The case of HRH the Duchess of Sussex v Associated Newspapers Ltd has been running for almost three years and may not be over yet. At the Court of Appeal on Thursday, the Duchess won the second round of her claim against the group for publishing substantial chunks of a letter that she wrote to her father.

The arguments centred on whether the Mail on Sunday had breached her copyright and secondly whether she had a legitimate right to keep the details of the letter a private matter between herself and Thomas Markle. The law is clear that to avoid a breach of copyright only selected and minor extracts can be used from an original text in a subsequent article or book. The court found that the newspaper had quoted nearly half of the letter.

But the issue of privacy is a different matter. This country does not have a specific law of privacy but the courts are bound by the Human Rights Act to balance a person’s desire for a private life against the right to free speech. These are supposed to have equal weight, and yet courts have increasingly favoured privacy over free expression.

Although the judges emphasised the “narrowness” of the issues they had to decide, the Duchess chose to hail the ruling as a landmark judgment against newspapers “prying” into the lives of the famous. Yet not only did she “unintentionally” mislead the court about her own briefings to favoured writers, she appears regularly on TV chat shows.

She is evidently not unduly concerned about her private life, only about controlling the way it is presented. The newspaper is considering a further appeal to the Supreme Court. But what would be better is for the Government to put a free speech Bill before Parliament that would clarify the law and make double standards harder to uphold.