The Times Review:
As a small boy, Charles Spencer was known to his family as “Buzz” for his bee-like effervescence. Today, the buzzing is of a decidedly less innocent variety. The 9th Earl Spencer — former journalist, historian, godson to Queen Elizabeth, veteran of three divorces and, of course, the only brother of Diana, Princess of Wales — has re-entered the national conversation like a hornet in the royal enclosure.
We already know from the headlines that Spencer has accused King Charles of sounding “giddily elated” and “like a lottery winner” after Diana’s death. He also alleges that Charles casually told him that he was “so lucky” his father had died young because it meant Spencer came into his inheritance sooner. These revelations — “verbal homicide”, according to Andrew Marr — are very much in keeping with the picture Spencer paints of the King in Swan Song as a toxic compound of vanity and envy. Spencer claims that in his mid-forties Charles complained that despite employing 50 people, “my parents insist on treating me like — like a child”, before literally stamping his foot like a toddler. Spencer also claims, via a courtier, that Queen Elizabeth once said of her heir: “He always resents things… He even resented it when I taught him the alphabet.”
Reading the whole book, the rest of the family fare no better, being depicted variously as “envious”, “suspicious”, “petty”, “stuffy” and “sourly disapproving”. Prince Philip is revealed first as an art thief (he allegedly pinched paintings by Edward Seago from the artist), then, more predictably, as a bully. Spencer recalls being “shocked” at the bite of a “sudden outburst” he directed towards the Queen at the state opening of parliament in 1977. Princess Anne displays a total lack of “grace and manners”. Prince Andrew is remembered for smirking at a reference to “the Virgin’s womb” in church at Sandringham — which seems fairly mild under the circumstances.
But if the rest of the family are brought into sharp, unforgiving focus, William and Harry are kept at telephoto distance and are sketched with a soft-focus reverence that portrays them as perpetual icons of childhood innocence rather than real flesh-and-blood men.
The quality that Spencer hymns most often in his older sister is her “positive, modern, maternal” presence. “I have never, in my life, come across a better mother,” he writes — which probably won’t delight the three mothers of his own seven children. His fear, in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death, was not simply that these two boys would be traumatised by their loss, it was that without her they would become Windsors — “dragged back into the archaic ways of the monarchy, just as they seemed set on the enlightened path picked out by their mother”. Indeed, this was the central anxiety of his eulogy at Diana’s funeral, which he apparently rehearsed alone 40 times. He pledged to his nephews that “we, your blood family”, would do all they could to steer the young princes “so that [your] souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition”.
That “blood family” comment, we now know, was a furious response to Prince Charles’s (alleged) questioning of the Spencer clan’s “sense of duty”. And this points to the real animating force in the book. Beyond the screeching soundbites and nosebleed revelations, Swan Song is not just a defence of his sister, but a salvo in a Shakespearean blood feud between two aristocratic houses — a Montague-versus-Capulet drama played out in Barbour jackets and tweed where an “ancient grudge” becomes “new mutiny”.
Earl Spencer’s Princess Diana book: the 15 key claims
As Spencer is keen to point out, his family has far deeper roots in historic English and Stuart royal blood than the parvenu House of Windsor, whose ancestry leans heavily towards German princely houses. Spencer is careful to insist that his own house has never been anti-monarchy. They have served royalty “with patriotism rather than sycophancy” and have been “respectful of the Crown, but not afraid to hold its wearers to account”.
But he’s angry that the Spencers have been forced into the shadows of the Windsors. He says this was a fate suffered by his mother, Frances Shand Kydd, whose birth on the Sandringham estate in 1936 was eclipsed by King George V’s death on the same day less than a mile away. Then there was his father, whose alleged youthful romance with the future Queen was apparently crushed by Lord Mountbatten to make way for his nephew, Prince Philip.
Diana was apparently channelling ancestral swagger when during her darkest years she would whisper to herself like a battle cry: “Remember you’re a Spencer.” Her brother proudly declares that Diana thought the splendour of her family’s Northamptonshire seat “certainly knocked Highgrove into a cocked hat!” When she died, that dynastic pride turned bitterly proprietorial; the Spencers, he writes, had merely “lent Diana to the world for a decade and a half”.
