Ruth Dudley Edwards: Like Prince Harry, Nigel Farage has come to believe that everything is about him

Harry is perhaps not the brightest and it seems one of his major intellectual deficiencies is gullibility.

When it comes to the law, he believes what he wants to believe and what his lawyers tell him.

And he falls out with those who give him advice he doesn’t want to hear.

When he mounted his white charger, he was on a mission to bring about state regulation of the press.

In alliance with similar tabloid-hating celebrities like Elton John and Liz Hurley he was set on destroying the Mail for phone-hacking and illegal accessing of private medical records.

Throughout the seven years of what would become a £50 million defeat, he seems to have had no doubts about the validity of the evidence adduced by his side.

There were 97 claims of unlawful information-gathering - all rejected by the judge.

There were more than 40 journalists cross-examined - praised for their truthfulness and candour.

On Tuesday, Harry called the judgment an “obvious whitewash”.

Paul Dacre, who was Mail editor for 26 years, and who threw his own and the paper’s reputation behind a successful hunt for the murderers of Stephen Lawrence and was also seminal in supporting the families who sued the Omagh bombers, pointed out a great nonsense at the heart of Harry’s case.

He wrote pityingly about the “confused and angry young man” who “wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug taking and, in cringe-making detail, how he lost his virginity.

“There isn't a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family.

“For him to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin.”

Farage, who deserves most of the credit for making Brexit happen, had an unhappy day too.

To see this brilliant campaigner – who used to play the press so cleverly – whingeing self-pityingly about annoying queries about the source and purpose of his new riches is to see a giant crumble.

Free speech is a good thing, but for MPs it isn’t untrammelled.

They are required to answer legitimate questions that pertain to their work.

Think of all those parliamentarians hounded by the press over their expenses.

It’s painful, but putting up with it is part of the job.

I was horrified that while complaining about various inexcusable scary incidents in his past, Farage was so self-absorbed that it apparently didn’t occur to him to mention Labour’s Jo Cox (stabbed and shot) and the Conservatives’ David Amess (stabbed) - two hardworking but rather low-key MPs murdered in the last decade in the course of their public duties.

Like Harry, Nigel has come to believe it’s all about him.

But the idiocy about quitting and re-standing for Clacton in – as Kemi Badenoch put it – “a hissy fit”, in order to get support for his right to do what he likes, may not be a winner.

Nigel may prove to have been a loser as gullible as Harry.

l Ruth Dudley Edwards’ books include The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions and The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice