The HARRY Nobody Knows

Princess Diana's longtime butler reveals how the boy he knew has changed — and what his late mother would think of his life now!

- 

Princess Diana's devoted butler, Paul Burrell, remembers the moment well. “I first ‘met’ [Prince Harry] when Diana placed my hand on her tummy and I felt him kick in the latter stages of her pregnancy,” he tells Life & Style. He'll also never forget seeing the little boy who “preferred to sleep with his mother rather than in his own bed” after Diana was tragically killed in a 1997 Paris car crash at 36. When a grieving Harry returned to Kensington Palace, her servant of 10 years recalls, he “flunghimself into my arms. His heart broke and he soaked my shirt with his tears.”

Now, nearly three decades later, when Paul looks at where her 40-year-old son is today, he can't help but imagine what Diana would think of it all — from Harry's decision to marry former Suits actress Meghan Markle, 43, to his moving to California in 2020 amid a seemingly hopeless estrangement from sibling Prince William, 42, and their father, King Charles III, 76. The truth, Paul believes, is that Diana would never have stood for her sons' ongoing feud. “If Diana had lived, she would have steered [Harry] in a different direction and he would have been influenced by her to stay at his brother's side,” Paul says. Instead, “Meghan gave Harry the confidence to leave the royal family.”