Prince Harry's pal says 'I wish I could erase our friendship' after leaked texts

Journalist Charlotte Griffiths said it has been a "very stressful four years" until the phone hacking scandal was drawn to a conclusion asthe High Court dismissed all 97 claims against the publisher of The Daily Mail. The Editor-at-Large of Mail on Sunday admitted she felt "cringe" to read the Facebook messages she exchanged with Prince Harry.

She mentioned that she "wishes I could erase my friendship with Prince Harry". Sharing on TalkTV, she said: "He has rewritten history in his own head. He is a Californian guy, he is very virtuous and very virtue-signalling, and that's fine. One can grow into that kind of person, but you don't eradicate who you were before. And who he was before was a wild child, which is how I got to know him."

Charlotte met Prince Harry in the early 2010s when they were both in their 20s. She recalled the time she spent with the Duke of Sussex, saying: "We were partying hard, we were going to nightclubs, we were chatting, we were going to a country house on weekends. And that's all fine.

"I'm now a mother-of-three, married, we grew up. You don't just pretend you were a saint from your 20s. We all know that most of us were a little wild in our 20s. And he has just rewritten history, and he can't remember the old him. These Facebook messages are so cringe to read because they're actually a bit of a reminder of how funny, silly and mad we all were by then."

She told Kevin O'Sullivan that she revealed the Facebook messages to provide evidence to save her career. She has shared her account of her friendship with the Duke after her text correspondence with Harry was made public in the privacy case.

The journalist met Harry at a shooting weekend in Hampshire in 2011, and shortly after, she received a friend request on Facebook Messenger from an account named "Spike Well". There's a text message that reads: "It's H...in case u were confused by name and picture!! X."

She also referred to a "fun weekend of naughtiness" in a series of text messages. Harry's messages to her, according to The Times, included the words "sugar", "Griff" and "miss our movie snuggles".

She told Kevin: "I've kept our friendship for 15 years, and not only did he not say thank you very much for keeping it secret, I would have thought a thank you, and a pat on the back would have been in order, but instead I got slapped with a lawsuit."