Caroline Flack's mum claims daughter's phone was hacked when she was seeing Harry

Caroline Flack’s mother has spoken out in support of Prince Harry amid his ongoing court case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), claiming her daughter's phone was hacked while the pair were seeing each other.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Harry gave evidence against the publishing company for unlawful information gathering — making him the first member of the Royal Family to testify in court in over a century.

MGN has denied that the articles in question were the product of unlawful information gathering, with the exception of one 2004 article about a visit Harry made to Chinawhites nightclub, for which they "unreservedly apologise".

One 2009 article that was examined during his evidence was headlined ‘Harry’s Date with Gladiator Star’ and appeared in The People. The article detailed an evening that Harry spent with Caroline Flack at a friend’s – Mark Dyer – home in Fulham. The publication of the article, Harry said in his witness statement, made him start “obviously doubting Caroline, [and] I even came to distrust Marko”.

Harry said: “Given the fact only the three of us knew the plan, I was highly suspicious and convinced someone had leaked the information to the press.”

Flack’s mother, Christine, has since said that she is “very much so” supporting Harry in his trial and that press intrusion also left her daughter struggling to trust people.

“Carrie was the same in her life,” Christine Flack told the Jeremy Vine show on Thursday. "Whenever a story appeared in the paper it causes distrust amongst your friends and your family”.

“When she was seeing Harry, she knew her phone was being hacked, so we used to use a different telephone”, Flack said, without naming any specific newspaper.

“I think Harry’s doing it for everybody... and I think he is very brave, because he is getting such an awful lot of stick as well.

“The people that are reporting on him are the same people that, you know, he is in court against. So it’s doubly hard.”

Discussing her other frustrations with elements of the tabloid press, Flack continued: “I’ve been told don’t say anything about The Sun, with that awful picture of [Caroline’s] blood that they put on the front page, because you may need them, or what can they do to you. But I think: 'My daughter’s dead, so they can’t do anything else to me'.”

“People live in fear of them,” Vine said of the tabloids.

Harry detailed his relationship with Caroline in his memoir Spare, and the aftermath of the night in question and how she was termed his “bit of rough” in the press.

He writes: “Jesus, I thought, are we really such a country of insufferable snobs? I continued to see Flack on and off, but we didn’t feel free any more. We kept on, I think, because we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and because we didn’t want to admit defeat at the hands of these arseholes. But the relationship was tainted, irredeemably, and in time we agreed that it just wasn’t worth the grief and harassment.”

He also wrote about the reaction to Caroline’s death in 2020, around the time he and his wife Meghan were stepping back from life as working royals.

“In the midst of all this darkness came the horrible news that my old friend Caroline Flack had taken her life. She couldn’t stand it any more, apparently.

“The relentless abuse at the hands of the press, year after year, had finally broken her. I felt so awful for her family. I remembered how they’d all suffered for her mortal sin of going out with me [...] I told myself it was an important reminder. I wasn’t being over-dramatic, I wasn’t warning about things that would never happen.

“What Meg and I were dealing with was indeed a question of life and death.”