The first half of that article;
Why Earl Spencer's damning memoir rings so true to me
By Richard Kay
They last met at London’s Tate Gallery on July 1 – Princess Diana’s 36th birthday. It was unexpected. ‘Neither of us had any idea that the other was going to be at the evening,’ Charles Spencer observed.
Typically, he noted, his sister was not celebrating her special day with friends but was working: guest of honour at a charity fundraiser.
They were never to see each other again. Nine weeks later, with Diana dead and a nation convulsed in grief, Earl Spencer was to recall this briefest of final encounters in his powerful eulogy from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.
He had included it as a bittersweet reminder of how unexpected and abrupt the death of a loved one can be.
While this lacerating oration has been ranked as one of the great speeches of the modern age, alongside Churchill’s wartime addresses and that of John F. Kennedy at his inauguration, it is his voice, cracking with emotion and loss, that has reverberated down the years.
His use of the phrase ‘blood family’, signalling the bitter difference between the Spencers and the Royal Family, together with the rebuke to the House of Windsor for stripping Diana of her royal title and his damning of the media for their pursuit of her, remain extraordinarily vivid.
Listening to it today, it has lost none of the shock and awe I felt sitting among Diana’s closest friends at her funeral 29 years ago, when we joined the applause that had begun among the masses outside the* Abbey *as he sat down.
I remembered that I, too, had spoken to her on that birthday. ‘I’ve got more flowers here than Kew Gardens,’ she quipped, before groaning about the number of thank you letters she would be required to write. This was the elegant and amusing Diana with whom I had become friends over the previous five years, whose memorable laughter and sense of humour was infectious.
There was another side to Diana, too – vulnerable and hurting not only from the ceaseless scrutiny her enduring fame had triggered, but also her eating disorders and her battles with the royals, who wanted her marginalised once the fairytale marriage failed.
The fatal Paris car crash prompted endless examinations of these many sides of Diana's life, most of them barely scratching the surface of the complicated woman that was the Princess of Wales. Much of this output was ill-informed, and some downright cruel.
From time to time Earl Spencer, the baby brother whom Diana had mothered as a child, would speak out against some of the more lurid fantasies.
A young Charles Spencer and Diana. They called each other 'Carlos' and 'Duch'
Occasionally he would take aim at the royals too: one year complaining that William and Harry may not have been encouraged to stay in touch with their mother’s side of the family; another, wondering why the then Prince Charles had never visited his ex-wife’s island grave at Althorp, the Spencer family home in Northamptonshire.
But mostly he kept quiet, as he and his family tried to hold fast to their memories of the woman to whom he paid such moving tribute.
Now, with the 30th anniversary of the princess’s death 11 months away, comes, at last, Charles Spencer’s own brilliant examination of his sister, in order to right some of those wrongs.
It is an explosive yet thoughtful book, simply entitled Swan Song. But it is at times unflinching when it comes to Diana in the raw, the sister he so memorably described from the Abbey pulpit as 'a very British girl who transcended nationality'.
It is an insider’s account from the ultimate insider, one of only a handful who knew Diana for almost the entire span of her life. It is elegiac and moving, with childhood memories of growing up with Diana, who was three years his senior. But it is also at times painful, as the rollercoaster of the princess’s life escalated to a whirlwind pace on marrying the heir to the throne.
Nor does he shrink from how her celebrity impacted his family – the fallings out and the breakdown in relations. At the time of her death, she had not spoken to their mother for almost four months. And he details his own quarrel with her, when he changed his mind about allowing Diana the use of a property she had her heart set on at the Althorp estate.
But for King Charles the memoir is a catastrophe. All his careful efforts to rebuild the affection of a nation that was repelled by his treatment of Diana but has come round in the years since – especially since he assumed the crown – risk being brutally stripped away.
Spencer paints a portrait of his former brother-in-law as blackhearted and uncaring. He describes a petulant and peevish Prince of Wales, unused to being questioned or thwarted.
There is a chilling coldness when he writes of receiving a telephone call from the prince, then at Balmoral Castle with his sons, in the hours after Diana’s death had been confirmed.
Charles at the launch of The King's Fund's Enhancing the Healing Environment programme at St Thomas' Hospital, London, in 2000
‘Unlike my other callers, who were stunned, barely able to articulate their condolences and offers of help, he sounded giddily elated – like a lottery winner, I remember thinking at the time,’ he writes.
