Earl Spencer defends Diana memoir claims about King in BBC interview

Earl Spencer sat down with the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg at his Althorp estate to defend the central claims of his forthcoming memoir about his sister, Princess Diana—a book that has already drawn sharp pushback from Buckingham Palace over what he says King Charles told him nearly thirty years ago. The dispute centers on a single phrase, allegedly spoken during a heated telephone call in the days after Diana's death in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997: "We'll forget her soon enough."

Spencer was in South Africa when his sister died. He received the initial call from his sister Lady Jane Fellowes in the middle of the night, told only that Diana had been in a crash and it wasn't serious. Then the calls kept coming, each one worse than the last—a broken leg, perhaps a head injury, and finally, death. Hours later, Prince Charles called him at his Cape Town home to say he had broken the news to Princes William and Harry at Balmoral Castle. Spencer told Kuenssberg he detected something in Charles's tone that unsettled him deeply. "I felt there was a sort of giddy tone," he said. "I'd had a lot of calls that day from people who cared, who were stunned... and I just felt there was a lightness in his tone about Diana's death that really jarred with me."

The confrontation came when Spencer learned that palace officials had decided the young princes should walk behind their mother's coffin during the funeral procession. Spencer objected, telling the official it was not what Diana would have wanted. When Charles called to challenge him on this, Spencer recalled pushing back: "Well, of course not, sir, she wouldn't want it." Charles responded by invoking his own experience walking behind Lord Mountbatten's coffin. Spencer countered that Charles had been thirty years old at the time and Mountbatten was not his mother. According to Spencer's account, Charles then "went ballistic... and ranted for a while" about the Spencer family's sense of duty before delivering the line that would become the crux of his memoir: "We'll forget her soon enough." Spencer said he was so stunned that after a moment of silence, he told Charles he could not believe he had said that and hung up on him.

Buckingham Palace issued a strongly worded response, suggesting that grief can "cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss." The implicit challenge was clear: how reliable could Spencer's recollection be after nearly three decades? But Spencer was adamant. "I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said," he told Kuenssberg. "I've only ever had two calls on the line with Prince Charles at any stage in my life. I was hyper-alert to what he was saying, and those are precisely the words he said." He added that he had told close friends and family about the comment at the time, and when asked why he would have hung up on the King that day if not for those words, he replied simply: "What else would have made me hang up on the King that day?" He also noted that Princes William and Harry would not be surprised by these revelations—the words, he suggested, would not be news to them.

Spencer, now sixty-two, framed the book as a moral obligation. "It was my duty... as an eyewitness to history," he said, and as someone acutely aware of his own mortality—his parents had both died in their sixties. He wanted to set down the truth before it was too late. When pressed on whether he knew other damaging information about the King that he had chosen to exclude, Spencer said: "I know lots of things about the King which I chose not to include in the book because they were not relevant." He insisted this was not a threat but simply a fact. He also defended his decision to include Diana's claim that Charles was in love with his valet—a story Spencer himself acknowledged as improbable—by saying it appeared in the context of Diana telling him their marriage was over. "It's a brother's tribute, a loving tribute to a sister," he said. "And I think she deserves honesty so that's what I've delivered."

Beyond the dispute with the King, Spencer expressed deep concern about Prince Harry's security. "I would say that I personally worry about the fifth-in-line to the throne who's served in the military not having any police protection," he said. As an uncle who had witnessed his sister die in "very, very preventable circumstances," he believed protection was essential. He also drew a line between the tabloid treatment of Diana and the current coverage of Harry and Meghan, warning that the press should learn from Diana's example. "It would really be beholden on people to learn from Diana's example," he said. "For anyone who's being destroyed in this way daily, it must be such a cancerous influence in their life."

On the question of the rift between William and Harry, Spencer said he took no sides, positioning himself as a benign uncle equally available to both. He expressed hope that one day the brothers would resolve their differences, though he acknowledged he did not know the details of their dispute and would feel intrusive prying further. As for the Panorama interview with Martin Bashir in 1995—the one in which Diana admitted to an affair and spoke of feeling worthless—Spencer made a connection to her death two years later. A 2021 inquiry had found that Bashir had used deceptive tactics, including fake bank statements, to gain access to Diana. "People said, 'Oh, she was paranoid'," Spencer reflected. "She wasn't paranoid. She was convinced that she couldn't trust people because the evidence was there. And, you know, I think that left her vulnerable that night."

When asked if he supported the monarchy after writing such a damning book, Spencer said he did—but he wanted a modern one. The archaic protocol around the institution troubled him. "You know, you mentioned the statement earlier, 'His Majesty says', I just don't think it's healthy for a human being to be seen in such archaic, servile terms." He clarified that his book was not a critique of Charles as monarch but rather an account of events from thirty years ago. As the interview drew to a close, Spencer became visibly emotional when asked if he would ever get over his sister's death. He misses her every day, he said, and that is the nature of sibling loss—you never truly recover. The book, which he titled Swan Song, is his final word on Diana's life, a sign-off before he steps "into the sunset." "I have been Diana's brother," he said. "This is my final take on the situation… this is my final word, a celebration of her."