Princess Diana's brother claims King Charles III dismissed the global mourning over Diana's 1997 death with a cutting remark during a private phone call, an allegation Buckingham Palace has answered with a carefully worded non-denial.
Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, writes in his forthcoming memoir "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister" that the then-Prince of Wales phoned him after Diana died in a Paris car crash and expressed what Spencer calls raw contempt for the outpouring of grief that followed. Page Six reported on the memoir's claims ahead of its scheduled September 22 release.
Spencer recounts that Charles "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." The call ended, Spencer writes, after Charles allegedly delivered a line that Spencer says stunned him into silence before he hung up.
"'Rest assured,' he hissed, 'we'll forget her soon enough!'"
Spencer says he managed only one response before ending the call:
"I can't believe you just said that."
The alleged exchange is a single-source claim, Spencer's own recollection, written nearly three decades after the fact, with no independent corroboration offered in the excerpt. King Charles, now 77, has not personally addressed the allegation.
A Buckingham Palace representative offered a statement that stopped well short of calling Spencer's account false. The Palace 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 judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss."
That language, pointing to grief that can "cloud reason" and "colour memory", questions Spencer's reliability without disputing the specific words he attributes to the King. It is a diplomatic way of saying Spencer may be remembering wrong, without actually saying he is.
The response fits a familiar Palace pattern: say nothing definitive, concede nothing, and let the news cycle move on. Whether that strategy works depends on what else the memoir contains, and how the public receives a brother's account of a conversation no one else heard.
The memoir does not stop at the alleged phone call. Spencer writes that days before Diana's funeral on September 6, 1997, an aide to Queen Elizabeth contacted him to insist that Prince William, then 15, and Prince Harry, then 12, would not walk in the funeral procession at Westminster Abbey. Spencer's account of his response was blunt.
"That's not going to happen."
Both boys ultimately did walk in the procession, alongside Spencer, their father, and Prince Philip. The image of William and Harry, two children walking behind their mother's coffin, became one of the most recognizable moments of the late twentieth century. Spencer's memoir now claims he had to fight for it to happen at all.
Prince Harry, of course, has spent years publicly airing his own grievances with the royal family. He and his wife Meghan Markle have made headlines repeatedly over their fractured relationship with the institution, and Spencer's memoir adds another layer to the family's long-running public disputes.
The memoir spans the full trajectory of Diana's life within the royal family. It covers her 1981 wedding to Charles at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the couple's extramarital affairs, their 1996 divorce, and Diana's death the following year at age 36.
Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul all died in a crash inside the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris after being chased by paparazzi. The crash and its aftermath consumed global attention for weeks and turned Diana into something closer to a secular saint in the public imagination, a status that, if Spencer's account is accurate, clearly irritated the man she had once married.
The Daily Mail obtained and published an excerpt from the memoir ahead of its release. The book has already generated controversy before a single copy has reached store shelves. Four copies were reportedly stolen from a truck heading to a distribution warehouse in the Netherlands. The driver had parked overnight and discovered a break-in upon waking. Whether the stolen copies have surfaced or led to any arrests remains unclear.
King Charles's relationship with public figures on both sides of the Atlantic has drawn scrutiny in recent years. A recent book reported that President Trump found the King "boring" during a 2019 meeting dominated by climate talk, though that relationship has reportedly evolved since.
Spencer's claims deserve the scrutiny any single-source, decades-old recollection demands. He is selling a book. He has a point of view. And memory, as even Buckingham Palace noted, can shift over time.
But the Palace's own response is worth reading carefully. A flat denial would have been easy to issue. Instead, the institution chose language that cast doubt on Spencer's judgment without contradicting his facts. That is not the same as saying it didn't happen.
Meanwhile, the broader Spencer and Windsor families continue to play out their conflicts in public. Meghan Markle has reportedly been exploring a return to acting after years of reinvention attempts, while the royal family has carried on with its public duties, including recent outings at Balmoral.
The memoir hits shelves September 22. Readers can judge for themselves whether a brother's grief sharpened his memory or distorted it. What they cannot do is unhear the quote, and neither, apparently, can the Palace.
When an institution's best defense is that grief makes people remember things wrong, the accusation has already landed.