‘He let me know he had informed William and Harry of their mother’s death, first thing that morning, in their bedrooms at Balmoral. It all sounded strangely matter of fact, given the enormity of the disaster.’
He then offers the most devastating critique. ‘Looking back now, I suspect the prince’s first reaction must have been to think more of how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not.
‘It can be hard to feel too much sympathy for an ex-spouse, or those who care for them profoundly, after a bitter divorce.’
Buckingham Palace’s reaction to these incendiary revelations have been almost without precedent.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the Palace responded in the strongest of regal terms: ‘While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such loss.’
Powerful stuff, but Spencer’s scathing character assassination instantly transported me back to those troubled days when Diana’s unhappiness in her marriage, and the haunting presence of Camilla Parker Bowles, led her to tearfully call me at all hours of the day and night. She relayed her bitterness at what she once described as her ‘inhuman’ treatment from what she always scornfully called ‘my husband’s family’.
Those long calls, sometimes lasting hours – one went on for the best part of a day, with fleeting breaks for meals – were a form of therapy for Diana, whose circle of trust had shrunk dramatically after her separation.
At the heart of the circle, though, were the Spencers and the spirited bloodline she was so proud to have passed on to William and Harry.
And it is why Charles Spencer’s recollections, carefully annotated at the time, are so damning. After that phone call from the prince he received another, a few days later, after learning of plans for William and Harry, then 15 and 12, to walk behind their mother’s coffin.
Appalled, he told the courtier: ‘I’m afraid it’s not happening. Diana would never have wanted to put them through anything so ghastly.’
Within minutes his phone rang. It was Prince Charles. ‘“I gather you’ve got a problem with the funeral arrangements,” he said testily,’ Spencer relates.
He explained to the prince that his concern was the issue of the boys walking behind Diana’s coffin. To which Charles said: ‘But I did it at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral!’
Spencer: ‘But you were 30, sir, and he wasn’t your mother.’
Spencer and Charles chat during the official opening of a fountain built in memory of Diana, in London's Hyde Park
This, says Spencer, triggered an astonishing outburst from Charles: ‘That’s the problem with your family. They’ve got no bloody sense of duty.’
Stung by his words and thinking of his family’s centuries of service to the monarchy, Spencer listened in stunned silence as the prince ranted, before finally coming to a stop.
‘I assumed the pause signalled an effort to bring himself under control,’ writes Spencer, ‘but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death: "Rest assured," he hissed, "we’ll forget her soon enough".'
Spencer was so flabbergasted it took him several seconds before he could reply. ‘I can’t believe you just said that,’ he told the prince, and hung up.
His coldly calm reply was telling – he didn’t use the word ‘sir’.
Harry, Charles, Spencer and William at Westminster Abbey for Diana's funeral service
Even accounting for the fact that the week between Diana’s death and her funeral was the most serious for the royals since the abdication crisis 60 years earlier, and tempers were short with emotions running high, the words Spencer reports are lethal for Charles’s reputation.
Notwithstanding the Palace’s denial of the conversation this week, these highly contentious words – if true – evoke an image of a man so tied up with convention and his place in the world, he had suddenly lost touch with humanity. Such shuddering indifference to the mother of his own children – and the feelings of his sons – shows him to be insensitive to the emotional needs of everyone around him, while desperate for his own to be met in full.
Looking back all these years later, it does seem preposterous that King Charles would ever utter such contemptible words. But as Prince of Wales? I am not so sure. He was scrupulously fearful of how history would judge him for his actions in the marriage crisis.
Spencer himself has doubled down on his version, telling the BBC he stands by his account of what he writes. And the narrative is certainly gripping.
In another bizarre episode, he recalls meeting Diana for lunch and she tells him she is going to get a divorce. When he warns her that public sympathy may not be on her side, she replies ‘But Carlos (her nickname for him), my husband is in love with his valet.’
To which Spencer gulps: ‘Well, I guess in that case, you don’t really have a choice.’
This astounding intervention is given no further context – maybe for legal reasons – and there is no evidence there is any truth in it. But from my conversations with Diana, I know she believed it.
It is one of the curiosities which may explain why Charles Spencer has resisted writing any kind of biography of his sister until now. But the anecdotes about the then Prince of Wales make a compelling case that, in the words of the old cliché, revenge is a dish best served cold.
