Royal row between King Charles and Earl Spencer 2

[Viviennemary]

Buckingham Palace have said they won't be commenting further on the book. But I expect plenty of others will be and it's not even published yet so I started this second thread. I really liked Diana and thought she got treated shabbily by Charles. But really writing a book of gripes 30 years later is not on imho. I noticed on the news Harry declined to comment on it. Sensible decision for once.

Aaarrrggghh!

She was the princes’ mother - of course she’d be monitored. That doesn’t have to be sinister.

I just wonder what the hell she was doing with the creepy Fayeds?

@CoffeeCantata

You are again missing the point .

Yes standard palace security monitored everyone ( well I assume they do - but where are the logs re Andrew and Epstein’s activities I’d like to know !)

Diana’s movements and meeting were leaking to build a picture / smear her .
Where other royal’s activities leaked ? No .

She didn’t know who to trust . She refused her security
Bashir built on this totally justified fear .

I can’t believe people buy these type of books. There is no way of proving who said what. Supply and demand.

Just to clarify - in referring to “flaunting herself in a bikini” - are you referring to the famous photos taken of Diana in a leopard print swimsuit diving off a platform in the South of France?

Diana set those photos up herself with Mohammed al Fayed and Piers Morgan (at the time the editor of the Daily Mirror) because she wanted to upstage Camilla on her 50th birthday party. She knew full well that both she and Camilla would be covered in the press the next day, and guess who looked better…?

Piers Morgan has directly confirmed this; “When Charles threw a 50th birthday party for Camilla in 1997 while Diana was holidaying with the Fayeds during that last fateful summer, Mohamed Al Fayed called me from his villa to ask if our photographer (I was editor of the Daily Mirror) would be near the beach that morning. I could hear Diana in the back­ground, issuing instructions to him, and she later came to the beach in a leopard-print bikini and began doing cartwheels, guaranteeing that the next day’s front pages would be full of pictures of her and not of Camilla’s big night’

No negative PR from the Palace needed here - Diana wanted to be in the papers in her swimsuit looking fantastic, and sticking it to Camilla.

I think people like reading about scandal. It's interesting gossip, and inflammatory.
Plus, he is Diana's brother and an aristocrat - that has a lot of sheen for some people.

One theory was that she wanted to provoke the man she was really in love with (the married) Hasnet Khan, to break with his wife and marry her.

I can’t believe she really loved Dodi….but who knows? Horrible Mohammed Fayed had engineered the match and was pushing hard for them to be a couple. Yuk.

@CoffeeCantata

That William called his mother paranoid is his shame to bear .
He, like you, is totally unqualified to do so
His words were I believe that Bashir ‘contributed’ to her paranoia . Ie that she was paranoid before that

Utterly disgraceful thing to say about his mother .
She was not paranoid . Her fear and distrust was justified

I won’t on principle! I didn’t buy Spare and I won’t be filling Spencer’s coffers either.

Now your just making stuff up

I am mean-spirited enough to believe bad things about just about anyone but this doesn't really add up.

There are plenty of eye-witnesses to King Charles being absolutely devastated when he went to bring Diana's body back from Paris. And he was not popular at the time and people did want to blame him, so if there was any sense that he was anything other than devastated and grieving, people would definitely have picked up on it.

Charles Spencer is adamant that King Charles did say what he alleges.

The only logical assumption I think is that King Charles did say this, or something very like it, but did not mean it in the way Charles Spencer took it.

My theory is that Charles was thinking about his Uncle Louis Mountbatten: killed in a shocking way, a massive news story, huge funeral, but largely forgotten by the public by 1997. I think Charles was thinking that Diana would go the same way and be a footnote to history soon enough so they might as well have a big dramatic send off.

If King Charles really did say "we will forget her soon enough" that does sound callous though. I suppose he could have meant "we" as in the nation, but I suspect he might have said "she'll be forgotten soon enough" and Charles Spencer has remembered it differently.

Well, this is on page 34 and in multiple other threads meanwhile, over on the Climate Change sub on MN, it’s crickets.

Whatever else you can say about the House of Windsor - good, bad or indifferent it is the pre-eminent soap opera on the planet, bar none, while simultaneously being a key constitutional construct of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

And apparently, God wants us to save it

Oh - why don’t you actually read what I wrote? It’s like playing chess with a pigeon.

i qualified that remark as well you know,

I can’t believe you are criticising Diana’s actual son, whom she is known to have confided in about her romantic life (poor lad) for saying something he believed to be true. Shame on you, not on him. I’m sure he understood the situation better than either of us.

Your anger is misplaced.

I can’t believe you are criticising Diana’s actual son, whom she is known to have confided in about her romantic life (poor lad) for saying something he believed to be true. Shame on you, not on him. I’m sure he understood the situation better than either of us.
👏👏

Some posters just have to get that William dig in somewhere. 🙄
He really triggers them for some reason 🤷‍♀️

Agree

William talks about her paranoia more than once. I have just listened to what he said

Compare and contrast to Harry's speech.
Heartfelt and emotive

www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/prince-harrys-extraordinary-statement-amid-princess-diana-panorama-interview-findings/news-story/034d088b78fd3d345143eb5998d61bf5?amp

What that boy went through in adolescence! Harry was really too young to have borne the brunt of his mum’s over sharing. I think the age difference is significant in their different recollections of her last years.

I see that pp is determined to bring AMW into the discussion too - basically, just throw anything you can think of!

Yes, do you think it's because he's the heir... and Harry isn't?

There were more than 3 years between the boys - that’s a lot in your teens.

My sister and I (similar gap) have very different recollections of family members for that reason.

Common sense really.

Although you have a good point, there's only just over 2 years between them. Harry turned 15 in the June of that year, Harry turned 13 in the September.

What a load of nonsense. She was feeling paranoia thanks to the interview that her brother, Charles Spencer, engineered, but not only. Surely her greatest supporters could see that the paparazzi were also making her feel paranoia.

You yourself wrote above that, in your opinion:

"Diana’s movements and meeting were leaking to build a picture / smear her"

And:

"She didn’t know who to trust"

Which contributes to feelings of paranoia, doesn't it? So what's wrong with her son, who loved her and knew her better than most and was actually around at the time and was describing what he remembered, as part of his criticism of the Martin Bashir interview engineered by Charles Spencer, that it contributed to her feelings of paranoia?

It would be a lie to say that Diana was in a great mental state at that time.

Yes, I do think that’s it.

I thought they were 12 and 15?

There’s a lot of difference in maturity and understanding the adult world in the gap. H was basically a child but William was on the way to manhood and I guess they’d have been at different schools H at a prep and William already mixing with boys older than him.

What?! They were 36 and 38 years old when they made those statements!

Would William have also been in his exam year?

William was "well on his way to manhood"? He'd just turned 15, Harry was almost 13.
I've read this before - William was older, his feelings don't need to be considered, Harry was the child.
I think it's very unfair on a teenage boy who'd just lost his mother.
William seems to be so marginalised in this.