AMANDA PLATELL: Harry accusations are a cataclysmic catastrophe for the Sussexes. It’s left me with an almost unsayable thought…

Prince Harry once described Sentebale, the charity he set up in memory of his mother Princess Diana, as his lifelong mission.

And so his sudden decision to last week quit his role as patron of the charity originally created to help children suffering from Aids in the small African country of Lesotho sent shockwaves around the world. It is said to have left him ‘shattered’.

Harry announced that he and his co-founder, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, had stepped down in solidarity with five board trustees who had resigned over a dispute with the chair of Sentebale, Dr Sophie Chandauka.

While the board said it had lost ‘trust and confidence’ in her, there was always clearly more to the affair and, sure enough, Dr Chandauka, a distinguished lawyer of Zimbabwean birth who has worked in London and New York, came out fighting. She not only accused Harry of being a bully but made claims of ‘misogynoir’,  a modish term defined as misogyny directed at black women.

Hold the front page! Harry the victim now Harry the bully?

(Harry and Meghan have not commented publicly on Dr Chandauka’s comments. But a source close to the former trustees of the charity has described her allegations as ‘completely baseless’.) 

But worse was to come. Dr Chandauka claims the news of his departure was leaked by the Sussex PR machine without informing her or other executives.

And the feisty Dr Chandauka, who studied at Oxford University and has held numerous senior corporate positions, did not stop there. In a series of interviews, she accused the Prince and the charity of ‘harassment and bullying and intimidation at scale’.

She claims his behaviour since Megxit – the Oprah Winfrey interview, the publication of his lurid memoir Spare and his participation in a Netflix series that trashed the Royal Family – meant the Sussex brand had become ‘toxic’. This had damaged their ability to raise money for the charity.

The chair of Sentebale, Dr Sophie Chandauka, has made claims of bullying

Perhaps her most devastating accusation was that Sentebale was guilty of ‘misogynoir’.

Given that the Sussexes accused Harry’s own family of racism against mixed-race Meghan in their TV interview with Oprah in 2021, to be embroiled in a row about race politics himself must have been particularly damaging for Harry – and embarrassing.

Who can forget the sanctimonious prince revealing in 2020 that he only began to understand ‘unconscious racial bias’ after he met Meghan, a revelation that enabled him to see the racism within his own family for the first time.

How terrible, then, for the self-ordained perpetual victim to be portrayed as the villain – by a black woman.

Ms Chandauka’s slurs will not just hurt his feelings, of course. More importantly, perhaps, they could have a devastating effect on the Sussex brand that is worth millions to the Duke and Duchess.

The cataclysmic collapse of the carefully nurtured image the Sussexes have so desperately tried to create for themselves since they left the Royal Family dates back to a sunny day in Florida in April last year.

The occasion was a Polo Challenge – a charity fundraiser for Sentebale in which Harry was captaining one of the teams.

His wife Meghan had not been planning to attend it but made a last-minute appearance with her bestie, the tennis champion Serena Williams, plus a Netflix camera crew in tow.

Their unexpected arrival understandably threw the whole event – not to mention their security – into chaos.

In a video of the Polo Challenge prize-giving last April, Meghan can be seen insisting Dr Chandauka move away from Prince Harry in the prize-giving line-up

Dr Chandauka (left) and Harry had worked tirelessly to help children with AIDS in Africa as part of Sentebale before the bust-up with the board of trustees

Harry co-founded the charity in memory of his mother Princess Diana, and is seen here meeting a 15-year-old orphan in Lesotho in February

In a video that has since gone viral, Meghan can be seen insisting Dr Chandauka move into a position away from her husband as the event’s leading personalities posed for official photographs after Harry’s team had emerged victorious.

As the chair of the charity, Dr Chandauka was the person who had worked tirelessly to make the event a success. But the Duchess of Sussex forced her to ignominiously duck under the trophy and take up another spot in the line-up, away from Harry’s side, as she marshalled everyone involved in the photocall.

Moments before, Meghan had kissed her husband to celebrate his win, with the Netflix camera crew capturing the moment for his TV series on polo.

Social media was understandably excoriating of Meghan’s behaviour – a woman of mixed-race apparently pushing out of the picture a black woman who had more right to be there than she did. It was an ugly scene in anyone’s book.

But when the inevitable backlash occurred, Dr Chandauka claims the prince tried (so we are told) to cajole her into publicly defending Meghan’s actions.

‘Harry asked me to issue some kind of statement in support of the Duchess,’ she says. Dr Chandauka refused, ‘not because I didn’t care about the Duchess…but because we [the charity] cannot be an extension of the Sussexes and their PR machine’.

The video is, indeed, hard to watch. Seeing any woman appearing to effectively elbow out another is not a good look.

As Meghan has proudly claimed, genealogical tests have proved she is 43 per cent Nigerian.

On paper the two women could have been besties. After all, they have much in common. Meghan, 43, is a mother of two young children; Dr Chandauka, four years older, has four children.

But the American former actress appears to have let her competitive nature get the better of her.

Which left me wondering: Was a charity polo photoshoot at the root of Harry’s decision to quit the charity? Did an outraged Meghan pressure Harry to get Dr Chandauka to defend her in the face of a social media pile-on and, when she refused, demand her head?

Harry’s school chum Alex Rayner places the blame firmly in Dr Chandauka’s camp, suggesting that her behaviour may possibly spring from jealousy of Meghan.

He added that Harry is ‘beyond heartbroken and flabbergasted that the charity he founded has been taken hostage’ and ‘feels as if he has had had one of his fingers cut off’.

Meanwhile, I’m guessing he’ll be banished to the chicken coop by Meghan. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, outraged by the fact he’s eclipsed her latest TV and business ventures, she blames him for further tarnishing the Sussexes’ already toxic reputation.

Harry is ‘a bully’. Who would ever have thought we’d read that headline?

But the people I really feel sorry for are those poor children with HIV he vowed to protect. How can he live with himself for abandoning them and, in so doing, betraying the memory of his mother Princess Diana?

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