Harrold: Prince William broke up with Kate in 2007 to get the media off her back

Grant Harrold, the former “royal butler” of King Charles’s Highgrove estate, is still shilling his book. Harrold seems to be following the royal party line, and it would not surprise me at all if the palace had issued some talking points for him to follow, especially when it comes to Prince Harry. Well, somewhat hilariously, Harrold was asked about Prince William and then-Kate Middleton’s infamous 2007 breakup. Back then, William was being pressured to either propose to Kate or dump her, and he chose “dump her.” There was tons of documentation that William celebrated the breakup and went looking for other girlfriends (only to be turned down by the posh girls). Kate and her mother came up with a plan to ensnare William yet again, and it worked – six months after he dumped Kate, they were back together. Would you like Harrold’s take on all of this?

By now, Prince William and Kate Middleton have been together for the better part of 25 years—save for a few months in 2007, when they briefly broke up after graduating from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (where they originally met in 2001).

Royal butler Grant Harrold—who began his service for the royal household the day after Princess Diana’s death on August 31, 1997 and who left royal employ just 18 days after William and Kate’s wedding on April 29, 2011—was around for the breakup, working at Prince Charles’s country home, Highgrove, at the time of their split. In his new book The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life in Royal Service, which is out in the U.S. on September 23, Harrold writes that, even through their breakup, “Kate was always the one.”

Speaking exclusively to InStyle, Harrold says that during their breakup, William’s demeanor “became very quiet,” he says. “He went very quiet. He became a little bit withdrawn. I didn’t see a huge amount of him. I didn’t ask him—I didn’t say anything. I just knew he wasn’t himself 100 percent. I knew he wasn’t himself.”

Harrold speculates that maybe William and Kate “split up to get the media off Kate’s back, because it was so bad at the time,” he says of the rampant pressure on the couple in 2007 to get engaged. “Kate was struggling, and I wondered if it was to give a breathing space. That’s just my view. I had no information. So when they got back together, I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if they hadn’t really split up, they just had a bit of time apart [because of] the media.’”

During that time apart—only a few months in length—“I kept hoping that was the case and they would get back together, and I secretly wanted them to get back together,” Harrold says. When they did reconcile, he was “thrilled,” he adds.

Harrold describes the Kate he knew in the 2000s as “lovely, very bubbly, very talkative.”

“What’s funny—people think she’s shy,” Harrold says. “She’s not shy at all.” Kate had no airs about her and talked to Harrold about how his week was and what was happening. Even if he’d read headlines about her, he never mentioned it—“I always made out that I had no knowledge,” he says. “So I would kind of say, ‘What have you been up to, and what have you done?’ She was always lovely.”

One of the roles of a royal butler was to get a drink for anyone who needed one in the house, but Kate “would take care of herself,” Harrold says. “She wouldn’t let me do anything. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ She’d be in the fridge getting a drink. ‘I’ll get you a plate.’ She’s already got the plate. You know what I mean? She did everything herself.”

[From InStyle]

They keep trying to rewrite Will & Kate’s early years (!!) and it’s always so funny to those of us who were around for the coverage at the time. While the 2007 breakup was “the big one,” for years beforehand, William and Kate had a more loosey-goosey understanding that he got to sow his oats and pursue other women. They had tons of mini-splits before the big one in 2007, and no, that one did not happen because William was trying to get the media off Kate’s back. Hilariously, Kate was never more welcoming to the press than she was post-split. She was out constantly, going to nightclubs and parlaying her “royal ex-girlfriend” credentials to get into posh events. That was the plan – to show William what he was missing. It wouldn’t have worked if the posh girls had shown William any interest at all. Thankfully for Waity, the other girls weren’t into him.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.