A brother’s memoir, a rare palace rebuke, and a 29-year-old night that Britain has never finished arguing about.
Princess Diana’s brother says King Charles sounded like a lottery winner the night she died. The palace says grief can twist memory. The book is not even in shops yet, and both camps are already speaking in public. That gap is the story.
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A brother’s memoir, a rare palace rebuke, and a 29-year-old night that Britain has never finished arguing about.
Princess Diana’s brother says King Charles sounded like a lottery winner the night she died. The palace says grief can twist memory. The book is not even in shops yet, and both camps are already speaking in public. That gap is the story.
What landed this week
On 16 and 17 September 2026 the Daily Mail printed extracts from Charles Spencer’s memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, due in bookshops on 22 September. Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer and Diana’s younger brother, writes that he was at home in Cape Town when the phone rang after the Paris crash of 31 August 1997. Other callers, he says, could barely speak. The then Prince of Wales was different.
“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.”
Spencer adds a later reading of that tone. He suspects Charles first thought about how the death might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than about the loss of the woman he did not. Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. She is now Queen Camilla.
A second extract, printed a day earlier, is even sharper. Spencer says he fought palace plans for Princes William and Harry — then 15 and 12 — to walk behind their mother’s coffin. He says Diana would not have wanted that walk. He writes that Charles poured anger down the phone, then hissed:
“Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough!”
Spencer says he answered, “I can’t believe you just said that,” and hung up. He also writes that some people inside the palace were “relieved — indeed, pleased — that she had gone.”
Penguin Random House, the publisher, has told newsrooms that the passages quoted by the Mail match the book. That matters. This is not a rumour about a manuscript. It is a signed memoir going on sale next week.
The newest turn, reported on 18 September, is not in the extracts themselves. A family friend told Vanity Fair that the King is “deeply wounded and very angry” and “seething” that the claims were printed with no right of reply. CNN the same day listed five of the book’s hardest lines, including an alleged remark on the eve of the 1981 wedding that Charles was happy to marry Diana but was not in love with her, and a later squeeze of her waist with the words “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?” See CNN’s 18 September round-up.
Spencer has not walked any of it back. Speaking to the BBC about the “forget her” line, he said: “Those are exactly the words he said.” That is the latest public position from the author as of 18 September 2026.
The palace did not stay quiet
Royal houses usually ignore books. They ignored large parts of Prince Harry’s Spare in 2023. They did not ignore this.
A spokesperson said:
“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 judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.”
That sentence does two jobs at once. It refuses a line-by-line fight. It also tells the reader that Spencer’s memory may be the problem. British papers immediately heard an echo of Queen Elizabeth II’s 2021 line after Harry and Meghan’s television interview: “some recollections may vary.” Different decade, same tool: do not call the other person a liar; say the past is fog.
Julian Payne, who handled Charles’s communications around the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, told the BBC he did not recognise the language Spencer attributes to his old boss. That is not proof. It is a former aide saying the voice in the book does not sound like the man he worked for.
Roya Nikkhah, royal editor of the Sunday Times, put the palace choice in plain terms. The old rule is “never complain, never explain.” This claim, she said, was too big, and more extracts were still coming. Silence would have looked like consent.
Two memories, one night, no tape
Here is the fact that will not go away: there is no public recording of those 1997 calls. There are two men, a dead woman, and a story told 29 years later in a book sold through a tabloid serial.
Spencer’s side is simple. He was her brother. He gave the funeral address that scolded the press and, by tone, the court. He has spent decades watching other people write Diana’s life. He says this book is meant to correct “untruths that have become accepted.” If his memory is sharp, the portrait of Charles that night is cold to the point of cruelty.
The palace side is also simple. Grief warps time. A brother who lost a sister at 36 may lock an ugly reading onto a flat or awkward voice. Charles had just told two boys their mother was dead. People in shock do not all sound the same. Some go quiet. Some go brisk. Some sound oddly light because the mind has not caught up. “Giddy” can be joy. It can also be a listener’s word for a voice that did not match the room.
Memory research does not pick a winner here. It only warns both camps. Recollections of high-emotion nights are vivid and often wrong in detail. People remember the feeling and then fill the words. That cuts against Spencer if he rebuilt a sentence from a mood. It also cuts against anyone who now says, with total certainty, that Charles could never have spoken in anger days later. Families say ugly things at funerals. Courts and palaces are families with better stationery.
A reader who wants to stay honest has to hold both possibilities at once. Either Spencer heard what he says he heard. Or he heard something colder than kindness and, over thirty years of unfinished grief, turned it into a line that now sells papers. Those are not the same event. We do not have the tape.
Why this still burns in 2026
Diana died at 36 in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. The driver, Henri Paul, was over the drink limit. The car was speeding away from photographers. None of the three who died were wearing seatbelts. The British inquest in 2008 called it an unlawful killing by the driver’s gross negligence and by the pursuing pack. That is the court record.
The street record is different. For a generation, a large share of the public has refused the accident. Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi Fayed’s father, said the crash was a hit. He named the security services and, at points, the royal house. The Metropolitan Police spent years and millions on Operation Paget. In December 2006 Lord Stevens wrote that, on the evidence then available, there was no plot to murder anyone in the car. “This was a tragic accident.” The overview is still public; the BBC hosted a copy of the official summary at this PDF.
What the official file does not close is the feeling. A white Fiat Uno that grazed the Mercedes was never firmly traced. French case papers from the first inquiry sit sealed until 2082. Sealed paper is not proof of a plot. It is proof that the state chose a date most of the living will not see. People who already distrust palaces read that date as a locked drawer. People who trust courts read it as ordinary archive law. Both readings now sit on the same shelf as Spencer’s new pages.
