Royal row between King Charles and Earl Spencer 3

[Viviennemary]

A new thread and book not even published till Tuesday. I checked on Amazon and its only 12th on the non fiction bestseller list. Doesn't show Earl Spencer in a very good light imho.

Nonsense!

It's OK, I appreciate this comment, I don't feel vilified personally at all ha ha.

And on with the show.

Which is the post I was replying to

Piers Morgan cares - he has just announced he will be suing Lord Spencer and the publisher for defamation. This could be fun…

Do we know what he has said about Piers yet?

I’ll be surprised if the publishers didn’t fact check something about someone likely to be litigious like Piers. That seems like an error.

(I don’t think they’ll have overly fact-checked things about the King or royals as they know they’re unlikely to sue)

Because he has a title, and, he's Di's brother.

I doubt the payroll issue is nonsense at all. How can you prove that it is? The infiltration of social media is everywhere these days, sigh. Got to be aware at all times of the strategic placing of commentary in relation to certain issues.

Oohh - FIGHT !!!

Thin legal gruel.

In Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, Earl Spencer writes that he phoned tabloid editors asking them not to attend Diana’s funeral. Most agreed, but then-Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan “snarled with annoyance before he hung up.” The book also notes Morgan contacted Alastair Campbell to curb Spencer’s press criticism and quotes Diana joking about having lunch with him. Morgan calls the claims demonstrable lies and is suing.

Must be bad - Piers is used to people bad mouthing him with his marmite personality - he normally seems quite unbothered by criticism.

Most people are not mentioned in the book though so they won't care. I'm safe enough anyway! 😊

That doesn’t seem that bad!

I never know which equerry story people are referring to? The Johnnie Spencer one? Or the more salacious one about Diana saying that Prince Charles was in love with his valet?

At least one of his valets made it to equerry status I believe?

If the former, there was talk of Johnnie Spencer becoming a suitor of Princess Elizabeth before he became an equerry to her when she was married, because she wrote to him while he was on active service during the war. So it’s not inaccurate. You can easily find this documented in several history books.

As for the latter, who knows? It could have been a joke? It could be true? CS is simply reporting what Diana said. He is not making a judgement about it.

As for the Frogmore burial story not everyone is in agreement on this board about the royal protocol surrounding that and far more informed voices than mine have explained why CS has said this. I suppose it might depend on Diana’s HRH status at the time which was offered back to her? We don’t know the strict sequence of events?

I suggest everyone bears in mind that serialisation of the most interesting snippets of a book can massively distort the impression of the whole!

I for one am looking forward to reading it in its entirety.

Maybe there is more to it than that 🤷‍♀️

Piers could be on the payroll OMG! A distraction technique. Sue for inaccuracy so everything in the book will be considered inaccurate.

I believe everything though, the truth, the lies, the smears, the letters, the phone calls, the name calling, everything, I don't care about accuracy at this stage. It's the best free entertainment I've had in a long time. It has everything hasn't it?

If that's it then this looks like a remarkably low bar for a defamation action. Piers Morgan hardly a stranger to controversy himself, given the phone-hacking era — is now threatening legal action over allegations made about him in Earl Spencer's book.

Perhaps there is a genuinely serious defamatory allegation in there, but until we see precisely what was written, this looks rather more like a strategic legal move and publicity opportunity than a case of obvious and substantial reputational harm.

The courts aren't supposed to be a venue for every minor grievance between public figures. If the alleged statements amount to nothing more than disputed recollections, opinions or relatively trivial inaccuracies, one has to ask whether litigation is really proportionate or whether the publicity generated by threatening it is part of the point.

I seem to remember that Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson attended a private lunch hosted by Camilla just two days before Clarkson published his notorious column about Meghan in which he described fantasising about her being paraded naked through the streets and having excrement thrown at her. The column was subsequently removed by The Sun, which apologised. Whatever one thinks of Clarkson, the timing of that lunch and the subsequent column certainly raises questions about the extraordinarily close relationship between some royal critics and people in the royal circle

Here its is.

