Butler Grant Harrold spent seven years working at King Charles’ country home of Highgrove, getting to know Princes William and Harry – and now he is speaking out about his time working there
A royal butler who worked for King Charles has claimed Prince Harry’s brutal claims about Queen Camilla don’t add up.
Grant Harrold worked for seven years at Highgrove, the King’s country home in Gloucestershire, from 2004 to 2011. During his time at Highgrove, he got to know both Princes William and Harry, who were in their late teens and early 20s.
In a new interview, the former butler reveals that he first met Harry as a 19-year-old, with their first encounter coming when Harry hit him with a water balloon during a playfight. He says the pair even shared a takeaway in the time before the Duke of Sussex went off to Sandhurst Military Academy.
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Harrold’s time at Highgrove also coincided with the time Charles and Camilla announced their engagement and subsequently got married.
In his bombshell memoir Spare, Harry told how he and now estranged brother William begged their father not to marry his now wife. He telling wrote: “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).”
But for Harrold, who was at the wedding back in 2005, he recalled William and Harry decorating their father’s car with ‘Just Married’ signs with both of them racing after the car as the newlyweds drove away following their wedding reception.
And he says what he saw was a far cry from what Harry wrote in his memoir. He told The Telegraph: “The four of them, I promise you, got on so well. 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.”
He also recalls seeing “no animosity” between any of the royals adding: “The King used to do things to make them [William and Harry] laugh and giggle.”
Harrold’s comments come as he prepares to his own memoir from his time at Highgrove called The Royal Butler: My remarkable life of Royal Service, which charts his journey from a young boy growing up in North Lanarkshire to working for the then future King.
In Spare, Harry mentioned Camilla on more than 60 occasions, often branding her as “the Other Woman”. He also accused the Queen of being “dangerous” and leaking negative stories to the press, allegedly “sacrificing him on her personal PR altar”.
He also pondered whether she would become his and William’s “wicked stepmother” before her marriage to Charles, as they continued to grieve the loss of their mother.
In his bombshell interview with the BBC back in May, Harry said that “some members of my family will never forgive me” for writing his memoir. But he added: “It would be nice to have that reconciliation part now. If they don’t want that, that’s entirely up to them.”
