Getting facetime with Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t easy—even for her own grandson, apparently. So Prince Harry decided to take matters into his own hands and send his grandmother a secret cell phone so he could have a direct line to her at all times, according to an excerpt from the upcoming book The Royal Insider by Paul Burrell published by the Daily Mail.
“Of course Harry would claim later that he ‘wasn’t able to get to the Queen’ but he knew how to reach her whenever he wanted to see her. He also had a secret weapon. Unbeknown to his father [King Charles III] or brother [Prince William], 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,” writes Burrell, 67, who served as a footman to the Queen and a butler to Princess Diana.
Unfortunately for Harry, 40, who famously left his royal life behind and decamped for California with his wife Meghan Markle, 44, in 2020, his grandmother declined to actually use the phone. “That mobile phone went in the top drawer of a servant’s desk at the end of the long green corridor,” according to Burrell, who goes on to say that it joined another cell phone given to the Queen by her disgraced son Prince Andrew, 65, “who’d had a similar plan.”
It isn’t clear exactly when Harry attempted to open the lines of communication with his grandmother by giving her the cell phone, but just a few months before her death in 2022, he ruffled royal feathers when, after a visit with her that would prove to be his last, he told the Today show: “I’m just making sure she’s protected and got the right people around her.”
Back in 2021, royal commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti said on the Royally Us podcast that Queen Elizabeth did indeed own a Samsung cell phone “packed with anti-hacker encryption.”
The Royal Insider is out September 11.
