Among the purse-lipped patricians of Buckingham Palace, Sir Philip Green stood out a mile.

With his gravelly London accent, his perma-tan and his rattail of white curls, he reveled in his role as the King of Retail Fashion, cursing a blue streak and flying in batches of supermodels for his birthday. His rages were mythic. Once, during a failed bid to buy Marks & Spencer, he was widely reported by the British press to have confronted the retail chain’s chairman outside his office, grabbed him by the lapels and yelled, “Oi! I want a word with you!”

Mr. Green’s ascent of Britain’s social ladder, made complete when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, was tainted this week after he became the latest high-profile target of sexual harassment claims.

Mr. Green, 66, had used nondisclosure agreements to hush five former employees who accused him of sexual harassment and racist abuse. He then managed to secure an injunction, which remains in effect, to block publication of a monthslong investigation of those charges by a newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, at the estimated cost of $642,000 in legal fees.

But a plummy-voiced Labour peer, Baron Peter Hain, decided to defy the court order, invoking his parliamentary privilege to identify Mr. Green as the subject of the newspaper’s investigation. The revelation comes at an important moment in Britain, after the Harvey Weinstein case unleashed decades of sexual harassment accusations, and as Prime Minister Theresa May considers banning the legal practice of issuing nondisclosure agreements in such cases.