Prince Harry has been ordered to explain to a High Court judge how private messages to the ghostwriter of his memoir were “destroyed” amid their potential relevance to his legal action against the publisher of The Sun.

In a ruling on Thursday, Mr Justice Fancourt said the apparent deletion of the duke’s exchanges with John Moehringer on the Signal messaging platform, as well as drafts of Spare, before the book’s publication was “not transparently clear”.

The judge ordered the duke’s lawyers to carry out further searches of his laptop and examinations of his texts and Whatsapp and Signal messages from 2005 to January last year, for evidence potentially relevant to the litigation over allegations of unlawful information gathering.