Palace disputes Earl Spencer's claims about King Charles's Diana comments

Buckingham Palace has issued an unusually forceful rebuttal to claims made in Earl Spencer's forthcoming memoir about a conversation with King Charles in the days following Diana's death nearly three decades ago. According to excerpts published in the Daily Mail, Spencer alleges that the then-Prince of Wales told him over the phone, "we'll forget her soon enough"—a remark Spencer characterizes as evidence of Charles's contempt for his late sister and shock at the world's overwhelming grief. The Palace has rejected the account outright, suggesting that Spencer's memory may have been distorted by the weight of fraternal loss and suggesting that such a comment would be entirely inconsistent with Charles's character and his own grief at the time.

The dispute centers on a specific moment of tension between the two men. Spencer claims he had objected to Charles's insistence that Princes William and Harry, then fifteen and twelve years old, walk behind their mother's coffin in the funeral procession. According to Spencer's account in the book, Charles responded with what he describes as a "stream of anger," unleashing what Spencer took to be years of accumulated resentment toward Diana and bewilderment at the scale of public mourning. The Palace's response—carefully worded but pointed—suggests that grief itself may have clouded Spencer's recollection, invoking language that echoes Queen Elizabeth's 2021 statement about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's racism allegations, when she noted that "recollections may vary."

Spencer's book, titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, is scheduled for publication the following week and promises to offer an insider's perspective on Diana's death and its aftermath from the Spencer family's vantage point. The memoir arrives at a moment when the Royal Family has long been sensitive about its perceived emotional distance during the crisis of Diana's death in 1997. At the time, the monarchy faced intense public criticism for appearing cold and disconnected from the nation's grief, a narrative that Spencer himself helped shape through his widely remembered eulogy at her funeral, in which he spoke with emotional defiance about his sister's life and the family's failings.

The timing of this dispute is particularly fraught because it threatens to overshadow an exceptionally crowded day of royal engagements. King Charles is scheduled to address artificial intelligence industry leaders at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, where he plans to call for safeguards against AI becoming a destructive force. He will speak about the need to ensure that technological advancement remains "firmly in the service of humanity, community and the natural world," and will meet with representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Google DeepMind, alongside AI minister Kanishka Narayan. Meanwhile, Prince William and Catherine are making their first official visit to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, where they will observe the traditional sport of shinty, visit a community-owned pub, and learn about environmental conservation efforts on the island.

Later the same day, Prince Harry is scheduled to appear at the inaugural Invictus awards ceremony, marking his first major public event since returning to the United Kingdom. The ceremony will celebrate what organizers describe as the "resilience, service and unconquered spirit" of those participating in sports events for injured service personnel. It remains unclear whether his wife, Meghan, will accompany him. The convergence of so many high-profile royal events on a single day is unusual, though it may signal a new pattern as Harry and Meghan resume a more active public presence in Britain, running their own program of engagements as private citizens rather than as working members of the Royal Family.

The Palace's sharp response to Spencer's claims reflects the institution's ongoing sensitivity about how its members are portrayed during moments of historical significance. The language used—suggesting that grief can "cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory"—stops short of directly calling Spencer a liar but casts his account as potentially unreliable. For readers of Spencer's forthcoming book, the dispute raises an immediate question: what version of events will they encounter, and how should they weigh Spencer's firsthand account against the Palace's institutional denial? The row threatens to reopen wounds that have never fully healed around the monarchy's response to Diana's death and the broader question of whether the institution has truly reckoned with its failures in that moment.