Straight faces, please, as we try to look charitably at the toxic row engulfing Prince Harry’s charity. Are you up to speed with this everyday story of giving folk? I’m in such a muddle with it all that I can’t remember if I’m allowed to say that purely from my observations of her telly interviews, Sentebale chair Sophie Chandauka does seem like a right old loose cannon.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s do a quick recap. Sentebale is a charity to help children and young people with HIV and Aids in Lesotho and Botswana, and was set up almost two decades ago by Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, in honour of their mothers. Its current chair is Chandauka, a Zimbabwean lawyer, and something about her stewardship of the charity has provoked its entire board of trustees to judge that their relationship has broken down irretrievably. Accordingly, they have all resigned. Chandauka in turn has said that the charity was riddled with “poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny [and] misogynoir”, and accused Prince Harry of “harassment and bullying at scale”.
