How purge of polo and ‘posh white men’ saw Prince Harry lose control of Sentebale

Beneath the majestic Maloti Mountains, we watched a 19-year-old Prince Harry find his vocation and build a legacy in memory of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.

More than two decades on from that life-altering gap year photocall at an orphanage in the African country of Lesotho, Harry has now found himself forced to resign from the Sentebale charity he co-founded to help children like the ones he met there.

The future of the charity, which helps children orphaned by Aids, is now in serious doubt, according to sources familiar with an extraordinary row that has unfolded between its founders and Sophie Chandauka, the embattled Zimbabwe-born lawyer who chairs the board of trustees.

Chandauka and interim chief executive Carmel Gaillard have wanted to make the charity less reliant on money raised by well-meaning posh white men, including Harry.

His polo matches around the world, featuring glamorous figures such as the Argentine star of the sport and Ralph Lauren model Nacho Figueras, have raised almost £12 million for Sentebale and been one of its major sources of funding for years, while concerts by his celebrity friends including Rita Ora and Chris Martin have also helped.

In the process of this culture clash, according to one source familiar with the matter, Chandauka upset one of the main financial backers of the Sentebale Polo Cup, resulting in the match not taking place last year.

To replace the income, she hired – allegedly without board approval – consultants, understood to be Lebec,  a women-led strategy firm that advises clients on getting finance from philanthropists. “The total spend on the consultants to explore a new fundraising strategy was £500,000 but it did not produce new funding,” the source said. “There was a clear breach of trust. She lost the support of the board.”

In the fallout, courtiers and journalists who have incurred Harry’s wrath over the years could perhaps be forgiven for enjoying the irony of seeing him hoist by his own petard.

The Prince who accused them of racism towards the Duchess of Sussex, now himself faces similar allegations of bullying, harassment, and “misogynoir” – defined as a particular kind of sexism faced by black women – from Chandauka. She has lost the trust of the two co-founders and five British and African trustees despite a glittering CV that includes senior corporate positions at Meta, Morgan Stanley, and Virgin Money in the US and Britain.

But among Royal insiders and veteran Royal watchers the reaction to the resignations of Harry and fellow co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, has been almost unanimously one of regret. “It’s a terribly sad state of affairs,” said one former confidant.

That original trip in March 2004 was the first of many for Harry to Lesotho and one of at least four for me during a long spell covering the Royal Family. In a country where one in four adults was HIV positive, the second-highest rate in the world after what was then Swaziland and is now known as Eswatini, it was a lesson in the soft power of Royalty.

“We’ve been trying to get the international media interested in the HIV/Aids crisis in southern Africa for the past three years,” one UN worker said, as Harry helped construct a fence around the orphanage. “And in one day, we’ve got more journalists here than we’ve had in those past three years.”

The young Prince was so fragile initially, aides instructed journalists not to ask him about Diana but in September that year he broke his silence in an interview for an hour-long ITV documentary about his eight-week stay in Lesotho. “I always wanted to go to an Aids country to carry on my mother’s legacy as much as I can,” he said. “I believe I’ve got a lot of my mother in me, basically, and I think she’d want us to do this, me and my brother.”

Later when he was dating Chelsy Davy it was she who could not be discussed, as during subsequent trips he talked in mountain lodges and goat herdsmen’s huts with growing confidence and maturity about his desire to do something that would have made his mother proud.

Harry and Seeiso, who has acted like an alternative older brother to the now 40-year-old Prince, publicly supported the decision to appoint Chandauka, who had served on the charity’s board from 2009 until 2015, as its chair in July 2023, replacing the Marlborough and Edinburgh University-educated Johnny Hornby.

Publicly, they were equally supportive of the charity’s decision to broaden the focus of its work to addressing issues of climate change, inequality and youth health, and in December last year to shift decision-making from London to southern Africa.

The announcement coincided with the departure after five years of its chief executive Richard Miller, an international development specialist with 40 years’ experience in the field, and the appointment of Johannesburg-based Gaillard. “Leading into our 20^th anniversary, our organisation will be locally led, aligning with the global movement towards fostering greater local agency and ownership,” the two co-founders said in a joint statement. “This shift reflects our continued commitment to being guided by voices from within the region we serve.”

But behind the scenes all was not well. A steady stream of senior figures left, among them Baroness Chalker, the former overseas development minister, who retired after almost 20 years as a trustee in November. In an interview this week, she said she was not happy with the direction of the charity under Chandauka’s leadership and found her “almost dictatorial”.

When a financial deal fell through in December, the board of trustees turned against Chandauka. In February they sought to vote her out but she went to the High Court to stop the vote, prompting the five trustees – Timothy Boucher, Harry’s old friend Mark Dyer, Audrey Kgosidintsi, Dr Kelello Lerotholi and Damian West – to resign last Monday, citing their loss of faith in her and their concern to avoid landing the charity with a big legal bill.

Harry and Seeiso resigned in solidarity, hoping to shame her into quitting. They said they were heartbroken but the chair’s position was untenable. “What’s transpired is unthinkable. We are in shock that we have to do this but we have a continued responsibility to Sentebale’s beneficiaries, so we will be sharing all of our concerns with the Charity Commission as to how this came about,” they added in a joint statement.

Chandauka, 47, fired back, appointing new trustees and suggesting Sentebale was a vanity project for Harry, Seeiso and the old trustees, whom she had reported to the Charity Commission. She portrayed herself as a whistle-blower highlighting “poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir and the cover-up that ensued”.

In a blistering response that appeared to be directed at Harry, Chandauka said: “There are people in this world who behave as though they are above the law and mistreat people, and then play the victim card and use the very press they disdain to harm people who have the courage to challenge their conduct.”

Even though Sentebale had sought to distance Chandauka from some of the accusations by insisting it was not her job to manage key relationships with Polo Cup funders, she added: “I must focus on fundraising for the very important work of the young people who inspire the incredible team at Sentebale who make sacrifices daily at a time when geopolitics is severely impacting funding for development work in Africa.”

It was a nod to Donald Trump’s planned cuts to USAid, particularly to Lesotho, a country he said earlier this month “which nobody has ever heard of”. Uncertainty over whether the US would continue to fund two big projects involving Sentebale may not have helped but, in fact, the charity has insisted it has now been given the go-ahead to continue the work. “Sentebale had work stopped temporarily because of USAid discussions but the work now continues,” a spokesman said.

The bigger question is whether Sentebale, which means “forget me not” in the Sesotho language, can continue without Harry and Seeiso, the 58-year-old brother of Lesotho’s King Letsie III, at its helm. “I think that really is open to question,” one friend said, while others suggested the two royals would be ready to jump back in if Chandauka could be manoeuvred out.

Without it, Harry’s legacy and body of work may look thin in future. “He has two pillars on which his most important work projects rest: the Invictus Games (for injured troops) and Sentebale,” said Sally Bedell Smith, an American Royal biographer, suggesting he appeared less emotionally invested in other causes he has backed.