My heart hurts for Poor Prince Harry. News broke late last night that Harry has stepped down from his role as co-founding patron of Sentebale, the charity he set up in memory of his mother. This close to Mother’s Day, it must be an excruciating blow.
Sentebale was founded to help children and young people in Lesotho and Botswana, including those living with HIV and Aids, causes that were famously dear to Princess Diana’s heart. Harry set it up in 2006, when he was just 22 years old. Today it’s all gone up in flames, with current chair Sophie Chandauka hitting back with an excoriating statement aimed at the board, all of whose members resigned after Chandauka refused to step down .
Something, clearly, has gone badly wrong. Just last year, Chandauka was full of praise for the Prince. "He is principled and really cares,” she told People magazine. “He is energetic and hard-working as well as being blessed with a wife like Meghan who makes it possible for him to do this.”
Now, she has strongly implied that he is someone who plays the “victim narrative” and takes on “vanity projects” that he picks up and drops at will.
It feels like a very targeted and personal attack on Harry, full of the key words to make the media go crazy. Chandauka should know, she’s Head of Risk Management and Intelligence for Meta, the company that gave us Facebook and all the virulent slop it churns out to make people angry and unhappy and permanently online. Chandauka also made her statement to the Daily Mail — the very same publication that Harry is currently bringing a lawsuit against for alleged phone-hacking.
Harry has few things left to him
The other aspect to this tragedy is the Diana angle. When it comes to Harry, people just won’t take Diana’s name out of their mouths. This is down to memory, too. Psychologists have a term for this, flashbulb memories, when something is so shocking that the memory crystalizes and can be recalled in vivid detail years later, as though it was lit by a camera flash and preserved in perpetuity. The death of Princess Diana was a flashbulb memory for the world, and Harry will forever be caught in the blinding afterimage.
The Prince tried to set up a charity to keep his mother’s memory alive. I wonder if he thinks about how we fundamentally misremember Diana’s own charitable works, and the struggle she had to go through to get them done.
When her friend Adrian Ward-Jackson was dying of Aids, she defied the attitudes of the Royal Family, ditched the holiday in Balmoral and drove through the night to be there with him on his deathbed. She became a patron of the National Aids Trust. When she had to resign from 100 charities in 1996, following her divorce, it was one of the six charitable roles she kept.
I’m no royalist, but Harry has few things left to him, since the Royal Family stripped him of security and roles. How tragic that one of the those things he has to remember her by, to keep doing good in the world, is something he has felt he must give up. I wouldn’t blame him if he felt it was taken from him.
The true tragedy is, of course, all those children that Sentebale is trying to help, as funding for overseas aid is ripped away. The UN has warned that six million more people will die in the next four years because the Trump Administration has cruelly frozen funding overnight. Now a charity is in jeopardy, and all anyone wants to do is bicker over the memory of a woman long dead. How do you think she would feel about that?
India Block is a lifestyle and culture writer
