JAN MOIR: After five hours of cross-examination, one wonders if Prince Harry felt so cheerful

Finally! Here we go. Curtain up, drum roll. Light, action and here comes the judge, closely followed by the Duke of Sussex, a day late.

In the corner of a civil courtroom, sitting in a light wooden witness box, Prince Harry initially seemed happy to finally have his day in court. But after five blood-curdling hours of cross-examination by Andrew Green KC, acting for Mirror Group Newspapers, one wonders if he felt so buoyant.

With scrupulous courtesy, the famous lawyer took the prince through his evidence step by step. Time and time again it seemed to me that the Prince had difficulty convincingly verifying the facts of his case and had a frighteningly weak grasp of details. He was vague about when he first read the MGN newspaper articles in question.

He wasn’t quite sure why he thought the printed information had been obtained illegally. He was even vague about a hunting trip with his then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy to South Africa in 2005.

This is the kind of event you would think someone would remember, with lions and giraffes and rhinos thundering around, but no. “I can’t remember,” he said.

When repeatedly asked how he could prove articles had been hacked, he said, “You’d have to ask the journalists themselves.” All he had in his prickly arsenal was the belief that “the timing was suspicious.” More difficult questions were answered with, “That’s a question for my legal team.”

It was astonishing. At various stages, he also couldn’t remember what his lawyers had or hadn’t shown him before the trial began, and struggled to be precise. “More than thousands, maybe millions,” he guessed at the number of articles written about him.

But while the princely sketch was sketchy and his brush strokes worse than slippery, his oily big picture was vibrant, overwhelming and unsurprising. “I’ve experienced hostility from the press since I was born,” he said at one point.

This is clearly and demonstrably untrue, but it is what Prince Harry believes to be true, which is why we are where we are today.

Again and again he turned to the judge and took it upon himself to explain to Your Honor how the newspaper industry works. “Knowing what I know in my experience,” was how he put it. He also took the time to berate specialist journalists, suggesting they used “imaginary sources.”

However, there was at least one moment when it became clear that his knowledge of newspapers is not as extensive as he thinks. “I have never heard of anyone writing a story that has already been printed and sent out [selling] it on,” he said, which must have given news editors across the country a good laugh on a grim day.

For his big moment, Harry wore a dark suit, white shirt, purple tie and clutch bag with snazzy beaded bracelets on his right wrist.

The courtroom, with its low ceiling and unflattering lighting, was stacked with silk in wigs—at least five, including David Sherborne, Harry’s lavishly lavish lawyer.

There were boxes and boxes of evidence all over the room, a testament to the hours and hours of work and the millions and millions of pounds this case is costing.

In the coffin, the prince was regularly asked to look up paragraphs of his testimony, in various legal anthologies, on numbered pages of the coffin files that he had to retrieve from the floor.

“It’s like you’re working out,” he grumbled. Mr Sherborne had to arrange for a junior lawyer to sit next to him to help him navigate the paperwork – something even Johnny Depp himself managed at his trial in London.

For those in the courtroom or, like me, watching the court footage, it was a fascinating spectacle. Harry has never been seen like this; under continued pressure, is asked to answer for himself and his barrage of accusations in the gloomy confines of a court of law.

Sure, he’s no stranger to public conversation, but this was a far cry from being coddled and spoiled by his showbiz buddies in a rose garden.

This was serious, formal, demanding. With Mr Green circling again and again, how must Harry have longed for the scruffy embrace of an Oprah interview or the sultry ministry of his sympathetic friend Tom Bradby from ITV. Instead he had forensic Mr. Green. ‘So? So?’ barked the KC at one point, as Harry watched over an irrelevant point of annoyance.

It came as no surprise that the Prince’s level of ferocity seemed to increase as the day wore on – you don’t need a dipstick to gauge the true depths, but here he is anyway.

“Repeat the question,” he demanded at one point. At other times, he had trouble finding the on-screen evidence for him. “It’s on the screen for you,” Mr. Green told him.

‘It’s not,’ said Harry.

“I think so,” the lawyer said.

“If you say so,” said Harry, a 38-year-old man who can still pinpoint his inner Kevin the Teen with unsettling ease. Hour after hour, the Harry who appeared in court was a combustible mixture of victimization and arrogance. The latter often took precedence, but his broken side, the damaged side, was never far away.

My favorite exchange of the day was a very revealing one about a news story about Harry celebrating his 16th birthday at a gastropub in Fulham. The prince was convinced that MGN had obtained this story illegally. Mr Green suggested that the celebrity chef who worked there might have called the newspaper himself.

“As a cook, he’d be too busy to make that call,” Harry said. In response, Mr. Green suggested that he get other chefs to work for him.

“I have no idea, I’ve never worked in a kitchen,” said the prince, somehow managing to contradict himself, acting like a legitimate snob, and at the same time making no sense.

What ultimately emerged from his historic first day in court is, dare I say, a man who is strangely insubstantial and simply cannot admit he is wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He often complained in general terms about his treatment by the media over the years, rather than addressing the specific issues presented to him.

“Prince Harry, let’s try to concentrate on the question I’m asking,” Mr Green said, tired late in the afternoon session. The case continues. Prince Harry is back in court today.