As soon as news broke that copies of Charles Spencer’s memoir about the late Princess of Wales, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, had been stolen from a truck in the Netherlands, it was inevitable that the contents of the revelatory and potentially scandalous book would soon make it into the public domain. And so it has proved, albeit through the time-honoured means of a serial deal in the Daily Mail. Yet although the first official excerpt will only be published later today, there is already a war of words brewing between Buckingham Palace and Spencer over a particularly shocking story from Swan Song.
Anyone who remembers Spencer’s incandescent and emotive eulogy to his sister, in which he attacked the Royal Family and the media, will know that he has an axe to grind when it comes to his former siblings-in-law. If reports of the book’s contents are correct, he has offered intimate detail about one of the most contentious scenes that took place after Diana’s death in August 1997. The young princes William and Harry were instructed, apparently by Prince Philip, to walk behind their mother’s funeral cortege: an action that could either be viewed as heartless thoughtlessness or a sincere, if misguided, attempt to involve the boys in the funeral in a meaningful way.
In either case, Spencer now writes that he attempted to veto such an action for his late sister’s sake, even going so far as to tell Charles ‘that’s not going to happen.’ According to the Earl:
‘Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting. Then he stopped. I assumed the pause signalled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. “Rest assured,” he hissed, “we’ll forget her soon enough!”.’
As the continued interest in the late Princess of Wales has proved over the past three decades, it is clearly not true that Diana has been forgotten. But the wider issue is not whether Charles was correct, but whether he even made such an incendiary remark.
In what is probably the strongest royal rebuttal since the late Queen’s famous ‘recollections may vary’ comment about the outlandish claims of Harry and Meghan, Buckingham Palace issued a statement last night that said:
‘While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.’
It was tactful, dignified and, underneath the usual circumlocution, angry. A further, more candid statement was offered to the Daily Mail, when it was said of Charles that the alleged comment was ‘just not in his nature and it certainly wasn’t in his nature at that time, when he was a man absolutely grief-stricken.’
As ever in ‘he said, he said’ arguments of this nature, the public will pick a side and come down heavily on their preferred version of events. Those who have always loathed the now-King for what they have seen as his cruel and neglectful treatment of his former wife will be only too glad to believe Spencer’s furious account of his callousness. Conversely, those supporters of the monarchy who see the Earl as a disruptive, even destructive influence will regard this as an opportunity to sell what they would perceive as sensational and largely untrue memoir that might make Jason Arday’s book look like a sober exercise in factual accuracy.
Those whose sympathies lie somewhere in between might observe that two things can be possible at the same time. Charles was, undoubtedly, grief-stricken after Diana’s death and went above and beyond to comfort his shell-shocked sons, in a fashion unthinkable had it occurred in a previous generation. He also ensured that the late Princess of Wales was given a full ceremonial funeral, against conventional royal protocol. It is also possible that, sleep-deprived and faced with Diana’s angry, emotional brother, he said something rash that he may later have regretted, and has chosen to blot out the memory of such an utterance. In either case, one ill-tempered remark – if it ever was made – should not obscure the clear good that Charles did at the time and has done since in Diana’s memory.
One of Spencer’s last books, his furious, deeply sad 2024 title A Very Private School, rightly won acclaim for its mixture of anger and regret at the private school system that, in his estimation, royally screwed him and boys like him up. Should Swan Song be attempting to do for the monarchy what the earlier book did for fee-paying schools, he might find that his audience rather less receptive.