The excerpt that was given shows Spencer stating that his father was warned off by Mountbatten whilst he was an equerry. His words. Again if he’s worded it badly that’s entirely on him. His father was an equerry from 1950-1954 and the Queen was already married.

Again in his wording the Queen suggested Frogmore and he said she couldn’t be buried there because of the HRH being removed. He didn’t say because she was divorced or not royal. He specifically said that the removal of the HRH meant she couldn’t - that is simply inaccurate. The debate over her being royal or not is a different thing and regardless of all of it, if the Queen offered it then it was possible. The family not wanting it is a different, understandable, thing.

As a historian details and wording are important. He has said this is a historical record. His words. His facts.

It will be very interesting to see the book as a whole.

Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha! I am loving all this, CS and HAM are going down. They are so transparent and grasping. I love the drama so I am enjoying the spectacle, but with two people trying to recover from cancer (not HAM and the press) I hope the swan song is quick.

This is the defamation as stated by Piers Morgan ;

“Swan Song: Diana, My Sister” — by Charles Spencer, published by Michael Joseph (Penguin Random House), 2026
“I assumed Morgan must be feeling particular guilt because, four years earlier, he and his Sunday Mirror counterpart had published photographs taken with hidden cameras by a gym owner. They were of Diana working out in a leotard. This was such an intolerable invasion of her privacy that Diana instructed lawyers to sue the Mirror Group and to block further use of the images.
Meanwhile, a Dutch newspaper splashed one of the pictures on its front page, and an American tabloid bought a selection of them with which to titillate its readers. The gym owner eventually made £300,000 from his salacious, stolen images.
For a while it had looked as though the Mirror Group would be brazen enough to allow the case to go to court, calculating that whatever their newspapers lost financially at trial would be more than recouped through global publicity.
Despite significant public outrage at the pictures, and loss of revenue when some major companies withdrew their advertising from the Mirror Group, Morgan’s triumphant spokesman boasted that sales of his paper and of the Sunday Mirror had each risen by more than a hundred thousand copies since splashing the intrusive shots.
But, after that, public curiosity turned into general revulsion and both papers’ circulation dropped significantly. This commercial setback persuaded the Mirror Group to fold. It agreed to pay Diana’s legal costs, of around £1 million, and was obliged to further acknowledge its guilt by making donations of £200,000 to her chosen charities.
In the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death, Morgan was one of four tabloid editors named, shamed and photographed in an article looking at who might be held responsible for the paparazzi’s role... It must have been an extraordinary sensation for this powerful quartet... They were used to dishing out such treatment, without ever receiving it in return.”

The thing is defamation in the UK has to be both untrue AND damaging.

I can’t see how that would change anyone’s opinion about Piers Morgan for the worse. Isn’t it the kind of thing he’s already known for.

My take is that Morgan has a weak case. He appears to be trying quite aggressively to insert himself into the Diana story, disputing details of Spencer’s recollections and now threatening legal action over what he says are defamatory claims.

There is also an obvious irony here: Morgan is challenging Spencer over his account of events in which Morgan himself was a prominent tabloid editor. He is effectively asking a court to adjudicate parts of a historical narrative in which he was an active participant.

And there is a broader point about his relationship with the establishment. Morgan has spent years cultivating relationships with people at the highest levels, including members of the Royal Family. Given that those people cannot easily answer back to contemporary criticism in the normal way, there is something rather convenient about Morgan now presenting himself as the aggrieved party when Spencer turns the scrutiny back on him.

This is a nothing burger a they say in America- Morgan gets to play an hour of performative outrage which will quitely be forgotten soon after .

Ah just heard Piers Morgan in detail he says he wasn't at the Mirror at the time - he had his dates wrong. So whilst it might be right about the Mirror it's wrong about Morgan. Ouch !

That’s a really stupid, and potentially expensive, detail to get wrong if PM is speaking the truth.

It is and he wants an apology and a considerable sum to be paid top the King’s Trust.