After all the pain he caused the late Queen with his hateful memoir Spare, I couldn’t have imagined a moment when I’d actually feel sorry for Prince Harry.
But now his beloved charity Sentebale is suing him for libel that moment has surely come.
This morning at 6.30am, he and Meghan flew in to Melbourne for what has the potential to be a triumphant four-day tour of Australia, taking in Canberra and Sydney. It’s a tour focusing on ’mental health community resilience, and support for veterans and their families, alongside private meetings and special projects’.
First stop was the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, where a crowd had gathered. The Sussexes posed for selfies with children who were undergoing treatment, and chatted to parents and staff.
The couple looked relaxed and cheerful after their 15–hour flight from Los Angeles where they had left Archie and Lilibet.
And yet overhanging everything is the Sentebale court case. Instead of headlines screaming ‘The Sussexes Down Under’, the stories have all been about the fact that the charity he co–founded with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho 20 years ago, in honour of his late mother Princess Diana, has lodged papers in the High Court in London accusing Harry and former Sentebale trustee Mark Dyer of defamation.
It’s the latest bout in a bitter row between Harry, who resigned as patron last year along with other disgruntled trustees, and the charity’s chair Dr Sophie Chandauka.
Amid claims that Chandauka’s chairmanship was ‘almost dictatorial’ and the running of the charity ‘untenable’, Harry said that he was standing down as patron with a ‘heavy heart’.
He added that the ‘relationship between the charity’s trustees and the chair of the board broke down beyond repair’, and friends said Harry was ‘left emotionally devastated by the events, after 19 years of working with the charity’.
There followed a very public war of words between the Prince and Dr Chandauka, with the charity in the legal suit now accusing Prince Harry and his ‘second dad’ Mark Dyer – the red-haired royal equerry who acted as mentor to William and Harry in the wake of Princess Diana’s death – of conducting a ‘media campaign’ against the charity that has caused it harm and forced it to divert resources into ‘managing a reputational crisis not of the charity’s making’.
Forget all the legal complications, though. It must have hit Harry like a bomb from hell when he was served the legal papers.
This, after all, is a cause that could not be closer to his and his late mother’s hearts – a charity that supports orphans and Aids.
Understandably, Harry and Mark Dyer have fired back. ‘As Sentebale’s co-founder and a founding trustee, they categorically reject these offensive and damaging claims,’ their spokesman said. ‘It is extraordinary that charitable funds are now being used to pursue legal action against the very people who built and supported the organisation for nearly two decades, rather than being directed to the communities the charity was created to serve.’
Who knows where this will end? But what is clear is that there is no love lost between Dr Chandauka and the Prince. Last year, when the Charity Commission intervened in the dispute, they cleared Harry of allegations made by Dr Chandauka, finding no evidence of ‘widespread bullying, harassment or misogyny’.
She had also accused him of ‘misogynoir’ – a new word to add to our vocabulary meaning discrimination against black women. But surely that was a laugh-out-loud moment, given that Harry is married to Meghan, herself a woman of mixed race.
It has to be said that all parties in the saga were criticised for allowing an internal dispute to even become public.
But now for Harry to be accused formally in the High Court of bad-mouthing the charity he set up must be utterly bewildering.
It is worth noting donations to the charity have haemorrhaged since Harry’s departure.
And while Dr Chandauka insists that no monies from the charity’s £3million-plus budget will be spent on the litigation, and that it is being paid for by ‘external funds’, when asked by The Times newspaper who was actually financing the case, Senteable refused to comment.
The exact details of the defamation claim have not been made public, but Sentebale said it was seeking the High Court’s ‘intervention, protection and restitution’ after what they claim is a ‘coordinated media campaign’ against them by Prince Harry.
It’s worth noting here that the mention of ‘restitution’ could mean millions in damages. Call me a cynic but is this what it is really all about – bolstering Sentebale’s diminishing funding?
And could it be true that the fallout between Prince Harry and Chandauka actually began not over governance of the charity but when the Duchess of Sussex moved Chandauka out of a photo op to be beamed across the world after a 2024 charity polo match, Meghan insisting she was snapped next to her Prince?
Could the once-proud charity Sentebale – meaning forget–me–not – now be so mired in litigation it is losing sight of the very children it was set up for and vowed to protect?
All are questions that may yet be answered in the High Court.
But let us not forget in the meantime that more than 78,000 of Africa’s most deprived children – mostly orphans inflicted with HIV and Aids – are helped by Sentebale every year, and they need every penny they can get.
It’s hard to see how this litigation will help them. Or how it will do anything other than upset Harry.
