Paul Burrell, who served as Princess Diana’s longtime butler before her death, recently blasted Prince Harry for airing the Royal Family’s “dirty laundry” publicly, adding that Harry is “blinded” by wife Meghan Markle’s beauty and the Hollywood lifestyle.
Princess Diana, Burrell said, would be “heartbroken” by Harry’s actions and his situation if she were still alive today.
Burrell, who worked with Diana for 10 years and met Harry as a baby, told Closer Magazine that he doesn’t “recognize” Harry anymore and emphasized that therapy should be done privately.
“There’s no doubt it’s a great idea for Harry to have help and therapy. But therapy is supposed to be confidential – it doesn’t work on the world stage,” the 62-year-old said. “Doing what he’s doing is only going to cause him so much more pain. I don’t recognise him now – he’s almost become the centre of his own world.”
“He’s hurting his family and saying things that I really think he’ll regret,” Burrell continued. “Meghan has encouraged him to get therapy and change his way of thinking – but I think he’ll be left broken when this all stops and he realises what he’s done.”
“He’s been blinded by Meghan, by her beauty and by this Hollywood world,” the former butler stated.
“I think now it could only be Meghan who can stop him from doing these interviews and doing any more damage, and destroying himself. He won’t heal if he keeps doing this – it’ll make things worse in the long run. I honestly have no idea when it will stop.”
“Diana would be heartbroken it’s come to this,” Burrell said, according to the Daily Mail. “Not only would she be devastated that Harry is cut off from his family, but she’d disapprove of him tearing down the royals.”
“She’d want him to stop airing his dirty laundry, and to live a quiet, private life, focused on his children.
Prince Harry revealed last week that Markle told him she was going to commit suicide but stopped herself because she didn’t want her husband to lose “another woman” in his life, referencing Princess Diana.
“The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be on me after everything that had happened to my mum and to now be put in a position of losing another woman in my life, with a baby inside of her, our baby,” Harry said in a documentary series with Oprah Winfrey.
“The scariest thing for her was her clarity of thought,” the prince continued. “She hadn’t ‘lost it.’ She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t self-medicating, be it through pills or through alcohol. She was absolutely sober. She was completely sane. Yet in the quiet of night, these thoughts woke her up.”
Though Harry never sought help from his family, he speculated that they wouldn’t help him anyway.
“That was one of the biggest reasons to leave, feeling trapped and feeling controlled through fear, both by the media and by the system itself, which never encouraged the talking about this kind of trauma,” he said, adding, “Certainly now I will never be bullied into silence.”