Prince Harry's Security Battle: Court Defeats, a Terror-Threat Claim, and a Newspaper Apology
Prince Harry has accused the chair of the committee that revoked his UK security of failing to warn him about a 2023 al-Qaeda terror threat, the latest turn in a legal fight over his state-funded protection that has now run through two courts and lost at both.
The Duke of Sussex challenged a February 2020 decision by the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec), the body that sets protection for royals and public figures, after being told he would no longer receive the same degree of personal protective security when visiting the UK. In 2024, retired High Court judge Sir Peter Lane ruled that Ravec's approach was neither irrational nor procedurally unfair. Prince Harry was given permission to appeal in June 2024, but after a two-day hearing in April 2025, the appeal was dismissed in May 2025 (Hello!).
The new accusation centres on the Ravec chair's conduct. Prince Harry says that in 2023, the FBI informed his private security team it had received intelligence from overseas indicating that senior al-Qaeda leaders had planned threats against him. He accuses the committee chair of failing to pass that intelligence to him or his team (The Times and Sunday Times, via Facebook).
A confidential security report, reported by ITV News in July 2026, identifies Prince Harry as the focus of six terrorist plots, five of them originating in the UK (ITV News, via Facebook). The Home Office has not publicly commented on the specific claim about the Ravec chair's handling of the 2023 intelligence.
Ravec operates behind closed doors. Its decisions weigh threat levels, public appearances, and cost. The committee's reasoning in Prince Harry's case was that his status had changed when he stepped back from royal duties and moved to the United States, and that his protection should be assessed on a bespoke basis rather than under the automatic tier afforded to working royals. Sir Peter Lane accepted that approach as lawful.
While the security case has moved through the administrative courts, Prince Harry has been pursuing parallel claims against newspaper publishers with mixed results. In January 2026, he and News Group Newspapers (NGN), which publishes The Sun and published the now-defunct News of the World, reached a settlement shortly before a trial that had been scheduled to last up to ten weeks. The agreement, announced on 22 January, included what was described as a "full and unequivocal apology" and "substantial" damages. NGN apologised for intrusion between 1996 and 2011, including unlawful activities by private investigators working for The Sun (Hello!).
The outcome was different against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the publisher of the Daily Mail. Prince Harry was one of seven high-profile claimants, including Sir Elton John and Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, who alleged unlawful information gathering. In November 2023, Mr Justice Nicklin ruled that ANL had failed to deliver a "knockout blow" to the claims at an early stage, allowing them to continue. But at trial, on 7 July 2026, the same judge ruled in ANL's favour, finding that none of the seven had proven the allegations (Hello!).
Two litigation threads have produced very different results: a settlement with an apology and damages from NGN, and a court loss against ANL. The security claim has lost at every stage so far, though the Duke's accusation about the withheld terror intelligence adds a new argument that has not yet been tested in a ruling.
The Ravec decision Prince Harry originally challenged was made in February 2020. More than six years on, the protection arrangements it set remain in place.
