The Mail on Sunday can rely on a recent biography of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in its defence of Meghan’s High Court privacy claim over the publication of a letter to her estranged father.

Meghan, 39, is suing the newspaper’s publisher Associated Newspapers (ANL) for alleged misuse of private information, breaching the Data Protection Act and infringement of copyright in relation to the publication of parts of a handwritten letter sent to Thomas Markle, 76, in August 2018.

The duchess took legal action last year over five articles published in February 2019 – two in the Mail on Sunday and three on Mail Online – which included extracts from the “private and confidential” letter to her father.