PIERS MORGAN: Put your gloating champagne away, Princess Pinocchio

'If you tell the truth,' Mark Twain once observed, 'you don't have to remember anything.'

I thought of this incontrovertible truism today when news broke that Meghan Markle had 'won' her privacy court battle with the Mail on Sunday.

Her victory response was issued within seconds, on regal notepaper adorned with a gold 'M' under a golden crown, and headlined: 'Statement from Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex.'

You might think this a curiously regal way of doing things for a woman who spends her entire time trashing the Monarchy and smearing the Royal Family for being disgusting callous racists.

Just as you might be amused to see Ms Markle position herself as the victim of painful lies given how much pain she's caused with her own alleged whoppers.

And by her claim to be representing 'anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what's right' like she's some kind of latter-day Winston Churchill rallying a nation in wartime, rather than an unemployed actress fleecing her unelected marital royal status for gazillions from her California mansion.

Let's be very clear about exactly what Meghan 'won' today.

The Court of Appeal decided the Mail on Sunday was not entitled to publish quite as much of her letter to her estranged father Thomas Markle as the newspaper did.

Had they run less of it, the judges said, the Mail would have been OK.

So, she won on a point about precisely how many of her words were permissible to be reported, assuming the letter was indeed private, surely an issue for trial. 

(To be precise, 585 words from a 1,250-word letter was deemed too much.)

But while Meghan didn't formally authorize her dad to publish her letter, she expected that he might.

We know that from messages and emails revealed in court that painted a very different picture of Meghan, the self-appointed Patron Saint of Privacy and Veracity.

'Obviously everything I have drafted is with the understanding that it could be leaked,' she texted Jason Knauf, then her communications secretary, 'so I have been meticulous in my word choice, but please do let me know if anything stands out for you as a liability.'

Indeed, she was so convinced the letter might be published that she even deliberately used certain words to manipulate the public's emotions when they read it.

Knauf told the court: 'She also asked a specific question regarding addressing Mr Markle as 'daddy' in the letter, saying 'given I've only ever called him daddy it may make sense to open as such (despite him being less than paternal), and in the unfortunate event that it leaked it would pull at the heart-strings'.'

Wow.

I regret to say that when I read that ruthlessly cynical little gem, my heart-strings remained resolutely unmoved but a small piece of repulsed intestinal fluid spat out of my mouth.

And it's worth returning to Meghan's victory statement again here, to the bit where she says: 'From day one, I have treated this lawsuit as an important measure of right versus wrong.'

Meghan then whacks the tabloids for being 'cruel' and profiting from 'lies and the pain they create' and specifically, she states, their desire to 'twist facts and manipulate the public.'

All of which might carry more weight if she hadn't revealed herself by her own actions to be a cruel manipulator prepared to exploit her own 'daddy' to 'pull at the heart-strings.'

As for twisting facts and profiting from lies and the pain they create, Meghan should

read more from dailymail.....