Prince Harry has not issued any public statements regarding the recent controversy surrounding his HIV and Aids charity Sentebale in Lesotho. After stepping down as its patron last week, a close friend of his revealed that Harry is deeply affected by the situation, likening it to losing a part of himself.
Alex Rayner, a fellow student from Eton College who accompanied Harry on a journey to the North Pole in 2012, shared that the prince has expressed shock and devastation over the allegations leveled against him. Rayner mentioned that Harry is devastated by how events have unfolded.
Rayner stated, “Harry has given me permission to convey his emotions regarding this distressing ordeal. He is profoundly saddened and bewildered by the crisis involving the charity he established during his youth. It seems to him like a forcible seizure of something he held dear.”
‘He is so upset and hurt and wounded about the things that are being said about him. I think it’s too early to tell whether he will just walk away now or whether he might try and get it back.
‘The way he feels is as if he has had one of his fingers cut off.
‘He set up Sentebale with a schoolfriend when the death of his mum was a fresh memory. At the moment he is just in total shock about what is being said and the accusations being made.’
Sensationally, Rayner adds that he believes some of the accusations from Sentebale chairwoman Dr Sophie Chandauka may possibly spring from jealousy of Prince Harry’s wife, Meghan.
Onstage during the trophy-giving ceremony, Meghan appeared to ask Sentebale’s chairwoman, Dr Sophie Chandauka, to move away from Harry
Dr Sophie Chandauka, a Zimbabwean lawyer and businesswoman who was appointed to the board of trustees for Sentebale in 2008 and set about diversifying the charity’s income streams
At the heart of the row is a major falling out between the prince, other trustees, and Dr Chandauka, a Zimbabwean lawyer and businesswoman with a gilded career in London and New York.
Dr Chandauka took over in July 2023 and set about diversifying the charity’s income streams.
When donations were weaker than expected, the trustees apparently asked her to step down, yet she claims it was the ‘toxicity’ of the Sussex brand that dented income.
Dr Chandauka said she was being forced out for daring to blow the whistle on ‘weak governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir [hatred of black women] – and the cover-up that ensued’.
With Dr Chandauka refusing to go, Prince Harry, the charity’s co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho and all five of the trustees resigned en masse last week citing irreparably broken relations with the chairwoman.
Without naming him, Dr Chandauka then aimed an even more pointed barb at him. ‘There are people in this world who behave as though they are above the law and mistreat people, and then play the victim card and use the very Press they disdain to harm people who have the courage to challenge their conduct,’ she said.
Attention has turned, over the weekend, to the Duchess of Sussex’s role in the affair and in particular to a highly awkward exchange with Dr Chandauka at a polo match in Miami last April.
On stage during the trophy-giving ceremony, Meghan appeared to ask Sentebale’s chairwoman to move away from Harry and instead to stand to one side, on the duchess’s left, leaving the spotlight to the couple. On a now crowded stage Dr Chandauka was forced to duck inelegantly underneath the trophy to move out of the way. But Alex Rayner told me: ‘It feels like [Dr Chandauka] had her nose put out of joint because she was not the most important woman of colour on the stage.
Harry and Prince Seeiso at a climate resilience project in Lesotho in 2024
‘There is an undercurrent of stink here because Meghan showed up and it is coming from her [Dr Chandauka].’
When footage of the embarrassingly public jostle went viral, Harry apparently asked Dr Chandauka for a statement backing Meghan’s role in the episode – but she refused. This weekend Dr Chandauka insisted in an interview that she did not know Meghan was coming to the match, and that a statement would have exposed the duchess to ‘even worse trolling’.
She also said that she would not allow Sentebale to be an extension of the Sussex brand.
Yet Alex Rayner said: ‘The chair should never have let that narrative take hold, that Meghan had caused an issue. ‘If that narrative did take hold, then I would argue it is down to the chair to put it right. They could have issued a statement and put a stop to it but they did not. Why? Again, the whole thing smells. It feels planned, and I suspect that the whole thing could only have come from the chair herself.
‘Any chair should have been delighted to have Meghan there. When you have both the Sussexes there it doubles the reaction, the power of it. And yet here she [Dr Chandauka] is refusing to get hold of a negative narrative which damages Meghan. It makes you wonder where it came from?’
As for the suggestion that Meghan effectively gatecrashed the event – Dr Chandauka said she had not been expected to attend, but then turned up with Serena Williams – Rayner said: ‘It’s Harry’s charity polo match and Meghan is his wife, of course she should have expected her there.’
A second highly contested episode concerns the original venue for the match, which Dr Chandauka says was lost when Prince Harry decided to bring a Netflix crew along to film him for his documentary on the sport.
Speaking on Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, Dr Chandauka said a wealthy family had provided facilities for the game, which would raise money for Sentebale.
Alex Rayner, an old Etonian school friend of the prince, who went to the North Pole with him in 2012
‘Then about a month before the event, Prince Harry called the team and said, “I’m doing a Netflix show and I would love to bring a camera crew so that I can include some footage”.’
There was an immediate crisis. The contract with the venue’s owner had to change because it was now ‘a commercial undertaking’. Dr Chandauka recalled: ‘We couldn’t afford it. So now we lost the venue.’
Yet Rayner, who set up the annual Polo In The Park matches and has also worked with Harry on Sentebale events, said: ‘If you are a sponsor then of course you would want the exposure from a Netflix documentary, so this whole story seems simply untrue.
‘You cannot say that Harry’s brand is of no consequence to the charity, it simply does not stack up. Yes, he has gone from being the great hope of the British Royal Family to being seen as a pariah, but he still attracts a lot of exposure. And with a TV crew in tow – what sponsor would not want the global exposure?
‘This sounds like an excuse to cover up an administrative error at the charity. They lost the venue.’
He went on: ‘Let’s not get blinded by “let’s bash Harry” and by the idea that there were racial undertones in play… the situation is that she has failed to administrate her role. She was asked to step down and she refused and took over the charity.’
Dr Chandauka has strongly defended her record, insisting there was ‘a significant correlation’ between the downturn in commercial support for the charity and the rupture between Prince Harry and the Royal Family.
Attempts to address the issue had been fruitless, she claims. When she tried to raise it, she was told ‘it’s an uncomfortable conversation to have with Prince Harry in the room’.
‘The number one risk for this organisation was the toxicity of its lead patron’s brand,’ she told the Financial Times.
Claiming the charity trustees had been in place too long, she said: ‘This is not how a properly run organisation should work.
‘There’s a reason why you have time limits because people begin to mark their own homework, and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.’
In her television interview, she said: ‘Really, what Prince Harry wanted to do was eject me from the organisation, and this went on for months through bullying, harassment. I have documentation.’
She described the release of Friday’s statement saying he had quit Sentebale as ‘an example of harassment and bullying at scale’.
Whatever the truth of this very vexed matter, you can be sure it was not how Harry foresaw the future of his beloved pet project.
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