You know a book is controversial when Buckingham Palace issues a pre-emptive, pre-publication statement about it.
Princess Diana‘s younger brother has just released a memoir full of headline-making bombshells about his famous sister, prompting the palace to get ahead of its release.
Before it even hit shelves yesterday, Charles Spencer’s “Swan Song,” a memoir about his sister, Diana, former Princess of Wales, stirred a rare reaction from King Charles’s camp — something that didn’t even occur when Prince Harry released his no-dirty-laundry-unaired autobiography, ”Spare,” in 2023.
“While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle,” the palace said in a statement, “His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss.”
The statement was released in response to claims made in excerpts published in the Daily Mail last week, in which Spencer says that then Prince Charles sounded “giddily elated — like a lottery winner” in a phone call immediately after Diana died in a car crash in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997.
“Looking back now, I suspect the prince’s first reaction must have been to think more of how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not,” Spencer writes. “It can be hard to feel too much sympathy for an ex-spouse, or those who care for them profoundly, after bitter divorce.”
The excerpts also included one of the most shocking claims in the book, that during a heated phone conversation before Diana’s funeral, Charles “hissed”: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
Spencer says he saw it as his ex-brother-in-law’s “pent up contempt” for Diana finally coming out, and “his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death.”
Spencer — who told the BBC that this book really is his “last word” on his famous sister — addressed the palace’s statement in an interview with Good Morning America on Monday, saying he felt “gaslit” by the King while noting “it doesn’t say that he didn’t say it either.”
In an interview with People, Spencer — after claiming that he didn’t want it to sound “loaded” — said that if he had wanted to write a “scandalous” book about the King, he has enough material to make it a “jaw dropper,” but he’s chosen not to.
Now that it’s out, here are seven more explosive claims in Charles Spencer’s “Swan Song.”
He paints an unflattering portrait of King Charles
Along with contempt for the media, whom he firmly believes killed his sister through its relentless, unprincipled pursuit of her, Spencer expresses vitriol for King Charles and paints him as a petty, resentful man.
A selection of the disparaging details he shares: unsubstantiated claims that, around the time of Diana’s death, then Prince Charles wanted his mother to abdicate; a memory of Charles saying, “You’re just so lucky to have inherited so young” after Spencer’s father’s death five years earlier; the queen telling him once that Charles “always resents things.”
He recalls Charles’s lack of generosity when Diana tried to give him some random household objects — hangers and tin cups — for his student digs, but the future king intervened because they were his.
Diana truly loved Charles — but he did not return the feeling
Spencer emphasizes that his sister truly fell in love with Charles “the person,” and was smitten from the first, mixed with a tenderness for his lonely childhood. “I felt reassured that my sister’s love for the heir to the throne was not only true, but almost palpable.”
At the same time, he notes that Charles and Diana’s first public outing as a couple was watching the Prince race a horse, the future Princess cheering him on alongside Camilla Parker-Bowles.
There were also early signs of trouble: Spencer claims that Diana tried to pull out of the wedding, writing that she told their father she “could not go through with marriage to a man who did not love her” after Charles ignored her all night at a party. Her father was “appalled,” and said she could not back out because it would be “deeply embarrassing” to the royals.
On her wedding day, Spencer says he learned later, she had a “wistful sadness” because the evening before Charles had said “he was very happy to marry her, but was not actually in love with her.”
He says that there was serious discussion of a “separation” quite early on, and that later she took her brother to lunch and said she wanted a divorce, claiming “my husband is in love with his valet.” Spencer calls this “improbable,” noting it was more significant as a mark of “the end of her dreams.”
Diana would not have wanted Princes William and Harry to walk in her funeral procession
One of the most striking images from Diana’s funeral was the sight of her two sons walking behind her coffin through the streets of London. Spencer says that he fought this choice, claiming his sister would never have wanted this “public ordeal.”
When Charles phoned him about his objections, Spencer claims he was “testy” and launched into a long rant about how Diana’s kin had “no sense of duty,” claiming he’d had to do it himself at his uncle’s funeral. (At 30, Spencer pointed out.)
Another damning detail: According to Spencer, Charles insisted on walking in Diana’s funeral procession, but fearing the public would hurl abuse at him, the palace wanted the boys there as a shield.
He refutes claims of Diana’s unhappy childhood
Spencer notes that any “snippets” of biographies about Diana that he’s come across have been “notable for their inaccuracy,” and one of his motivations for writing this now is to correct the “invention and lazy half-truth” out there. One area he starts with is their childhood, claiming that any stories — presumably even Diana’s own accounts of the pain of her parents’ divorce and everything that followed — that claim she was an unhappy child are false. In fact, Spencer says she was “the secure recipient of strong parental love, mainly in a warm and loving parental home.”
Certainly, a large portion of the book is dedicated to their shared childhood, and Spencer fills it with mostly fond memories about growing up together, navigating their parent’s separation as the two youngest shuttled between homes. A scene that stands out from this period: Diana sitting on the front step of their family home, waiting for her mother’s return that never came.
Queen Elizabeth and Diana’s father had a budding romance
Spencer spills a long-held family secret — albeit not about people you may have been suspecting. The late queen and his father apparently had a romance that was cut off by Lord Mountbatten, who wanted his nephew Prince Philip in that role instead. Their father, Johnnie Spencer, required “significant counselling” after this forced split, although Spencer does note the irony that had this relationship blossomed, neither King Charles nor Diana would have existed.
His sister was “full of self-doubt,” possibly neurodivergent
Spencer posits that Diana had “key symptoms associated with ADHD,” notably a short attention span. He says her undiagnosed, unsupported “learning difficulties” made school the “most difficult times” of her childhood; Spencer vividly recalls the “screech of pain” when she learned that she had failed a key set of exams in high school. He says he believes these early challenges “impacted her self-worth dramatically.”
Spencer says that his sister “craved acceptance, admiration, kindness and — perhaps above all — love.” He connects her willingness to take on “gritty, controversial” causes later in life to a shared “sense of helplessness” she felt. On the flip side, he repeatedly shares stories that demonstrate her “sense of fun,” and her gift for connection with others. He also praises her parenting, calling her “the best” of mothers.
He also proffers another diagnosis, one he shares: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, an “intense emotional pain in the face of others’ rejection or criticism.” He claims that the “shame and despair” she experienced, often due to negative press coverage, led to her to drive a headland multiple times and “contemplate ending it all.”
In a medical aside, he also reveals she had “chronic back issues,” made worse by long periods in high heels.
Diana was an imperfect human
Spencer, while writing about his sister with clear affection, doesn’t present a hagiography either.
One example he gives was her pattern of regularly falling out with family members, punishing them with the silent treatment for sometimes months at a time for “often not very much at all.”
