A memoir by Princess Diana’s younger brother, Charles Spencer, goes on sale as extracts containing explosive claims about the late princess, her former husband King Charles III and the aftermath of her death have prompted an unusually sharp response from Buckingham Palace.
SWAN SONG: Diana, My Sister offers Spencer’s personal account of his sister’s life, their childhood together and the events surrounding her death in Paris in 1997. The 384-page book is being published by Penguin and has been translated into 12 languages.
Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, has said he wrote the memoir to put down his own memories of Diana as the 30th anniversary of her death approaches. He said he had become increasingly uncomfortable with accounts of his sister that, in his view, contained “untruths that have become accepted over time”. His stated aim was to “speak on Diana’s behalf” and offer what he described as a positive portrait of the woman he knew as a sister.
Among the most contentious revelations is Spencer’s account of a telephone conversation with the then Prince Charles in the days before Diana’s funeral. Spencer says the two men argued over whether Diana’s young sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, should walk behind their mother’s coffin during the funeral procession.
According to Spencer’s account, he opposed the boys taking part because he believed Diana would not have wanted them exposed to the intense public grief surrounding her funeral. He alleges that during the heated exchange, Charles told him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.” Spencer has since stood by the recollection, saying the words were exactly as he remembered them.
The claim prompted a rare response from Buckingham Palace. While the palace generally does not comment on books, a spokesperson said King Charles was mindful that “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise”. Spencer subsequently rejected the suggestion that grief had distorted his memory and maintained that his account was truthful.
The memoir contains further recollections of Charles following Diana’s death. Spencer writes that the then prince sounded “giddily elated — like a lottery winner” when he spoke to him after learning that Diana had died. Spencer interprets the reaction in the context of Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, although that interpretation is Spencer’s own.
Diana died aged 36 on August 31, 1997, after the car in which she was travelling crashed in a Paris tunnel while she was being pursued by paparazzi. Her death triggered an extraordinary outpouring of public grief in Britain and around the world. Spencer delivered her eulogy at Westminster Abbey a week later, in a speech that became one of the most remembered moments of the funeral.
The memoir also looks beyond Diana’s final days, returning to the siblings’ childhood and the close relationship Spencer says they shared. According to the publisher, the book explores their experiences growing up together, their parents’ divorce, Diana’s marriage into the royal family and her transformation into one of the most recognisable women in the world.
For Spencer, Swan Song is therefore more than a collection of previously unpublished royal claims. He has described it as his attempt to preserve his own memory of Diana and explain the person behind the global image of the Princess of Wales. The publication, however, has ensured that memories of Diana’s life and death — and the complicated relationships surrounding them — are once again at the centre of public attention nearly three decades later.
