Harry’s lawyer, David Sherborne, made a rare intervention during Green’s cross-examination of the prince.

Green was questioning Harry about a 2006 article published in the People, detailing an argument the prince had in a nightclub with then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy.

“The article reports that Chelsy had ‘let rip in a string of phone calls’ and includes a comment from a ‘highly placed source’ that she had gone ‘berserk,’ had slammed the phone down because she was too angry, and then called back to scream at me for half an hour,” according to the prince’s witness statement.

Harry claimed that the “detail about the timing and length of the calls is so specific,” that it made him suspicious. 

He told the court that, because his “girlfriend’s number was bizarrely in the hands of Mirror journalists,” he believed the journalist who wrote the piece likely “got hold of her call data” and used it to make a story.

“You assume that having got hold of her number, they then managed to get hold of her phone records?” Green asked.

The prince agreed. When asked to provide evidence, Harry claimed that he thought “most of the evidence has been destroyed.”

In his written evidence, the prince cited three payments made to various contributors to the story, which he claimed to find “particularly suspicious.”

Green suggested that a more likely version of events is that “a payment has been made to a freelance journalist” who may have attended the nightclub, rather than hacking the prince’s or Davy’s phone.

“One of those payments, I accept, is probably to a person who works at the club,” Harry said.

Sherborne intervened, claiming that Green’s line of questioning was “inappropriate.”

The prince’s lawyer claimed that when Green suggests that “what has happened is X, it’s putting a case that there is no basis for.”

“Mr Sherborne’s right in principle, you can’t invite Prince Harry in advance to agree that something has happened,” the judge responded.