Why Kate Middleton Is a “Modern Day Princess Diana,” According to a Former Royal Butler
“She is everything you can imagine.”
The Gist
- Though the two never had the opportunity to meet, Kate Middleton is a “modern day Princess Diana,” former royal butler Grant Harrold said.
- Harrold interacted with a 20-something Kate numerous times, back before she was engaged to Prince William.
- The current Princess of Wales “is everything you can imagine,” he said.
According to a royal butler who knew Kate Middleton even before she married into the royal family in 2011, the current Princess of Wales has ample similarities to the Princess of Wales that came before her—Princess Diana.
Diana died in 1997, four years before Kate met Prince William as first-year students at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 2001. Grant Harrold—who served as a royal butler from just after Diana’s death to just after William and Kate’s wedding—told The Mirror that, when it comes to Kate, “Everything about her—the way she carried herself, the way she spoke, the way she interacted with people, her kindness, her beauty—she was, if I can say, the modern day Princess Diana.”
Harrold’s book The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life of Royal Service comes out in the U.S. in September, and even though he met Kate when she was in her 20s, “That girl was a queen-in-waiting in every aspect,” he said. “She is the perfect queen material, and you can so obviously see that.”
This extends not just to public moments, but private moments, too: “Diana used to do things at Sandringham to make the staff laugh by poking her head out the window and pulling faces, and Kate was doing the same kind of thing,” Harrold said. “She is everything you can imagine—she is a beautiful and intelligent woman.”
In addition to obviously being close with William, Kate got on well with William’s younger brother, Prince Harry, Harrold said, telling The Telegraph that the two would “go shopping” and “go to pubs” together. Kate was also close to Harry’s then-girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, who Harry dated off and on from 2004 to 2011. “Chelsy was always around,” Harrold said. “And Chelsy and Kate got on really well.”
