Alexander Larman

The sad demise of Prince Harry’s Sentebale charity

Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho (Credit: Getty images)

Prince Harry has had an eventful couple of years. There was the controversy-studded publication of his memoir Spare and a plethora of court cases, the highest-profile of which was resolved earlier this year. After all that, the Duke of Sussex might be forgiven for wishing to keep a low profile for the rest of 2025. His relative reticence might be seen by his fleeting, last-minute cameo in With Love Meghan; literally and figuratively, he seemed to be saying that it was her show now, and that he was just a bystander. Yet if he had wished to disappear from the spotlight, the news about his charity, Sentebale, has made such a desire wholly impossible.

This fiery, fierce denunciation of Harry and the trustees will not have gone down well in Montecito

On many occasions, Harry (and, indeed, Meghan) have been mocked for the charity Archewell – for a period branded ‘delinquent’ by Californian authorities – that they run. But he has been involved with many apparently less troubled institutions and organisations, most famously his Invictus Games endeavour. At first glance, Sentebale, which he set up in 2006 in honour of his late mother Princess Diana, was similarly blameless and uncontroversial. Harry had visited Lesotho that year and had been inspired to found a charity to help people living with HIV and Aids. Over the past two decades, it had run smoothly, or at least appeared to. As one of the few patronages that he retained after he ceased to be a working member of the royal family, it was a cause particularly close to Harry’s heart.

The name of the organisation means ‘forget me not’. Unfortunately, this latest controversy is one that Harry, and the other trustees of Sentebale, will find it difficult to forget any time soon. Amidst a dispute with the chairwoman, Dr Sophie Chandauka, over where to allocate funding, Harry, his co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho and their fellow trustees have all stepped down. In a statement, they said:

What’s transpired is unthinkable. We are in shock that we have to do this, but we have a continued responsibility to Sentebale’s beneficiaries, so we will be sharing all of our concerns with the Charity Commission as to how this came about.

It may prove to be equally unthinkable that Dr Chandauka has issued her own, strongly-worded statement, which implicitly attacks Harry and Prince Seeiso. She wrote:

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 angrily concluded that:

Beneath all the victim narrative and fiction that has been syndicated to press is the story of a woman who dared to blow the whistle about issues of poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir – and the cover-up that ensued.

Bullying, harassment, misogyny and misogynoir – these are four things that Harry has not previously been accused of, and it remains to be seen whether the allegations stick. Yet there are certain other issues in Dr Chandauka’s attack that sound all too familiar. While it would be an exaggeration to say that Harry has actively mistreated people, much of his high-handed public behaviour over the past few years has stemmed from a sense of noblesse oblige brought on by his royal birth and the privileges that he has enjoyed all his life. Likewise, the idea of ‘playing the victim card’ will be all too familiar to anyone who has read Spare or suffered through Harry and Meghan on Netflix.

This fiery, fierce denunciation of Harry and his fellow trustees will not have gone down well in Montecito, over the ‘As Ever’-branded homeware and jams. Observers may be wondering whether this is the end of the matter or whether the sudden demise of Sentebale may yet prove to be another potentially embarrassing and all-too-public scrap for the Duke of Sussex.

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