Prince Charles allegedly told Earl Spencer in the days following Princess Diana’s death: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough,” according to a deeply distressing new memoir.
Charles Spencer’s explosive book, which will be exclusively serialised by the Daily Mail from tomorrow, recounts what it describes as a bitter dispute with the man who is now King over plans for Diana’s funeral.
The clash came after a decision to have Prince William and Prince Harry, then aged 15 and 12, walk behind their mother’s coffin in the funeral procession — a move opposed by Diana’s brother.
The Earl says he told the then Prince of Wales that Diana would never have wanted her sons to face such an intensely public ordeal at their young ages. Charles is said to have challenged the Spencer family’s sense of duty before making the alleged remark that his former wife — whose death prompted an unprecedented global wave of mourning — would quickly be forgotten.
Earl Spencer says the King’s alleged comments, made nearly 30 years ago, revealed “his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death”.
The account appears in Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, a memoir by the 62-year-old Earl Spencer, who says he wrote it to challenge “untruths” about his elder sister.
The Daily Mail can reveal that the book also contains a series of further striking claims concerning Diana’s unhappy marriage to King Charles and the turbulent period after she was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997.
Its publication is expected to place Buckingham Palace under renewed pressure, coming only weeks after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex returned to the UK from California with their children.
Prince Charles and Princess Diana during their final official overseas visit together, to South Korea in 1992.
Charles Spencer, the ninth Earl Spencer, gives his famously defiant eulogy at his sister’s funeral.
On September 6, 1997, six days after Diana’s death, Earl Spencer famously delivered a defiant eulogy at her funeral that was later named one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century.
His raw oration in Westminster Abbey was delivered after he walked alongside William and Harry, as well as Prince Charles and Prince Philip, behind Diana’s coffin in a funeral procession through central London broadcast to 2.5billion people worldwide.
In his book, Earl Spencer writes that when one of Queen Elizabeth’s most senior aides told him in the days before the funeral that William and Harry would take part in the procession, he responded: ‘That’s not going to happen.’
But minutes later he received a phone call from Prince Charles who insisted that 18 years earlier he had walked in the funeral procession of Lord Mountbatten, his great-uncle, who he affectionately called ‘uncle Dickie’.
The memoir describes how Charles ‘went nuts’ after Earl Spencer pointed out that the Prince had been 30 at the time of Lord Mountbatten’s funeral in 1979.
In one of the book’s most extraordinary passages, Earl Spencer writes: ‘Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting. Then he stopped.
‘I assumed the pause signalled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he 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!”’
From left, the Earl, Prince William, Prince Harry and Charles at Diana’s funeral on September 6, 1997
The Earl, Diana and Charles at the Earl’s 21st birthday party in 1985 at the Mirabelle restaurant in London
Earl Spencer said that he was ‘so stunned’ by the alleged remarks that he took a few seconds to reply.
‘“I can’t believe you just said that,” I said flatly, before hanging up,’ he writes.
Earl Spencer’s description of the shocking outburst threatens to reopen the wounds of the so-called War of the Waleses and Prince Charles’s bitter split and eventual divorce from Diana.
Described as ‘historic’ and ‘extraordinarily moving’, Swan Song is due to be published worldwide next Tuesday – in the UK by Penguin Michael Joseph, a division of Penguin Random House – with the Daily Mail’s exclusive serialisation starting tomorrow.
It comes as police in the Netherlands investigate what publishing sources say is the ‘extremely suspicious’ theft of four copies of the memoir from a lorry earlier this week.
The Daily Mail revealed how a lorry packed with thousands of copies of the book, which were wrapped in black plastic to hide their contents, was broken into after it was parked overnight in a car park while the driver slept in the cab.
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