Nearly three decades after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, her brother has returned to the most painful days of the royal family’s modern history with an extraordinary account of the King’s behaviour in the hours after she died.
In his forthcoming memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, Charles Spencer alleges that the then Prince Charles sounded “giddily elated” when the two men spoke following Diana’s death in Paris on 31 August 1997.
“Unlike my other callers, who were stunned, barely able to articulate their condolences and offers of help, he sounded giddily elated, like a lottery winner,” Spencer writes.
It is a striking recollection, made more consequential by the fact that it comes not from a royal biographer or anonymous courtier, but from Diana’s younger brother, who stood beside her sons at Westminster Abbey six days later and delivered one of the defining speeches of her funeral.
Spencer goes further. Looking back on the conversation, he suggests that Charles’s reaction may have reflected the knowledge that Diana’s death removed an obstacle to a future marriage with Camilla Parker Bowles.
That interpretation is Spencer’s own and has not been independently established.
The memoir, which will be published by Penguin on 22 September, arrives as the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death approaches in 2027. Spencer has said he decided to write the book after years of being asked to revisit his sister’s life and because, in his view, some accounts of her have hardened into accepted history despite being untrue.
What might otherwise have been treated as another instalment in the vast Diana publishing industry has already prompted something considerably rarer: a public intervention from Buckingham Palace.
Earlier excerpts from the book contained Spencer’s account of a heated disagreement with Charles over whether the 15-year-old William and 12-year-old Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin. Spencer alleges that during the exchange Charles told him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
“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 judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.”
~ Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace responded with language unusually personal by royal standards.
“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 judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss,” the Palace said.
The statement stops short of offering an alternative account of the conversation, but plainly challenges Spencer’s memory of events. The Palace has not issued a separate response to the latest excerpt concerning Charles’s manner during the phone call immediately after Diana’s death.
That disagreement over memory sits at the heart of Swan Song. This is not an authorised history of Diana, nor does it pretend to be. It is the recollection of a brother writing almost 30 years later about a woman whose private life became one of the most examined of the 20th century.
Spencer also writes about the emotional difficulties Diana experienced during her marriage and later life. Among the most confronting passages is his claim that his sister experienced periods in which she contemplated ending her life, but that thoughts of William and Harry prevented her from acting on them.
The disclosure adds another dimension to a history already known to have included an eating disorder and profound unhappiness. It also moves the book beyond palace intrigue into far more intimate territory, raising inevitable questions about where remembrance ends and ownership of another person’s private life begins.
Diana and Charles married at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981, separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. Charles acknowledged infidelity during the marriage in a televised interview in 1994. He and Camilla married in 2005.
Diana was 36 when she died following a car crash in Paris in August 1997. What followed was an extraordinary public reaction that exposed a profound gulf between the restrained conventions of the monarchy and the emotion unfolding outside the palace gates. Her funeral became one of the defining public events of the decade.
Spencer was central to it. His eulogy, with its promise that Diana’s “blood family” would help protect William and Harry, was widely interpreted at the time as a criticism of the royal establishment. The tension between the Spencer family and the Palace has never entirely disappeared.
Almost 30 years on, Diana remains unusually resistant to being fixed in the past. She has been reconstructed through biographies, documentaries, television dramas, interviews and competing family accounts, each offering another version of a woman who can no longer answer any of them.
Spencer’s book now adds the testimony of the person who knew her before she became Diana, Princess of Wales.
Whether his memories of those extraordinary days are accepted or disputed, the response from Buckingham Palace demonstrates something remarkable in itself: after all this time, the argument over Diana, her treatment and what happened inside the royal family after her death is not yet over.
This article contains references to suicidal thoughts. In Australia, Lifeline provides free confidential crisis support 24 hours a day on 13 11 14 or by text on 0477 13 11 14.
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