Discussion about Charles Spencer's book - Swan Song : Diana, my sister , Beautiful, Beloved, Hunted.

[BasiliskStare]

I know there is a thread about the theft of some pre publication editions of this book.
This thread is more by way of a book club discussion about the actual book , the text. Threads will go where they will , but my intention is this is more for me to give my opinion on the book and for others who read it or are interested in the book to join in. I have pre-ordered from Kindle (half price otherwise I may not have 😊) But is only available on September 22nd. So a holding place if you like.

Thank you for that!

And fwiw I agree.

You may well be right. I considered your answer carefully and tried to think of a time when they complained but I couldn't come up with one. However, I don't follow royal news much so may well have missed something. Have you got an example to give me?

You'll be glad to know then, that he has said that. Just in much more polite, gentle tones

Well, none of us actually know what he said. But he may well have said something meaning that the pain of bereavement gets better over time. Time heals etc. As the palace statement said, it's easy to misinterpret things when you are distraught.

@simpsonthecat of course it’s a soap opera with occasionally some proper journalism. The media (including social media) is there to make money and they know conflict sells. The RF provide clicks and that makes the media money. It’s not just the RF, look at celebrities and how they try to create conflict.

The bottom line is we all, including CS, know the RF will not engage in a tit for tat briefings in this type of situation. You are never going to get a line by line rebuttal.

CS, a journalist and historian, has admitted he has made factually inaccurate statements in his book - this calls into question the factual accuracy of the whole book. If he got the Piers Morgan sections wrong then it is plausible he got other sections wrong.

CS waited until Robert Fellows, his Brother-in-Law, was dead before publishing the book. Robert Fellows was someone who could have verified facts e.g. the offer of HRH.

It was the same with Spare and OW, factually inaccurate recollections on one aspect e.g. Queen Mothers death, real wedding etc. impact the credibility of the other recollections.

Look at the claim CS denied Diana a home, he won a case proving that wasn’t true yet it still gets stated as fact on these threads. It’s more complicated than CS did or didn’t offer Diana a home but no one has time for the nuances.

At the moment everyone is fact checking CS’s book like we did with Spare. That is why the focus is on CS not KC.

KC is not a perfect human being and, like all of us, will have said and done things he regrets. None of us would like the level of media scrutiny of every aspect of our lives that the RF is subject to.

KC should not be above criticism or proper investigative journalism but is he not entitled to any part of his life being private?

WRT the RF we need a clear dividing line between “The Crown” and private family life. That means transparency about the finances including a full list of what belongs to the state and what belongs to the family. The family finances then become private.

There also needs to be a clear line in relation to privacy and what is and isn’t reportable I.e.right to a private life . Look at the smears Giles Coran made up and how it has taken legal letters for them to be quashed.

Epstein is much bigger issue that the RF and AMW is a bit player who was useful. Epstein was about bribery and corruption at the highest levels and involved far more powerful, primarily, men than AMW. i have said before the women and men who are victims are highly unlikely to see justice. We may see convictions for misconduct in public office but again I doubt we will see convictions for anything more serious.

As AMW is under investigation and any charges that will be brought in His Majesty’s name, it would be inappropriate for KC to issue any statements at the moment.

👍🏼

The palace statement is not a denial .

It’s waffle trying to look like a push back but it’s nothing of the kind

Look at the palace statement about Virgina Guiffre’s accusation of Andrew .
That was a denial :

’false and without foundation’

(It was also a pack of lies)

So the palace are happy to make full and clear denials ( as opposed their usual sneaky response via their media contacts) when it suits them . But Charles has not denied saying it .

And as head of state and head of the COE it’s a shocking thing to say - a dismissal of human life - so the denial is even more important.
But there has been no denial .

What do you want? A ding-dong battle about who said what, continual rebuttals, a face-to-face argument, a boxing match?! There is obviously no point in engaging in an argument about what was said all those years ago. Nobody knows - not even CS or KC. KC might have meant it kindly. CS might have misunderstood. Memory is very unreliable. We like to think we remember things well but we really don't. It has been well researched.

Right. Then whom would you believe if Spencer replied saying he was not lying? Do you just believe the last person that said anything?

@Kirschcherries

What am I reading ?

‘Inappropriate ‘ for Charles to make a statement on Andrew - but they were happy to issue an outright lie in 2019 calling her a liar and hoping their official statement would silence her !

The only reason the token gestures were made against Andrew was because of the partial release of the Epstein files in the the USA . The Windsors had no control over that thank god .
If it weren’t for that , they’d be lying to us still.

Diana herself made sterling attempts to trash her own reputation, lets be frank. Huge amount of retconning here.

I'm old enough to remember the affairs with multiple men, the public breaking up of Will & Julia Carling's marriage, the Met investigation into her harassing phone calls to Oliver Hoare's wife, her defamation of Tiggy Legge-Bourke, the very messy, public break up of Dodi Fayed's engagement. The endless summers on yachts, the public distress of her son's when they were used as paparazzi bait by her, the messages to journalists to attract attention on her and not Charles, the association with all Fayed. The advice to Blair to get better press by getting photographed with with sick children, ideally bald sick children.

