Following the release of Prince Harry‘s memoir Spare, royal watchers have all kinds of opinions about some of the revelations the duke included in his book. But what about the people who were actually there with Harry behind palace walls? Some have argued that things the prince said in Spare do not add up and others are countering specific claims including the man who worked alongside Harry’s mother every day for years.
Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell has dismissed Harry’s claim about not crying after the princess’s death, saying the prince “cried buckets.” Here’s more on what the former royal employee recalls from that time.
Prince Harry said he couldn’t cry after Princess Diana’s death
Prince Harry has said in the past that he did not cry much after his mother died.
In an ITV interview during the promotional tour for his book, the Duke of Sussex told journalist Tom Bradby: “I cried once at the burial.”
And in Spare, he revealed that his ex-girlfriend Cressida Bonas asked him about his late mother “with the perfect combination of curiosity and compassion,” adding, “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh no, I’m crying.’ It’s the first time I’ve been able to cry over my mother since we buried her.”
Diana’s butler counters Harry’s claim, says he ‘cried buckets’
However, Burrell is telling a very different story about the prince crying. According to the former butler, Harry “cried buckets” in front of him.
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Speaking on behalf of Slingo, Burrell said: “[Prince Harry] came back to Kensington Palace and he cried buckets, in the book he says he didn’t cry. He cried buckets and I was there and he held me tight, didn’t hold his father tight but he held me tight because he knew that I was someone special in his mother’s world.
“He didn’t quite know what I did or how much I did but he knew I was always there. Both boys always knew that I was always there and I was always there at the end of the day when Diana went to bed and I left the bedroom door open and put the light on in the hallway because she was afraid of the dark. They knew all those little things, all those daily routines that I had, and those chats. Boys that came to play with William and Harry would say why is Paul always here with your mummy, why is he always there with her, he’s the butler isn’t he? Oh yeah but it’s just Paul, he’s always there.”
Burrell says Harry’s book is ‘one-sided’ because Diana didn’t tell him everything
Burrell also described Harry’s memoir as incredibly “one-sided” and that’s because, as he says, Princess Diana “didn’t tell him everything about her world.”
“I have mixed feelings about [reading Spare],” Diana’s former employee admitted. “I have mixed feelings on whether I really want to wade through Harry’s pity and sorrow and sadness because really this is a very one-sided view of someone’s experience. For me, what I keep getting into my head is that he’s looking at most of this through an 11-year-old’s eyes and everything about his mother is of course through an 11-year-old’s eyes. I find that disturbing because he didn’t know [Princess Diana’s world] like I did.
“He may not have known the full truth of everything she was doing because she did not tell her children everything about her world and I’ve got mixed emotions reading it because of course I grew up with William and Harry as children and their mother in her adult world and I’m stuck somewhere in the middle. I’m stuck with protecting children and an adult and I was placed directly in the middle of all of that. From what I have heard, I think there’s a slice of something missing from Harry’s memoir, something which he could’ve never have known and I hold the key to that box and so that’s why I wrote my book of course.”
