Prince Harry's bitter rift with William 'started over gesture from Royal nanny' (2025)

Princess Diana's former butler Paul Burrell claims Prince Harry's bitterness over being 'the spare' to his brother Prince William started early

In an eye-opening revelation on Channel 5's The Palace: What the Royal Servants Saw, Paul Burrell, Princess Diana's former butler, disclosed that Prince Harry's sense of being "the spare" and subsequent sibling rivalry with Prince William may have been spurred by something as trivial as food during their childhood.

Burrell recounted a telling incident: "I heard one of the nannies say to William, I'm going to give you three sausages, William. You need to grow big and strong, because you're going to be king one day.'".

The remark didn't go unnoticed by a young Harry, as Burrell remembered, "Poor Harry's face across the table. I looked at him [and knew he was thinking] 'Why did you get three sausages and I got two?'"

Having joined Royal Service as a Buckingham Palace footman at just 18, before ultimately serving Princess Diana for ten years, Burrell had a front-row seat to the internal dynamics of the Royal siblings, noting: "I met both William and Harry in their early 20s, at a polo match, and chatted to them, and you could see that Harry always felt he was in second place."

Despite his underlying feelings of resentment, Harry reportedly had a charming, easygoing disposition, according to the princes' former Royal protection officer, Ken Wharfe, who found him to be the more approachable of the two. "Harry was the joker, people liked him," he said.

Royal author Robert Jobson delved deeper into Harry's psyche, suggesting additional layers beneath his affable exterior: "Even though he had this persona of being this happy-go-lucky guy that was well respected, the reality, I think, is that he always had a complex character. He was always struggling with the idea of the service, of having a public role."

Before Meghan Markle entered his life, insiders suggest that Prince Harry seemed content with his "traditional" Royal duties, which included his military career and participation in bloodsports.

However, Royal author Tom Quinn claims that everything changed when the Duke of Sussex met his future wife: "I spoke to a couple of people who run the pheasant shoot at Sandringham and they said that they just couldn't understand what Harry saw in Meghan because this was probably the only shoot she'd been to. And she hated it.

"She hated the idea of shooting 300 pheasants in a day. She didn't like Harry's Old Etonian friends."

Tom went on: "Meghan must have been appalled that they shot living creatures. But that's what the royal family did. There was a tradition in the royal family that children at their first shoot all that first hunt on their first kill, a child would have blood from the dead animals smeared on on their faces. It was called blooding."

Now, Harry has abandoned these traditions and is embracing a modern Californian lifestyle, as opposed to, as Tom Quinn puts it, "living in the 18th Century" like the rest of his family.

And, of course, he can now enjoy as many sausages for breakfast as he fancies.

The Palace: What the Royal Servants Saw will air on Channel 5 at 9:15 PM on Saturday March 29