Royal row between King Charles and Earl Spencer

[Viviennemary]

Buckingham Palace said they don't usually comment but they can't stay silent. Apparently Prince Charles said at the time of Diana's death rest assured we'll forget her soon enough. Which is pretty horrendous. Charles has more or less said grief had clouded Earl Spencer's judgement and memory.

I don't know why he has waited nearly 30 years to come out with this.

Ian Hislop was editor of Private Eye at the time of Diana’s death and came in for much criticism after the edition published just after her funeral.

I remember going into our newsagents and they were removing copies of the magazine from the shelves - when I asked why the newsagent showed me the front cover and for the time it was quite shocking. I can’t find a link to it but basically the cover featured a photograph of crowds of mourners gathered outside Buckingham Palace and across the top there was a banner headline - I’m paraphrasing but it read something like ‘Media to Blame’. There were speech bubbles over the crowd. One said ‘these papers are a disgrace’. Another was a reply saying something like ‘yes, I couldn’t get hold of a newspaper anywhere’ and a third said ‘you can borrow mine, there’s a picture of the car’.

Ian Hislop explained that it was meant to highlight the hypocrisy of the British public - that those same mourners at the gates were also the insatiable consumers responsible for massively increasing tabloid sales featuring invasive photographs. In the same issue was also a kind of mock ‘apology on behalf of all newspapers’ retracting everything bad they had ever said about Diana. Hislop said they were lampooning the media’s overnight change from reviling to almost canonising her.

The jokes backfired badly and retailers like WH Smith, and other newsagent chains, like our own local one, pulled the magazine from their shelves, and some banned it permanently. I remember reading not long after that Private Eye had been inundated with complaints and lost a significant proportion of it’s readership.

I've just googled because I didn't have any memory of it and it seemed fairly unlikely, and apparently he spent the night before the wedding at Buckingham Palace.

I don't believe he said that. I believe Spencer is misremembering.

Is that the problem?
Are they not posh enough? 😮

Funny how the Middletons have managed to not put a foot wrong despite their working class/middle class mixture. Perhaps they have more noble blood than we thought.

Re the train - this rumour appears to have come from a previous rumour a year before the wedding in 1980 when they were engaged that Charles had a woman smuggled onto the royal train.

There was speculation it was Diana.

A friend of Diana claimed it was Camilla.

@Viviennemary I don't know why he has waited nearly 30 years to come out with this.

Comments like this are always weird because they insinuate that the passage of time somehow affects what happened and what didn't happen.

It doesn't matter if something horrible was said yesterday, a year ago, or 30 years ago. The point is that it was said. Saying that it's not an issue just because 30 years have passed is a really odd perspective.

It’s easier perhaps to smuggle someone onto the Royal Train - Buck P may have been considered to be the wrong choice considering thousands were camped outside! It was widely reported at the time not just one newspaper/ journalist.
Diana said herself she looked for Camilla as she was walking down the aisle….and of course also said she wanted to opt out of the wedding but her sisters said you can’t your face is already on the tea towels! I don’t believe her sister refuted this.

I think they have been cautious because the press were awful about them in the beginning. Constant sniping over their non aristocratic status, picking apart their backgrounds etc. I imagine that it was a horrible experience for what was a fairly regular family. It would certainly make you suspicious of the press and want to batten down the hatches.

I am old enough to remember the newspapers in the summer before she died and they were negative about her. Not sure if you are old enough to remember

I think it was the kindest way of dealing with someone who seems incredibly emotional and living in an alternate reality.

Was this the guy who wore cufflinks with CC on them on the day of his wedding and ordered a bracelet with Fred and Gladys ( their nicknames for each other ) engraved on it, for Camilla just before the wedding, which devastated the 19 year old Diana ?

Charles statement was not a denial .
That’s a fact .

Interestingly the Windsors had no hesitation calling Virginia Guiffre a liar in a public statement when they no doubt had plenty of information re Andrew and Epstein at the time . No weasel words then . Just called her a liar when she was telling the truth . Then paid her off .

I think this is at the point of gossip being repeated over the years and ending up being treated as actual fact.

I think the Royal train episode was the November before they married.

It was denied that it was Diana presumably for the sake of her reputation.

But it would have been so weird for Charles to have been on the train the night before. It would have been widely reported on.

Having researched it, as I said above, it looks like people started mixing it up with a late night visit from a mystery woman to the royal train where Charles was staying in November 1980 - around the time of the engagement. So the press speculated that it was Diana.

At a later time a friend of Diana's claimed it was Camilla who was the mystery woman.

Yes, I think that's right. We saw with Diana and Fergie that aristocratic pretensions don't cut it. Upper-class girls these days don't want the restrictions that come with marrying into royalty, but Diana and Fergie thought they could handle it. Proper aristos wouldn't go near. On the other hand, good solid middle-class young women like Catherine and Sophie have proved their worth in spades. Prince Philip commented that he was glad Catherine was so level-headed.

The Crown didn't help by using a lot of unverified gossip in its episodes!

King Charles has the emotional regulation and patience of a toddler. I can well believe he said it tbh

It wasn’t their wedding day. It was their honeymoon. :(

When Prince William eventually ascends the throne, he will be the first descendant of Charles II to sit on the British throne. Through his mothers genealogy not his fathers
They were probably to posh, far more British than the RF and had rather a lot of new money - Rober Spencer was the richest man in England at one point

It was a fairly persistent tabloid rumour, originally from November 1980 which claimed a mystery woman - allegedly Diana - was smuggled onto the royal train to spend the night with Charles. Both Diana and Buckingham Palace denied the story at the time, and palace records of their whereabouts at the time subsequently provided the evidence that it was false. But years later the rumour resurfaced, re-written to suggest the mystery visitor was actually Camilla, the night before Charles and Diana’s wedding. But again official records proved it to be false. They placed Charles at Buckingham Palace on the eve of his wedding.

Yes funny how ' commoners' like Kate and Sophie managed to do the not so difficult job of a Royal so so much better than RF themselves despite them apparently needing to be trained from birth. Maybe the Spencers bad behaviour is because their 'a bit thick and inbred' aristocratic blood has diluted the sheep farmer blood, not the other way round!

There are many more examples of KC having a hissy fit in public than just the pen incident. They are often explosive mutterings about something not going his way - trivial but surprising when you think of the way everything is managed for him. There was a garden party with a speech/microphone glitch, Camilla's coat when again he was irritable with an aide because KC couldn't get the sleeve on. He may well not have meant something, in the long term, but he certainly lets it out even at the coronation where he is saying "they're always late" in the golden coach.

Yep. I mentioned upthread that Lord Mountbatten wanted Charles to marry his granddaughter Lady Amanda Knachbull. Charles eventually proposed to her but she turned him down essentially saying she couldn’t cope with life as a royal. Smart cookie.

I'm not sure the Middletons should be held up as not putting a foot wrong

Their company went bust owing £2.60million, a lot to small suppliers, £700K to HMRC and they had a COVID payout. So I am not sure that is not putting a foot wrong

They managed to move to a £5million property after Kate's marriage but couldn't pay those they owed