You’d imagine that getting through to King Charles III on his personal line would be pretty difficult, but you won’t believe who once gave the British monarch a cold call.
According to his former butler, Grant Harold, King Charles was once on the receiving end of a very memorable and peculiar telephone conversation.
Harold was in the employ of Charles at the time the royal was a Prince of some country called Wales, and not the King of England.
He served His Majesty and other members of the ‘old firm’, such as Queen Camilla, Prince William, and Kate Middleton, at Highgrove House in Gloucestershire from 2004 to 2011.
To celebrate the launch of his new book, ‘The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life of Royal Service,’ Harold has been taking a jolly wander down memory lane to relive just how remarkable those days as a royal butler actually were.
The Mirror reports that one of his fondest recollections is the day when King Charles’s personal phone rang with a very strange request.
Allow the 47-year-old to tell you in his own words.
“I remember once somebody got hold of the King’s private phone and they phoned him up thinking he was a Chinese takeaway,” revealed the former butler.
“They put in an order, trying to get a Chinese. He just said, ‘I’m not a Chinese takeaway, you’ve got the wrong number.’ But they kept phoning him back.”
Grant added, “Eventually, he had to get us to speak to them and say, ‘This is the wrong number’.”
To add insult to injury, the hungry caller, perhaps simply looking for some spare ribs and some chicken fried rice, didn’t seem to realise that they were talking to a future monarch. Like the butler said, they did make further attempts at ordering a King Prawn, but to no avail!
Maybe it was Prince Harry playing a prank. Talking of the prankster prince, Grant also recalls the time Prince Harry invited the butler to share a takeaway with them.
Grant said, “I declined, but I sat down with them while they had it, just informally. It was really fun, and I thought, This is obviously how they’ve been brought up.”
However, it would seem that Prince William was a little less easy-going than his younger brother, and Grant recalls unintentionally offending him during a conversation about ageing.
“I said, ‘From a man’s point of view, the worst is when you start receding, you start going bald’. Kate started sniggering, and William said, ‘Thanks, Grant!’ before leaning forward to show his hairline.”
Queen Camilla, it seems, has a great sense of humour. When Grant once overdid it with the spray tan, she affectionately snapped, ‘What have you done? What colour did you pick, Oompa Loompa?’”
Keen to get in on the action and ridicule the lowly butler even further, Prince William also joined in the right royal ribbing.
Grant recalls,”William said, ‘What have you done? Has it gone everywhere?’”.
After confirming that it had, the butler recalled, “He said, ‘Can I see it?’ I had to take my shoes and socks off to show him my toes, which were orange. He thought it was brilliant. He got his own back!”
The fun it would appear, never stopped!