Sentebale was Harry’s way to prove he was more than a playboy prince – as I saw when I visited with him. But there were clues things weren’t right. This will be a humiliating setback: REBECCA ENGLISH

In 2006 I accompanied Prince Harry on my first visit to Lesotho, the dusty, landlocked African kingdom that had captured his heart on his gap year travels two years earlier. 

He had just founded the charity Sentebale, which means forget-me-not in the local dialect Sesotho, in memory of his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, after being moved by the plight of a generation of children and young people growing up there in extreme poverty and with the stigma (as it was then) of Aids.

One afternoon I was sitting hunched on an earth bank overlooking what would be a new accommodation block, tapping out my story on my laptop, when I became aware of someone peering over my shoulder trying to read what I had written. It was Harry.

He had always been obsessed by what people were saying about him (and this time was no different), but he also wanted to speak to me about his passion for Lesotho and its children – and how determined he was to change their lives.

You could hear the intensity in his voice, an almost desperate determination to be taken seriously on this issue, to prove that infamous party prince (now aged 21) had a more weighty purpose in life.

I returned on two further occasions to cover his visits out there, watching Harry play football with the media (as well as snipe at us – there was always plenty of that!), help build a new school with his army mates, bake cakes and generally throw heart and soul into everything he did in a way that may surprise his critics.

How sad, then, that all of his hard work has seemingly come to an end just one year short of Sentebale’s 20th anniversary amid a storm of controversy and fears for the charity’s survival. 

Sad, but not entirely surprising. Although he last visited Lesotho in October 2024, it was actually the first time the prince had actually been there for six years. Even his regular fundraising events for the charity, mostly involving polo, had notably slowed down.

The Mail’s Rebecca English with Prince Harry – wearing a Sentebale polo shirt

The prince and his fellow co-founder, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, have now quit the charity

Nor (I, would argue, significantly in the circumstances) had he ever taken his wife, Meghan, to visit. Instead they have focused their efforts since quitting royal duties on high-profile joint tours to Colombia and Nigeria, as well as their lives as professional victims of the Royal Family.

I hesitate to say Harry’s commitment has waned. I think that’s probably unfair given what I know to be his genuine passion for this beautiful but desperately poor mountain kingdom, recently mocked by Donald Trump as a country ‘nobody has ever heard of’ as he slashed its aid budget.

But it has long been clear that something wasn’t quite right. And like so many of Harry’s long-standing projects, it does seem that his work in this field has stagnated since leaving the Royal Family, where he would have had a whole team of experienced palace private secretaries and press officers to corral his philanthropic efforts.

It is also worth noting that this is not the first scandal that has engulfed the charity, however well-meaning Harry’s intentions.

In 2008 (just two years after Sentebale was founded) it emerged that just £84,000 of the £1.15million raised (through events including a concert in memory of his late mother and a high-profile television documentary on his travels there) had actually been spent on helping the Aids orphans that Harry had set out to save.

Meanwhile some £250,000 had been lavished on staffing costs, plus tens of thousands more on new offices and a fleet of branded 4 x 4 vehicles. The charity’s first director had been earning an eye-watering £100,000 a year (a huge sum bearing in mind this was a fledgling charity two decades ago) and enjoyed a perks package that included a four-bedroom villa with staff and even an education allowance for his three children to attend private schools out-of-country.

The ensuing scandal almost brought Sentebale down. A new CEO was subsequently installed and a complete turnaround of the charity’s reputation and fortunes reigned for a significant while (I was again among a small group of media that travelled out there with him two years later to show us how much had changed).

But talk of behind-the-scenes conflict and resignations have never been far away, and have escalated rapidly in recent years with a string of high-profile supporters and executives quitting.

Rebecca English (far left) with Harry in Lesotho in 2008

This latest, devastating blow comes amid a complex row involving the current Africa-based chair, who is now suing the charity over moves by its trustees (who include a number of Harry’s close friends and supporters) to get her to stand down.

In an excoriating statement, she has hit back, claiming there has been a ‘cover up’ at the charity and accusing it of ‘weak management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, and misogynoir [discrimination against black women]’ against her as a whistleblower. 

The irony that Harry will now be pursued at the High Court – his own favored venue for combat in recent years – will be lost on no one.  

The prince and his fellow co-founder, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, the younger brother of the country’s current king and in whose own mother’s memory Senteable was also set up, have now quit in solidarity together describing the situation as ‘unthinkable’ and ‘untenable’, making clear how devastated they are.  They have also firmly placed the blame at Ms Chandauka’s feet. 

Their statement does suggest the situation may not be permanent, but the future is far from assured – not least because Sentebale is now, worryingly, facing the prospect of a Charity Commission investigation in the UK. 

It is a desperately sad situation personally given Harry’s good intentions when he first set foot in the country at the age of just 19, longing to atone for his very public sins and prove he was not the superficial playboy many assumed him to be. 

But it is – and make no mistake about the gravity of this – also a deeply humiliating set-back for the now adult prince who, while his wife clearly gets to work bringing home the financial bacon, has set his own sights on becoming a global humanitarian. 

Instead he finds himself an ex-charity patron with a hugely toxic melt-down on his hands, one that threatens to overshadow one of the few genuine success stories of his life and tarnish his dreams of carving out a career as a much-lauded philanthropic crusader.