The Duke joined forces with Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a black British teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in South East London in 1993, to issue his statement following the verdict. It began: “We came to court seeking justice and accountability. But we have received neither.

“This judgment represents a complete reversal of the position which previous judges have taken in relation to the hacking claims successfully brought against both News Group Newspapers and Mirror Group Newspapers, who were represented by, at the time, the judge who made this decision.

“Generic findings about various private investigators that were held by the courts in these parallel claims to have carried out unlawful activity at the very same time in relation to similar stories and well-known individuals have been wholly ignored.

“The fact that this court has chosen to dismiss them represents an inconsistency which is hard to understand or reconcile with common sense, or the evidence heard in the courtroom itself.

“It is a complete and obvious whitewash, but sadly not altogether unexpected. However, the lengths to which the court has gone to exonerate the Mail is as shocking as it is totally unwarranted.

“When the court says there is not sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, despite the documents showing otherwise, then one does wonder how justice was ever going to be achieved.

“One need not look past when a private investigator the Mail used actually admitted on tape to having unlawfully blagged Baroness Lawrence, or when a journalist recorded the name of the private investigators she used to find out about highly sensitive medical information, that even the Mail was too worried to publish, or when another private investigator emailed one of the journalists with the actual British Airways seat number and ticketing details for a young girl simply visiting her boyfriend, in return for payment.

“It feels here like one rule for the newspapers and another for the claimants.

“While the claimants presented evidence, Mail journalists simply gave denials and the court chose uncritically to believe them, even in the face of inconsistencies, contradictions and blatant untruths that were obvious to neutral observers in court when compared to the documents.

“We presented to the court evidence which we believed was compelling at the time and remains so now. We would like to thank our legal team for all their hard work and all the witnesses who were brave enough to come forward in the pursuit of justice.”