Earl Spencer has accused King Charles of gaslighting him following a Buckingham Palace statement regarding his upcoming memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister. The row centers on an alleged comment made by the then Prince Charles following Princess Diana’s death in 1997, which the Palace suggested may be clouded by grief.
Memoir Revelations and the Royal Funeral Row
The public dispute erupted after extracts were exclusively published by the Mail last week. The book details the life and public struggles of his late sister, Princess Diana, through the eyes of her brother who grew up with her. Among the most explosive claims is an assertion that days after Diana’s 1997 death, the then Prince Charles told him: "Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough." This alleged comment was made during a blistering row with the earl over whether Princes William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12, should walk in their mother’s funeral procession.
In his book, the earl writes about his primary memory of the train journey, expressing deep concern regarding the lack of obvious care for Harry, as he decompressed from the ghastliness of the morning. He claims that instead of calm and nurture, the young prince was allowed to spin out of control, noting that Harry needed Diana’s hugs, which would forever be denied him.
Buckingham Palace Response and the Accusation of Gaslighting
The Palace issued a highly unusual response to the memoir’s claims. While maintaining a general policy that they do not comment on books as a matter of principle, a Palace spokesman addressed the emotional weight of the historical period, stating that fraternal grief can "cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss."
Speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday, Earl Spencer, 62, hit back at the Palace’s assertion, describing it as a form of psychological abuse where the victim is manipulated into questioning what they know to be true. "It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King," he stated, calling the statement astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say he had lied without the King being able to deny what he had said.
He further dismissed the Palace’s wording as a rather poor imitation of the late Queen Elizabeth’s famous "recollections may vary" retort to Harry and Meghan after their interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, describing the original quote as a much more elegant way of putting things, but in these circumstances entirely out of place.
Defending the Truth Amid Claims of Financial Motivation
Some royal commentators have accused the earl of "cashing in" on his late sister’s memory. However, Charles Spencer strenuously denied that financial gain motivated the project, stating that "money has never even been the remotest consideration in my choosing to write my tribute to Diana."
As a historian, he emphasized that his primary responsibility is to tell the truth about Diana and all she had to put up with in her public life, along the way dealing with various myths that have grown up which needed to be dealt with once and for all. He noted his age in his sixties and mentioned that neither of his parents made it to 70, prompting him to do this while he could. He added his belief that his late sister would be "cheering from the rafters" at his book and would have been fully behind his words.
Unresolved Evidence and Public Scrutiny
In an interview with the BBC, the earl stated that he told close friends and family "straight away" about the Prince of Wales’s alleged outburst "because it was so monstrous." When asked if he had any evidence of the comment, he could not provide any hard evidence. Richard Kay, one of Diana’s most trusted confidants writing in the Mail, recalls Earl Spencer telling him in the week before the Princess’s funeral that there had been a "furious row" and that Prince Charles had been "utterly pathetic."
