Royal

There’s yet another royal book coming out from a royal sycophant. This one is by Grant Harrold, who served as King Charles’s butler at Highgrove from 2004-2011. Harrold is currently in a domestic partnership with a man who still works as a gardener for Charles as well. The book is called The Royal Butler: My remarkable life of royal service. Obviously, the only thing people care about is Harrold’s gossip about Prince Harry, Prince William and Kate. This guy has been milking his “remembrances” and gossip opinions for years by the way – he’s quoted with some regularity by the tabloids, and he usually has an anti-Sussex slant. Sounds like his book has the same bias, at least judging from the exclusive excerpt published in the Telegraph. Some highlights:

Charles’s second wedding day: The day itself, in April 2005, was the “happiest” Harrold says he ever saw the King. “At the end of the festivities, Charles and Camilla were catching a flight to head straight to Birkhall [on the Balmoral estate],” he writes in the book. “We all went outside to wave them off and laughed as we saw William and Harry had decorated their car with ‘Just Married’. As they drove off through the arches to cheers, the boys raced after the car.”

Harry’s account of Charles & Camilla’s engagement: It’s a scene that seems to contradict the account of that period in Prince Harry’s book, Spare. When it was published in 2023, tearing a hole in the Royal family which has never been repaired, it was the then Duchess of Cornwall who came out worse in the Prince’s evisceration of his family. In Spare, he told how he and William begged their father not to marry her, writing: “We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. ‘Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.’ He didn’t answer. But she answered. Straight away. Shortly after our private summits with her, she began to play the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the Crown (with Pa’s blessing, we presumed).”

Harrold claims Charles, Camilla, William and Harry got along: “The four of them, I promise you, got on so well,” he says. “And that’s why I don’t understand what Harry’s said, I really don’t understand. Because I saw them. I saw them having dinners together, I saw them having drinks together, I saw them going to parties together.” As Harrold remembers it there was “no animosity” on display. The relationship he observed between Charles and his sons doesn’t reflect the one Harry has portrayed either. “The King used to do things to make them laugh and giggle,” he says.

Harry got along with Kate: Among the saddest aspects of this era for the Royal family is surely the apparent breakdown in the bond that used to exist between the two princes. Back then, Harrold recalls how William, Catherine and Harry used to be a little gang. “They involved him. He used to go out with Kate. William would be away and Kate and Harry would be off doing stuff together. They’d go shopping together, they’d go to pubs together. […] I think when people say ‘oh he was left out’, he really wasn’t. But also he was with Chelsy [Davy, the Prince’s former girlfriend]. Chelsy was always around. And Chelsy and Kate got on really well.” The brothers were “so close”. “The banter was great. They used to go around being silly with each other and winding each other up, jumping out at their dad from corners and making him laugh. It was just like a family.”

Harrold watched the Sussex wedding from afar, and managed to lip-read: Since leaving Highgrove, Harrold has often watched on as a pundit. He reported live from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding in 2018, dipping between interviews and the picnic blanket where Stooks was installed. As he was still working for the family he was among those invited to watch from the lawn in front of St George’s Chapel and brought Harrold along as his guest. Watching the family file out of the ceremony, which included the famous 14-minute sermon by Bishop Michael Curry, Harrold claims in the book to have overheard a few choice words on the lips of the late Duke of Edinburgh. “Once all the formalities were over, we watched as the happy couple, and then the other members of the Royal family, filed out of the chapel,” he writes. “When Prince Philip came out he turned to the Queen and said, ‘Thank f— that’s over.’”

[From The Telegraph]

The royalists are already crowing that Harrold has definitively contradicted Prince Harry’s account of his own feelings and his devastation at his father’s second marriage. I don’t know, guys. Should we believe Harry’s descriptions of his own conversations and feelings, or should we believe some guy who used to work for King Charles who wants to sell a particular revisionist history? Should we believe the guy who believes he overheard Prince Philip say those words after Harry’s wedding?

As for the talk about Harry being close to Kate, and Harry constantly hanging out with Will and Kate… that was one of the most surprising aspects of Spare, for me at least. That in their 20s and early 30s, William, Harry and Kate really weren’t hanging out that much, at least according to Harry’s narrative. I also got the impression from Spare that Harry left a lot of stuff out about his “lost years,” his pre-Meghan years, especially when it came to Kate and the Middletons. He didn’t even mention the years-long attempt to put him with Pippa. I also think Harry was trying to be a gentleman, especially about Kate and what she was really like back then.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Instar, Cover Images, Backgrid.