There is a sense of anxious attachment woven through these pages. Spencer is convinced, after being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, that his sister shared his emotional wiring. He writes of his neurodivergence leaving him open to rejection sensitive dysphoria, an excruciating vulnerability to perceived criticism. But where he excelled academically, Diana struggled with learning difficulties. “I will never forget her screech of pain, and her violent sobbing, on opening her O-level results,” he writes. She failed them all — and he believes that despite her global fame, “part of Diana was for ever caught up in that feeling of academic ‘failure’ foisted on her as a child”.
The roots of that vulnerability lay in the wreckage of their parents’ brutal separation when Diana was six and Charles was three, which left the four siblings (he has two more older sisters, Sarah and Jane) to be shuttled on long, desolate train journeys between cold boarding schools and divided homes. It generated a lingering, explosive rage, most vividly illustrated when Diana pushed her stepmother, Raine, down the stairs at the Spencer family seat of Althorp after she said: “I have always felt sorry for the Prince of Wales, marrying somebody quite as stupid as you.”
Still, as chewy as all this dynastic drama is, Spencer has a deeper project: a reckoning with the aristocratic omerta that governs British upper-class life. The book might as well have been subtitled: Why Are We So Messed Up?
Swan Song represents the second act in a crusade against the English stiff upper lip, following Spencer’s 2024 memoir A Very Private School, a harrowing account of his 1970s childhood at Maidwell Hall, where prepubescent boys endured relentless physical and sexual abuse.
The “reticence born out of good manners” that left Spencer defenceless against prep school abuse is the same code that isolated Diana at court, where protocol, discretion and performance justified emotional abandonment. The same strain of aristocratic survivalism starved a young boy in his dorm, denied a suffering princess support, and forced two grieving boys to march behind their mother’s coffin.
Swan Song avoids a straightforward chronology, moving instead in short chapters that alternate between Diana’s life story and the aftermath of her death. Spencer is accomplished at big set pieces, like the royal wedding and the funeral, but the rest of his story can feel like a mosaic of fragments and salvaged memories delicately fused together — an approach fitting for a man who, with slightly false modesty, describes himself as merely “a useful footnote to the endless fascination with Diana”.
Although you can sometimes feel Spencer straining to capture his sister over the course of 400 pages (he keeps repeating the phrase “enormous fun”), what makes Swan Song compelling is that he writes entirely as himself — there are no ghostwriters, no spin doctors or secret tapes here. He is now the custodian of his family’s grievance machine, weaponising vulnerability in the clamorous media arena. It reminds me of something Tina Brown wrote in her 2007 book The Diana Chronicles, that the princess “knew that the aristocracy of birth was now irrelevant. All that counted now was the aristocracy of exposure.”
Some readers will struggle with the more extreme allegations against the King. The alleged comments about forgetting Diana “soon enough” don’t quite have the tang of authenticity for me. However, a friend of Spencer’s has told me that he reported these conversations to them more than 20 years ago; it certainly makes sense in the context of the eulogy, the composition of which takes up a significant portion of the book.
It is entirely possible to find Swan Song both a violation of Diana’s memory and a fascinating example of historical myth-making. Earl Spencer is adept at reframing every media opportunity as a solemn act of brotherly devotion. Yet several things can be true at once and I can’t help sympathising with his fury at Buckingham Palace’s ice-cold administrative machine, which made Diana’s life so hellish.
Why now? Spencer has pegged the release round the approaching 30th anniversary of Diana’s death; more cynical commentators point to the soaring maintenance costs of Althorp, three divorces and seven children. Whatever his motives, Swan Song reads like his frantic attempt to press his family’s seal into the wet cement before the slab sets for ever. The fear is that future historians will accept the House of Windsor’s polished façade as the original stone.
The danger for Spencer is that he might have overplayed his hand and transformed real human suffering into theatrical score-settling. I suspect much of the public will tire of the noise, look upon both battlements, and simply conclude: “A plague on both your houses.”