LONDON — Charles Spencer described his Tuesday morning with a precision that left little room for diplomatic interpretation. He had woken, he said, to find he had been gaslit by the king.
The 9th Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s younger brother and the man who delivered one of the most searing eulogies in modern British history at Westminster Abbey in 1997, was responding to Buckingham Palace’s statement about his memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, which went on sale in Britain on Tuesday. The palace issued what courtiers acknowledged was an unusually direct public response for an institution that has historically declined to dignify royal books with comment. The statement questioned his memory. It did not deny his account.
Spencer’s book, published by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Random House, makes two claims about King Charles III’s conduct in the hours and days after Diana’s fatal car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997. In the most incendiary passage to emerge from pre-publication excerpts, Spencer writes that the then Prince of Wales sounded “giddily elated,” what the book describes as “like a lottery winner,” during a call in which Charles spoke of his former wife’s death. In a separate account, Spencer recalls Charles telling him: “We’ll forget her soon enough.”
Spencer described the statement as “astonishingly provocative.”
“It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the king,” he told reporters.
The palace’s language was surgical in what it chose not to say. Aides did not identify which specific claims His Majesty disputes. The phrase “colour memory” is not the same as calling Spencer a liar. It was a rebuttal by implication, unmarked by attribution, and Spencer named it for what he took it to be.
Swan Song extends well beyond the disputed phone calls. The book devotes considerable space to the funeral procession question: whether the 15-year-old Prince William and 12-year-old Prince Harry should have been required to walk behind their mother’s coffin through central London as the world watched. Spencer writes that he “asked repeatedly” that the boys not be compelled to walk, without naming who made the final decision. The image of both brothers walking in silence behind the gun carriage became one of the defining photographs of the late twentieth century. For Spencer, it was not dignity. It was a failure of protection.
The timing carries its own significance. Swan Song lands a year before the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death in August 2027, a date the palace has been managing carefully in terms of public commemoration. The book offers a competing narrative for that anniversary, one that asks whether the men who stood in ceremonial silence beside her coffin have been sufficiently scrutinised for their conduct before and after.
Spencer uses the memoir’s later sections to draw a comparison between the tabloid culture that made Diana’s final years nearly unliveable and the media treatment of Meghan Markle since she joined the royal family. “The photographers and editors change,” he writes in a passage circulated ahead of publication. “The methods do not.” Whether that parallel holds across vastly different institutional and cultural contexts is a debate the book opens without settling.
The memoir’s central limitation is that its most explosive claims cannot be independently verified.
Spencer was present for the conversations he recounts, but he identifies no corroborating witnesses for the key exchanges. His descriptions of Charles’s elation, including the alleged remark about forgetting Diana, therefore remain his testimony alone.
The palace’s refusal to issue a detailed denial does not establish that the claims are true. It may reflect institutional habit rather than tacit admission. Readers must decide whether to accept Spencer’s account or view it as a recollection shaped—and possibly distorted—by grief.
Swan Song: Diana, My Sister is published in the United Kingdom by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Random House. A North American release date has not been announced.
