Fast forward to this month, and the man who presided over a media spectacle ahead of his UK trip, including a public spat over royal accommodation, is practically a stranger, she said. Ms Anderson made the comments while appearing on the Kinsey Schofield Unfiltered podcast, reflecting on Harry’s much-publicised transatlantic visit. “I count my lucky stars that I’m not working in the royal household today,” she said. “They just don’t know where the next missile is going to come from.
“It feels chaotic, it feels like a drama. You would never expect that from the British monarchy.”
Ms Anderson added: “I left the royal household at the end of 2013 … Harry was very approachable, very warm, very chatty. Fast forward to now, and he is in my view almost unrecognisable from what he was then.”
She went on to criticise the duke’s handling of his family’s return to the UK, which included multiple press briefings on the accommodation debacle and his long-running battle for taxpayer-funded security.
“It turned into a shambles, for the reputation of his wife, [and] even the children as a knock-on effect,” she said. “That’s all people are going to talk about. And it takes away from the real reason he came to the UK, for the Invictus Games.”
Despite the chaos, Harry reunited his two children, Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, with King Charles for the first time in four years on July 10.
Speculation was rife over whether the reunion would take place after the accommodation disagreement and reported tension between the King and his youngest son over his security demands.
While the meeting at Charles’ Highgrove residence was interpreted as a sign of thawing relations, Prince William was notably absent, with the rift between the two brothers showing no sign of abating.
Harry fuelled the estrangement from his royal relatives after stepping down as senior royal in 2020 by criticising William, Charles, Queen Camilla and Princess Kate in his Oprah interview, Netflix documentary and his autobiography Spare.