This is where mass media and other media split. Large outlets lead with the palace statement and the word “alleged.” Other sites and late-night shows lead with the lottery-winner line and ask why a king would need to tell a grieving brother that the world will forget his sister. Neither camp is inventing the quotes in the Mail. They are choosing which sentence is the headline.
There is also money. A serial in the Daily Mail the week before publication is not a history seminar. It is a machine. Anger from the palace is free advertising. Spencer knows that. The palace knows that. The reader is the third party in a sale.
The funeral walk the boys still talk about
Spencer’s fight over the procession is not a new quarrel. William and Harry have both said, years later, that walking behind the coffin was hard. Harry has been the blunter of the two. The palace at the time wanted a show of duty. Spencer wanted two children spared a global camera line. Both can be true: a court that feared shouts at Charles if he walked alone, and an uncle who thought the price was being paid by the sons.
Spencer now writes that palace staff wanted him and the boys in the line so the crowd would not abuse Charles. That is a claim about motive. It is not a claim that can be checked from a press release. It fits a known fear from that week: the country was angry, the Queen stayed at Balmoral too long, and the papers printed “Show us you care.” Whether Charles then spat “we’ll forget her” in a private call is the part only two living men can settle, and one of them has called the memory clouded.
Marriage, body, title: the rest of the extracts
The death-night lines are the spark. The book, as previewed, also walks back into the marriage.
Spencer writes that Diana tried to stop the wedding after Charles seemed cold at a party, and that her father would not let her. He writes that Charles told her he was happy to marry her but not in love. He writes that days after the engagement Charles remarked on her waist. He writes that her waist fell from 29 inches to 23 and a half between the engagement and the wedding, in the grip of an eating illness already underway. He writes that on the funeral day the Queen offered to restore the style “Her Royal Highness,” and that he refused it as empty once she was dead.
None of that is a court finding. Some of it matches stories Diana herself told friends and interviewers in the 1990s. Some of it is a brother’s memory of what a frightened young woman said at home. Readers who already see Charles as a man who married out of duty will nod. Readers who see Spencer as a man settling family scores will shrug. The useful habit is to mark each line as “Spencer says,” not “history now shows.”
Power, image, and the long British argument
This is not only a family row. It is about who owns a national story.
The Crown lives on duty, continuity, and the idea that private feeling must lose to the job. Diana lived, in the public mind, as the woman who broke that rule on camera. When her brother says the next king sounded glad she was gone, he is not only accusing one man. He is accusing the institution of relief. That is why the palace answered. Institutions can absorb a bitter brother. They struggle with the charge that they were pleased.
Geopolitics is quieter here than in a border war, but it is not absent. The British state still sells stability. A king in late life, after cancer treatment and a thin-skinned year of family books, does not want the 1997 wound reopened twelve months before the 30th anniversary of the crash. Spencer’s timing — extracts now, hardback on 22 September, anniversary year ahead — is not an accident of the calendar.
For a wider look at how this King uses gatherings and soft power in 2026, see our note on the closed AI meeting at Dumfries House: King Charles AI Summit in Scotland. For how fragile the royal information space already is, see the Ofcom ruling after a station played a false death bulletin: Radio Caroline and the false King Charles announcement. Britain’s older arguments about duty, race, and the imperial past also sit in the same week’s reading list: UN reparations guidance and Britain’s record. Health, fear, and state process — the other side of public trust — run through the DRC Ebola count and UK forced-marriage data on young children.
What a careful reader can take away
Keep four points and throw out the noise.
One: Spencer’s book, confirmed by his publisher, says Charles sounded elated the night Diana died and later said she would be forgotten soon enough. That is the claim.
Two: Buckingham Palace, against its usual habit, called the memory into doubt and pointed at a brother’s grief. A friend of the King now says he is furious. That is the reply.
Three: no recording of the calls has been produced. Official inquiries into the crash itself found an accident and drunk, fast driving. They did not take evidence on the tone of a private phone call in Cape Town.
Four: the French file stays closed until 2082, the anniversary machine is already warming up, and a newspaper serial is doing what newspaper serials do. Curiosity is reasonable. Certainty is not.
William and Harry have not spoken about these pages as of 18 September. They walked that coffin. They live with the film of it. If either son answers the book, the fight will leave the Mail and enter the family again. Until then the public is left with a brother who says he is telling the truth and a palace that says pain can invent a voice.
You do not have to love the Crown or love Earl Spencer to see the shape. A famous marriage failed. A woman died in a tunnel. Two men who stood near that death still cannot agree on what was said in the first hours. The rest is print, memory, and the long British habit of turning private coldness into public myth.
Original news spine: reporting first widely carried from Daily Mail extracts of 16–17 September 2026 and follow-ups on 18 September 2026 in CNN, the Guardian, Vanity Fair and others. Book: Charles Spencer, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, Michael Joseph / Penguin Random House, publication date 22 September 2026. Palace statement issued 16 September 2026. Crash record: French inquiry 1999; Operation Paget overview, 14 December 2006; London inquest verdict 2008.
Disclaimer for fact-checkers: This article reports published extracts, a palace statement, and named follow-up interviews. It does not prove what was said on a 1997 telephone call. Memoirs are one person’s account. Official crash inquiries addressed the tunnel, not these conversations. Sealed French papers and old conspiracy claims are described as public facts about the file and the rumour, not as evidence of murder. Readers should treat unrecorded private speech as contested until more than one independent record appears.
Original article: Earl Spencer Book: Was King Charles 'Giddy' After Diana Died? on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.