This week the Court of Appeal found in favour of the Duchess of Sussex with regards to the decision by the Mail on Sunday to publish some of her private correspondence with her father.

The case raises an interesting question: if you receive a letter from someone does that letter then become your property that you can do with as you like? That was the argument from the newspaper after Meghan’s father handed the document over to journalists.

However it is legal dictum that such correspondence is private and so the case becomes a balancing act between that privacy and the freedom of expression that is granted to the press. For the trial judge it was clear that the publication was a disproportionate breach of privacy and so he found in favour of the royals without the need for a full hearing.

It was this decision to issue a summary judgment that was being disputed in the Court of Appeal because the Mail on Sunday argued that a full trial was needed to cover all of the evidence. The problem for the publisher was that, at it’s heart, their argument is that they needed to publish swathes of personal correspondence to counteract 25 words that had appeared in the U.S. magazine, People. Plainly that approach was overboard and so the Court of Appeal concluded that the letters were “personal, private and not matters of public interest” and a summary judgment was sufficient.

If you will allow my own little slide into media politics here, the Mail on Sunday’s loss in the Court of Appeal was a sideshow to the Game of Thrones style reshuffle going on in that media organisation.

Martin Clarke was was one of the key architects of MailOnline and everything that the ‘sidebar of shame’ entails. If that is what the press has come to then it is hard to have much sympathy for their freedom of expression when their legal cases amount to an attempt to justify their bullying of Meghan Markle on their front pages.

Anyway Clarke is out and it has led to a reflection of his time in the newsroom. While those around him have praised his ‘genius’ it is also clear that he was a bully and created a toxic work environment with one journalist stating:

“We’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome here. He’s so focused, he can force people to do things they don’t want to, the least of them being working a 12-hour day.”

Speaking of bullies, the Priti Patel bullying affair was back in the courts this week as the High Court found in favour of the government over the FDA (the union for civil servants).

David Allen Green covers this in much more expert detail in his blog but he points out that this is not actually about whether or not Patel is a bully and is not so much of a win for the government as it might initially seem.

Fundamentally the case was about whether the prime minister was able to conclude that there had not been a breach of the ministerial code despite the findings against Patel. The court found that this was an available finding but this was almost exclusively down to the very precise wording used in the conclusions issued by Number 10.

Meanwhile the court found that the application of the Ministerial Code is something that can be looked at as part of a judicial review and so while the government might have gotten away with it this time they may not be so lucky in the future.