Diana was absolutely not a Saint - she was a troubled, flawed, mercurial woman who had a huge capacity for kindness, matched with cruelty. Spencer's book could have been brilliant, but he seems to have decided to use his sister and her memory as a weapon to avenge any and all slights he has towards the RF, rather than a true character reveal.

In 2019 there wasn’t a police investigation, that is what changes the situation.

Btw I just wanted to add to my previous post if I may about the RF briefing and leaking and allowing “friends” of the Palace to put across their viewpoint and whispering in to certain reporter’s ears and not stating things overtly.

Why do they do this? Instead of answering questions honestly and directly?

One: it’s so they don’t have to answer any more questions about the subject or be challenged directly about it.

Two: presumably this method allows them to spread stories or influence narratives in ways that aren’t entirely accurate?

Three: It’s so they can deny it if they are ever challenged on it or if their briefing turns out to be less than truthful

“Oh we didn’t say that, we have no knowledge of where that story came from, it was reporter a or b embellishing a story” is the Palace’s get out clause. It’s all about protecting their own backs and not being challenged.

And we the ordinary people of the UK, and our MPs, and our journalists, have blindly and unquestioningly accepted these methods from our Monarchy as normal; from an institution which should be leading the way in accountability and transparency!

I genuinely think that when you brief and leak over a period of thirty years to the favour of your own position or that of your institution, without allowing anyone to respectfully challenge those briefings in return and engage in an open discussion, I am afraid what happens is that people get very cross indeed and put their grievances in to books and publish them so that their viewpoints at least get an airing.

No he did not. He used flowery language to give the impression he was denying what Charles Spencer said without actually doing so.

@Kirschcherries

Yeah we know .

They lied about Andrew ( they’d known about Epstein and Andrew for decades) to the public in 2019 and they’d be lying still were it not for the release of the files

In your opinion. In mine it's clear he's saying Spencer is wrong

An excellent post

@MrsFinkelstein

Its not an opinion

If it was GCSE English language the marks would be for pointing out there is no denial

Yes, I agree, it makes it unattributable, and there needs to be more transparency with Palace comms.
I would like more clarity with finances as well.
Sorry if I haven't addressed everything in your post 😉!

No, but it would be refreshing to receive an unequivocal denial and I would be inclined to give King Charles the benefit of the doubt.
Context is everything and by saying I would believe the King if he denied it I was talking with too broad a brush, but I do think a convincingly delivered “I never said those words” would be compelling.
Obviously, if the king delivered these words with an accompanying whinny of laughter (à la Alan Carr on The Traitors) then I would be somewhat less convinced!

I've read the article.

A few points:

I've read Substack articles and watched YouTube videos recently claiming to be telling the truth that the mainstream won't, for reasons variously defined by their authors.
The only difference between mainstream (or legacy) media and social (or new) media is that the former is held to a code of conduct and can be legally challenged more easily than the latter.

The way articles (or in this case a serialisation of a book) work is that the article is written and an involved person (in this case the King) is given a 'right to reply'; a short time, perhaps a couple of hours, before the article will be published when they can provide a comment.

The paragraph about 'failure to verify facts' makes no sense; it will always be 'he said, he said'. It was a private phone call between two people. There is no way to verify anything.

Regarding 'we don't have the book yet'; all the media columnists writing reviews of the book will have been given advance copies under strict embargo. Laura Kuenssberg will have had one for her interview, as will the person who did the main US interview.

It may be 'spurious to suggest he's published this book for money'; I don't recollect any suggestion that the proceeds are going to charity. You may know differently. I have read his comment from 1998 about profiting from a sibling's death.

It may be that he's telling 'the truth as he saw it'. However, that is very different to telling the truth, and when you claim to be a historian with 'a duty to tell the truth' you need to be accurate. He has proved to be inaccurate on many provable issues (I don't know if you've had a chance to read the thread) so his credibility isn't very high at the moment - and was falling on the 22nd when this article was written.

The final point was that Diana's death made life easier for Charles R. I will assume that the writer has never lost the other parent to their children, because I hope no-one who has could write that.
It's also well known that Diana's death made progressing Charles' public relationship with Camilla much more difficult.

I agree but Epstein is much wider than the RF. I am not saying AMW should not be prosecuted if there is sufficient evidence.

What I am saying is the RF are an easy target and a perfect distraction away for others who are far more culpable. US and UK institutions like the government, security services etc. all knew about Epstein. AMW and the RF taking the flack allows them to avoid questions.

It’s interesting sister Jane said on hearing news “It’s curtains, Duch is dead”. Then CS says “Oh. God Jane!” & “Not knowing what I could possibly add hung up”.

if KC did say what he did to CS during a heated argument, was it that terrible? Context is everything & the CS/Jane vignette could be spun in a rather different way if anyone choss.

Well done splitting up such a long AI answer and reformatting a bit to One, Two, Three etc. Much better than just c+p.

No they wouldn’t. The language marks would be for interpreting the meaning behind the language used and why the author has chosen those particular words. English language GCSE is anything but about the literal meaning of what is written and all about the writer’s intentions, both in the fiction and non fiction papers. You can and should, of course, acknowledge the writer’s bias. So this would apply to Spencer’s book as well as KC’s statement