Prince Harry lost, and now he has a deadline. A High Court judge in London ruled that part of the enormous legal bill must be paid by 28 August - exactly 11,136,000 euros as a first instalment. Not the total, an advance. What the final figure will be, the court does not yet know, and it will schedule further hearings to establish it.

The case is old, but the outcome is fresh. The Duke of Sussex, aged 41, lost his privacy lawsuit in July against Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail. He was not alone - the group of claimants also included Elton John, David Furnish, Sadie Frost, Liz Hurley, Baroness Doreen Lawrence and Simon Hughes. Seven people with names that open doors anywhere, and not one of them managed to prove what they alleged.

The judgment runs to 436 pages. Justice Nicklin concluded that nobody in the group had proved unlawful information gathering. About Harry he wrote something worth reading twice: his evidence was accepted, but "like each of the claimants, Harry has limited evidence on the issues in dispute in this claim". In other words - I believe you think it happened, but you have nothing to show for it.

The numbers in this file are a story of their own. Associated sought over 11.55 million euros as an interim payment. The claimants' lawyers argued the sum should be somewhat above 9.22 million. But the real figure the publisher disclosed is a different one: defending the case cost it 40.22 million euros. The court called that "exceptionally high" - and then, after "careful consideration", refused to set an upper limit on how much Associated may recover.

Read that again. The court itself declared the bill excessive, and then put no ceiling on it. The publisher's spokesperson called the ruling "another comprehensive victory for the Mail and for its journalism". A victory costing forty million in lawyers is hard to defend as a triumph of journalism, but that is how the statement gets written.

The timing is what makes the story brutal. Only on Wednesday it became public that Harry and Meghan are moving back to Britain after more than six years in California. A private residence outside London, not a royal one. The children, Archie and Lilibet, are already enrolled in British schools. The man who left the island partly to escape the tabloids returns to it with a tabloid's bill in his hand.

At the same time, the rest of the family - the King, the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales - are already at Balmoral, where summer proceeds as it always does. Harry has a deadline of 28 August. They have Scotland.

There is something familiar in this construction. A media house with deep pockets defends the case to the last instance, and the cost itself becomes a message to everyone who might think of suing next. You do not have to win the case to lose - the bill just has to be big enough. Who in the Balkans would start such a lawsuit, knowing that even winning is expensive?