I suspect this is the book Spencer always wanted to write but for which he has been biding his time. Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and other senior royals of the era are dead, as is his and Diana’s mother Frances Shand Kydd. The more recent loss of his much-loved brother-in-law Robert Fellowes, once the Queen’s private secretary and married to Spencer’s middle sister Lady Jane, may have further emboldened him to write.
With the anniversary of her death still almost a year away, the timing of Spencer’s book is, however, puzzling. That it should be published just as his nephew Prince Harry returns to Britain, bringing fresh uncertainties and anxiety to the Royal Family as well as Harry's plans to make a film about his mother, adds another level of intrigue.
Indeed, this week's turmoil – with Harry and Meghan theatrically removing their children from their new school after only two days – was evocative of Diana’s impulsiveness.
In the six years of his exile, it was his uncle Charles and aunts Jane and Sarah with whom he kept in touch as relations with his father and brother collapsed. In the context of his falling out with the Royal Family, keeping close to the Spencers looks critical.
It was surely no coincidence that during his brief return with Meghan and their children Archie and Lilibet in July, they chose to base themselves at Althorp for part of the time. While there, Meghan posted photographs which appeared to show their children carrying flowers to place on Princess Diana’s grave – an act freighted with symbolism.
As Harry, the prodigal son, returns to an uneasy welcome, it is hard not to be transported back to the 1990s and those years of oneupmanship and rivalry between Charles and Diana that so damaged the image of the House of Windsor.
I reported on every twist and turn throughout those years, and we at the Mail unashamedly took Diana’s side in the conflict which became known as the ‘war of the Waleses’. We were her newspaper – and in a media landscape where she had few friends, she was enormously grateful for our support.
Princess Diana with her friend, Daily Mail journalist Richard Kay, in Kensington
Often she was accused, by lazy commentators* *who didn’t know her, of being a threat to the monarchy. I, however, saw someone who was its salvation, who had given a respected but fusty institution the kiss of life.
Observing the Harry situation – and there is already hot trouble looming following the King’s communique reminding organisations that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not working royals and should be treated as private citizens – it is clear there are parallels.
Inevitably, some will ask whether the Windsors have learned the lessons of history. Their attempt to erase Diana did not end well. There was outrage during a part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002 when her inclusion in a tableaux of royal lineage was reduced to a cardboard cutout.
Prince Charles’s hissed aside to Spencer that his sister would soon be forgotten has proved to be one of the great misjudgments of history. Are they risking similar trouble with their stance on Harry?
In life, the public put Diana on a pedestal, and she has remained there impervious ever since.
It is therefore easy to see why the feud between Harry and his family is being framed as Diana versus the Windsors Part Two.
There are, of course, critical differences. Princess Diana remained a much-loved figure, hugely popular with a public that forgave every misstep. Even the notorious Panorama interview, when she publicly questioned Charles’s fitness to be King, did not dent her appeal.
She was always seen as a wronged woman, despite admitting that she, too, had been unfaithful with cavalry officer James Hewitt. To fans everywhere she was the casualty of a coldly indifferent Royal Family who felt threatened by the mass affection of a public who stood with her.
For Harry it is a different story. Rather than staying and pinning his hopes on the generous and forgiving nature of the British people, he turned his back on his country and his duty. Diana never did, however much she would privately say to me she longed to do so.
Back in the pre-Meghan days, Harry seemed to possess that special something of Diana’s when it came to personal popularity, but he threw it away and the magic is gone.
His petulance and self-importance are more reminiscent of the Prince of Wales, as described by Charles Spencer, than of Diana. He will have to work hard to win back even a fraction of the love he lost.
As the author of nine well-received earlier books, his uncle Charles Spencer sees himself as a historian and I presume he believes he has a contribution to make to the historical record.
He would also have wanted to honour the memory of a sister he described to mourners as ‘the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty’.
His book is cleverly framed around the writing – and delivery – of that famous eulogy, fashioned from the copious notes which, as a journalist, he took of conversations with friends and family as well as fragments of memories.
It is thanks to Spencer’s forensic note-taking, don’t forget, that the world discovered the duplicity of the BBC’s Martin Bashir and how he manipulated the princess into giving her disastrous TV interview.