Buckingham Palace is in a war of words with Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, over a controversial memoir about her life and death.
King Charles III is accused of insensitively telling Earl Spencer, in the wake of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, that “we’ll forget her soon enough”, according to excerpts in the Daily Mail.
But the Palace has pushed back unusually strongly, angered by the claims and attempting to cast doubt on them.
“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 judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss,” it said.
The language is reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth’s unexpectedly firm response to claims of racism by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in 2021, with the comment that “recollections may vary”.
And the row threatens to overshadow a very crowded day for the royals – with the King, Prince William and Catherine attending events, and Prince Harry making his first big appearance since returning to the UK.
Earl Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, to be published next week, seems set to reopen a very difficult time in the recent history of the Royal Family – written from the perspective of her own Spencer family.
The death of Princess Diana, a hugely popular figure, had created a volatile atmosphere, in which the royals were accused of failing to show feeling and empathy, and had seemed out of touch with the public mood.
Earl Spencer’s emotional and defiant speech at her funeral added to that cloud of grievance hanging over Princess Diana’s sudden death. And this book will give an insider’s view on those events.
In the published excerpt, Earl Spencer says the then-Prince of Wales subjected him to a “stream of anger” after he insisted Diana would not have wanted Princes William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12, to have to walk in her funeral procession.
Earl Spencer wrote in the book: “He [Charles] unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. ‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough’.”
It is a claim that is being rejected by the Palace, who see it as being entirely out of character for a man with a deeply compassionate nature, who at the time was dealing with his own grief and that of their two sons.
Prince Harry has previously said that walking behind his mother’s coffin aged 12 was something no child “should be asked to do”.
In 2017, he told the BBC he did not “have an opinion whether that was right or wrong” but. “looking back on it”, he was glad to have been part of the day.
Earlier on Wednesday, it emerged that copies of Earl Spencer’s unreleased book had been stolen from a lorry in the Netherlands.
Julian Payne, the monarch’s former communications secretary, told the BBC that the King’s apparent comments in the book were “just not language that I recognise”.
He said the “highly unusual” statement from the Palace demonstrated the “strength of feeling that there must have been for them to feel that they needed to go out there and correct it”.
