When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat down for an interview after their engagement was announced on November 27, 2017, Harry said he thought his late mother Princess Diana and his future wife would “be thick as thieves, without question,” he said, adding that he thought the former Princess of Wales “would have probably been best friends with Meghan.”

Meghan’s 2025 has gotten off to a busy start, with the Duchess of Sussex rejoining Instagram, re-launching her lifestyle brand (now called As ever, not American Riviera Orchard), premiering a new show on Netflix, With Love, Meghan (with a second season to come later this year), and launching a new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder. Diana’s former butler and close confidante Paul Burrell tells InStyle exclusively that, while Diana would “have been puzzled” at some parts of Harry and Meghan’s life post-leaving their roles as working royals five years ago and relocating to California, “Diana would have applauded their fight for freedom and their risky strategy to break free and live a normal life,” Burrell says. 

After marrying in May 2018, Harry and Meghan announced their step back from royal life on January 8, 2020, five years ago. They relocated from the U.K.—Harry’s home country—to the U.S., specifically Meghan’s home state of California. (More on California in a moment.) Burrell, who worked with Diana up until her death on August 31, 1997 at age 36, was “very pro-royal,” Burrell says, despite not always having the best relationships with some members of the royal family (emphasized in her divorce from Prince Charles, which was finalized just a year before her death in 1996). According to Burrell, Diana was not a fan of using any royal title for monetary gain, even her own: “Diana did everything for other people and didn’t make a cent out of her titles,” Burrell says, as he wondered whether the couple were using the profits from their entrepreneurial ventures to pour “into Archewell [their shared nonprofit] or a campaign to help other people, or whether it’s going directly to Harry and Meghan.” (Burrell adds that if profits are going into a purse “which will be dispersed to people less fortunate,” he is “all for it.”)

Diana would have weighed in on it all, he says. “I think she would have counseled them, helped them along the way,” he tells InStyle.

As for the royal family—which Harry and Meghan remain, for the most part, estranged from, at least according to reports—Burrell says that when it comes to news from the Sussex front (like As ever, for example), “They likely just bat it off.”

“I think they ignore it to a certain extent,” he says, adding, “I really don’t think the royal family can do very much about it.”

In December, while speaking to Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit, Harry said that his life in the U.S. is what Diana would have “wanted” for him, per the BBC.

“I think, again, when you are kind of trapped within this bubble, it kind of feels like there’s no way out,” Harry said of life in the royal fishbowl. He added, “What happened to my mum, and the fact that I was a kid and felt helpless, there comes the inner turmoil. I felt helpless. One of my biggest weaknesses is feeling helpless.” He added that what frightened him most was that what happened to Diana—who was stalked by paparazzi up until the moment of her death in a Paris car accident—“would happen to me, or to my wife, or to my kids.”

Moving to California wasn’t out of left field, obviously for Meghan (who was born and raised there), but even for Harry. In Burrell’s 2003 memoir A Royal Duty, which followed his career working for the royal family as a butler to both the former Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana, and then Diana after their divorce, he shared that Diana herself had been planning to start a new life in California just before she died, and had even picked out a home in Malibu for herself, Harry, and Prince William, per ABC News. Diana had plans to move into Julie Andrews’ former home, which Burrell called “a lovely house…saw all the plans for it” in a 2003 interview on Good Morning America.

“We sat on the floor, spread out all the maps and the layout of the house,” Burrell said, adding that Diana said “This is our new life, just won’t it be great? Think of the lifestyle the boys—nobody’s judgmental here in America. You don’t have the class system, you don’t have the establishment.” (Harry himself said of moving to California on an episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, “Living here now, I can actually lift my head and I feel different. My shoulders have dropped, so have hers [Meghan]. You can walk around feeling a little bit more free.”)

The idea of Diana moving to California and starting over played out on season 6 of Netflix’s The Crown, and in Harry and Meghan’s 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, Harry himself confirmed that California was in his mother’s plans, musing that California “was the most obvious place to come,” adding, “This is one of the places my mum was going to end up living, potentially, you know.”

Diana’s former voice coach Stewart Pierce backed this up, telling Us Weekly, “She was talking about buying a property in Malibu [and saying] that would be ‘really great’ for the boys to have freedom so that they could surf. Because they’re both very sporty, you know, but they could surf, they could rollerblade, they could Frisbee.”

Charles Rae, a former royal correspondent for The Sun, told Newsweek that not long before she died, Diana told him and others, “My kids want me to go to America. I’m sick and tired of everything that’s going on,” referring to the press’ continual harassment of her. “And then at the end, she gave this mysterious statement: ‘You’ll be very surprised with the next thing I do,’” Rae added. Unfortunately, because of her far too soon death, the world will never know for sure what exactly she meant, and whether the surprise would have been a move to California or something else entirely.