“I’m telling the truth… what else would have made me hang up on the King that day?” That was Earl Spencer’s answer when the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked whether viewers should believe him or Charles III. The interview, recorded at his Althorp estate, came ahead of the release of his book Swan Song, which criticises the King, then Prince of Wales, over events after the death of Diana.
The disputed phone call
The sharpest claim concerns a call about Diana’s funeral. Spencer said a palace official told him Princes William and Harry would walk behind their mother’s coffin. He objected, saying Diana would not have wanted it. Soon afterward, he said, Prince Charles phoned to ask why.
“I said, ‘Well, of course not, sir, she wouldn’t want it’,” Spencer recalled. “And then he said, ‘Well, I walked behind Lord Mountbatten’s coffin.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but you were 30 and he wasn’t your mother’.” Charles then went “ballistic”, Spencer said, and told him: “We’ll forget her soon enough.”
Buckingham Palace pushed back strongly. It said the King was “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”.
Spencer would not give ground. “Those are exactly the words he said,” he told Kuenssberg, adding that he had only ever had two calls on the line with Charles and was “hyper-alert” to what was said. He said he told “close friends and family” about the “monstrous” remark, and that it “will not be a surprise” to William and Harry.
A call from Cape Town
Spencer was in South Africa when Diana died in a Paris car crash on 31 August 1997. His sister Lady Jane Fellowes rang him in the night to say it was “not too serious”. More calls followed, each worse. “It started… as a little prang, and then it became a broken leg, perhaps a head injury, and then death.”
Later that day, at his home in Cape Town, he took a call from Charles, who described how he had told the boys at Balmoral. Spencer said he heard “a sort of giddy tone”. The book likens it to the manner of a “lottery winner” and suggests Charles may have been thinking of marrying the woman he loved, the future Queen Camilla. Pressed on whether he could be sure, Spencer said: “I cannot be sure, I’m saying that’s what I assume from the tone is a possibility.”
Motives and a hint of more
Why write it now? Spencer, 62, called it his “duty… as an eyewitness to history”, and said he is in the “final season of my life”, his parents having died in their sixties. “This is not a threat, it’s a fact, I know lots of things about the King which I chose not to include in the book because they were not relevant.” Asked whether that sounded like a threat, he said: “No, not at all a threat, it’s just the reality.”
Kuenssberg also asked why he included Diana’s remark that Charles was in love with his valet, a claim Spencer called improbable, and whether such material was there to sell copies. He replied that it came from a conversation in which Diana told him her marriage was over. “It’s a brother’s tribute, a loving tribute to a sister.”
Harry, the press and Panorama
Spencer said he was reluctant to discuss how Harry has been treated, but voiced concern about his security. “I personally worry about the fifth-in-line to the throne who’s served in the military not having any police protection.” It is understood the committee known as Ravec will reconsider the police protection for Harry and Meghan now that they and their two children live full-time in the UK.
He called tabloid coverage of Harry and Meghan “a cancerous influence” and said Diana “was really brought low by all that criticism”. On the rift between the brothers he said: “I’m on my deceased sister’s sons’ side, both of them.”
Kuenssberg also raised Martin Bashir’s 1995 Panorama interview. A 2021 inquiry found Bashir acted in a “deceitful” way, mocking up fake bank statements that falsely suggested people were being paid to watch Diana, and showing them to Spencer to win access to her. Spencer said he did make “a connection” between that deception and the crash, and that she was “convinced that she couldn’t trust people because the evidence was there”. The BBC and Bashir apologised to the King, Spencer, William and Harry after the report.
He told Kuenssberg he is “all for a monarchy, but I like a modern monarchy”, and that he does support the institution. As the interview closed, visibly emotional, he said he misses Diana “every day”. “One of the reasons I called this Swan Song actually is because it’s my sign off.”
