuck’s happened to the ANTI-NOWHERE LEAGUE, you’ve all gone fucking pansies or something." Which was entirely right – too many drugs and too much confusion going on, and yeah, he was right. And in my book it says that I should’ve took his advice, that he was right, I just fell out with him [over it]. I was a bit of an arsehole. Obviously he was on the same sort of movement we were in those days, in 1980. He was just flying the flag of… I always thought that MOTÖRHEAD were sort of like the punk side of metal, and that ANTI-NOWHERE LEAGUE were the metal side of punk."

100% ROCK: "Yeah, definitely."

NICK: "We had some little thing between us, which was very similar but very different. I mean Lemmy never rode a motorcycle. We used to laugh at him. He never rode. We all used to ride and stuff like that. He had a good sense of humour, he was a good guy. Then we sort of parted ways, Lemmy and I, it was only later on – a few years ago – when we toured with MOTÖRHEAD, we actually sat down and sort of reminisced about the old days going up to London, you know, going playing with the band. We had a little bit of a heart to heart. It was quite good really, because we did fall out. When you get older, you think, "how fucking stupid was that?" We were silly. Unfortunately, he’s not with us anymore. Sad day, sad day."

1978 - American model Bebe Buell by Denis Jones, while she was modelling in London.

Shutterstock gives 2 different dates for the second photo, September 5 and December 15, 1978.

Hello readers, This is just a notice to make it official that ANL is on an indefinite hiatus. This is a beloved passion project and we fully plan to see it through, but real life comes first. We ask for patience and understanding and hope to see you all and be answering your questions again soon. Much love, Charmmycolour and Lonelylittleships