Princess Diana's brother alleges in a forthcoming memoir that King Charles III dismissed her legacy in a bitter phone call days after the 1997 Paris crash, a claim Buckingham Palace has not directly denied.
Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, writes in his upcoming book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister that the then-Prince of Wales phoned him after Diana's death and declared she would fade from public memory. The alleged remark, as Spencer recounts it: "Rest assured, we'll forget her soon enough." Spencer says he responded, "I can't believe you just said that," and hung up.
The memoir, scheduled for release on September 22, covers Diana's 1981 wedding at St. Paul's Cathedral, the couple's extramarital affairs, their 1996 divorce, and her funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997. An excerpt obtained by the Daily Mail and reported by Page Six contains Spencer's account of the phone call and several other confrontations with the royal household in the days surrounding Diana's death.
Spencer does not provide an exact date for the alleged call, only that it came after Diana died at age 36 inside Paris' Pont de l'Alma tunnel. Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul all perished in the crash after being pursued by paparazzi.
In the memoir excerpt, Spencer characterizes the monarch's tone bluntly:
"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."
Spencer describes himself as "stunned" by the exchange. The word "hissed" is Spencer's own characterization of how Charles delivered the line about forgetting Diana. These are single-source claims, Spencer's account, published in his own book, and no independent witness to the call is named.
Buckingham Palace did not confirm or deny the specific remarks. A Palace representative offered a carefully worded statement to Page Six:
"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."
That response stops well short of calling Spencer a liar. But it plants a seed: grief distorts memory. The Palace's framing leaves room for the claim to be wrong without ever saying so directly.
Spencer's memoir also recounts a separate clash with the royal household in the days before Diana's funeral. He alleges that an unnamed aide to Queen Elizabeth called him to say that Prince William, then 15, and Prince Harry, then 12, would not participate in the funeral procession.
Spencer says he refused to accept it. His alleged reply: "That's not going to happen." Both princes did walk in the procession on September 6, 1997, alongside Spencer, their father Charles, and Prince Philip. The memoir does not clarify who reversed the decision or why the aide initially said the boys would be excluded.
The image of those two boys walking behind their mother's coffin became one of the most widely recognized moments of the late twentieth century. Spencer's account suggests the royal household nearly prevented it.
The memoir has already drawn attention before a single copy reached bookstores. Four copies of Swan Song were reportedly stolen from a truck heading to a distribution warehouse in the Netherlands. The driver had parked overnight and discovered the break-in the next morning. No information about suspects or whether the copies were recovered appears in current reporting.
Spencer, now 62, has been no stranger to public revelations in recent years. His previous memoir, A Very Private School, detailed childhood sexual abuse he suffered at boarding school, disclosures he said contributed to the breakdown of his third marriage. He and Karen Spencer, married in June 2011, are divorcing. Spencer reportedly hired Baroness Fiona Shackleton, the same high-profile divorce attorney who represented King Charles III during his split from Diana in the 1990s, according to the New York Post. The couple has a daughter named Charlotte Diana, along with children from previous marriages.
Spencer addressed the divorce publicly at the time, saying he wished Karen "every happiness in the future" and wanted to "devote myself to all my children, and to my grandchildren."
King Charles III, now 77, has not personally addressed the memoir's allegations. The Palace's statement, invoking grief's effect on memory, is the only official response on record. It neither disputes the phone call nor acknowledges it happened.
Several questions remain unanswered. Did the Palace consult with Charles before issuing its statement? Does the memoir contain additional allegations beyond those in the excerpt? And does any corroborating evidence, letters, contemporaneous notes, a third party's account, exist to support or undermine Spencer's version of the call?
None of that is available in current reporting. What is available is a single man's recollection of a private phone call nearly three decades old, published in a book he wrote and stands to profit from, and a Palace response that chose its words with surgical care.
Readers can weigh the credibility for themselves. But when the most powerful royal household on earth responds to an explosive allegation by talking about how grief clouds memory rather than by saying "it didn't happen," the silence speaks plainly enough.
