Prince Harry gave Queen Elizabeth II a secret mobile phone so he could reach her whenever he pleased, according to former royal butler Paul Burrell.
As revealed in extracts from Burrell’s new memoir, exclusively serialised in the Daily Mail, the Duke of Sussex sent his grandmother the device that would allow him to bypass her courtiers – and even his own family – whenever he wished to get in touch.
Writing that Harry ‘didn’t always adhere to protocol’, Burrell – who became a close confidante of his mother Diana, Princess of Wales – said this extended to keeping in touch even after ‘Megxit’.
Harry wed Meghan Markle in May 2018. Less than two years later, in January 2020, the pair announced their intention to step back from Royal duties.
By the summer, they had relocated to the US – and in September announced a Netflix deal that continues to this day, albeit in depreciated form.
Despite surrendering their royal responsibilities and patronages as they severed themselves from the working family, Burrell said Harry found ways of circulating protocols as an effective outsider.
Without telling his brother Prince William or his father Prince – now King – Charles, the Duke sent his grandmother a secret mobile phone.
The intention, as Burrell explains in The Royal Insider: My Life with the Queen, the King and Princess Diana, was to give himself a direct line to ‘Granny’.
But this did not go quite to plan for Harry – nor for Prince Andrew, who Burrell said had tried a similar move.
Writing in the book, Burrell said: ‘Unbeknown to his father or brother, Harry had sent Granny a mobile phone with the intention of having a secure line direct to the CEO of the family firm, bypassing not just his family but all her courtiers.
‘When it arrived she said: “What am I supposed to do with it?” After all, the monarch couldn’t be expected to answer it whenever it rang. Imagine it going off in her handbag while she was in a meeting with a head of state or opening Parliament.
‘So that mobile phone went in the top drawer of a servant’s desk at the end of the long green corridor alongside a phone from Prince Andrew, who’d had a similar plan.
‘But even without her mobile phone, the Queen did get to see Harry and Meghan and her great–grandchildren.’
Burrell’s book reveals more details of the Queen’s ‘special relationship’ with Harry, said to be her favourite grandson, and how she even sought to placate Meghan as they bitterly split from the rest of the royal family.
He also reveals more on how the late Queen was able to meet her namesake, Princess Lilibet, in June 2022 during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations – just weeks before she died at Balmoral.
Netflix had been filming scenes of Lilibet’s first birthday – and Harry and Meghan were said to have invited the toddler’s great–grandmother for a tea party, presumably to be captured on camera.
But the Queen is said to have declined, and invited them instead to a tea party that proved so divisive other royals left the room until they had left.
Reports from the time also suggested that Meghan and Harry had sought to bring a private photographer to capture the moment the Queen met Lilibet – but the move was vetoed.
The Queen had been concerned that the photographs, captured by Harry and Meghan’s ‘people’, may end up in US media and beyond the tightly controlled apparatus that is the Royal Family’s communications machine.
Harry and Meghan reportedly departed the UK an hour before the Jubilee celebrations came to an end – and, as Burrell notes in his memoirs, before the Queen had been able to share a birthday surprise with her great–granddaughter.
The Duke would later recall how his children greeted the Queen during the birthday celebrations in his controversial memoir, Spare.
He had written of the encounter: ‘Archie making his deep bows, his baby sister Lilibet cuddling the monarch’s shins.’
He recounted the Queen’s reaction as one of pleasant surprise: ‘”Sweetest children”, Granny said, sounding bemused. She’d expected them to be a bit more… American, I think? Meaning in her mind, more rambunctious.’
