Friday at the High Court: Prince Harry, Elton John, Doreen Lawrence, Liz Hurley, Sadie Frost, Simon Hughes and David Furnish were ordered to make an interim payment of £9.54 million toward Associated Newspapers' legal costs, by 4pm next Friday. They'd sued the Mail's publisher over alleged unlawful information gathering; Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed every claim last month after an 11-week trial. The Mail won. Cleanly. Nobody here is disputing that. * Here's how the Mail's own homepage scored it: "Harry and claimants face paying up to £34.5m to Mail as judge says doomed case was 'unreasonable'." Thirty-four and a half million. The order the judge actually signed on Friday says £9.54m. * Where'd the bigger number come from? £34.5m is ANL's entire legal bill, as told to the court. Could the final total eventually climb toward it? Possibly — the judge put costs on an indemnity basis, and more instalments are coming. But "up to" is ceiling shopping. The Guardian wrote down what happened: "Prince Harry and others ordered to pay interim £9.5m to Daily Mail publisher." CNN: celebrities "hit with initial $13 million bill." Same courtroom, same piece of paper. Only the winner's own scoreboard multiplied it by three and a half. * And notice the verb doing the quiet work. Everyone else's Harry was "ordered to pay" — a thing that happened. The Mail's Harry "faces paying" — a thing that might happen. You need the woollier verb when you've picked the woollier number, because nobody has been ordered to pay £34.5m. * "Up to," of course, is a Mail house specialty. It's the elastic usually found wrapped around what migrants could cost you, what benefits claimants might pocket, what the council could waste. Today the same elastic is wrapped around the Mail's own trophy, stretching a nine into a thirty-four. The elastic only ever pulls in one direction — toward the better story. * Regulars may remember verdict day, when ANL called the ruling "a magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail's journalism" and we noted the Mail had handed itself an adjective usually reserved for symphonies. Friday's statement called this "another overwhelming victory for the Mail and its journalism" — and the homepage built a full trophy cabinet around it: a DAILY MAIL COMMENT calling the lawsuit "a sorry masquerade," an Amanda Platell column locating "the appallingly selfish truth" about the Sussexes' return, Boris Johnson on royal secrets. The costs ruling didn't land in a news section. It landed in a content engine already running at temperature. * To be scrupulously fair: the gloating rights are court-certified, and if the headline had said "£9.5m now, more to come," we'd have scrolled past. Our note is narrower. When a court hands you a number about yourself, and your first instinct is to ask how big it could theoretically get, you've told the reader exactly how you handle everyone else's numbers too.