Earl Spencer has said that claims he makes about the King in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death will not come as a shock to her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
The earl indicated that he had previously told the brothers about an alleged exchange in which Charles reportedly said, during an argument over Diana’s funeral, that she would soon be forgotten.
William and Harry are understood to have been unaware of the full contents of their uncle’s forthcoming memoir, including the account of the King’s alleged words.
Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Earl Spencer said: “I don’t like to talk about what I’ve been speaking about to William and Harry, but this will not be a surprise to them.
“I will tell you that these words will not be a surprise to them.”
The Royal Family has faced a fresh wave of controversy following revelations from Spencer’s memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, after extracts were published exclusively by the Mail last week.
Among the most explosive claims is Spencer’s account of an alleged conversation held days after Diana died in 1997, when Charles is said to have told him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
The alleged remark reportedly came during a heated dispute over whether William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12, should walk behind their mother’s coffin during her funeral procession.
The Palace issued an unusually direct response last week, casting doubt on the account and warning that grief between family members can “cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory”.
Spencer has described a furious confrontation with Charles after expressing concern about the two young princes taking part in the procession. According to his account, the future King challenged what he viewed as a lack of commitment to family duty.
In his BBC interview, the earl said the impact of that dispute—and his response to the alleged comment about Diana—can be seen in the eulogy he delivered at her funeral.
Earl Spencer suggested that he had previously told William and Harry about the alleged remark from Charles that their mother would soon be forgotten.
Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Earl Spencer said the revelations “will not be a surprise” to William and Harry.
Alongside his well-known declaration that Diana’s “blood family” would protect her sons, Spencer’s eulogy paid tribute to his sister as “the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana”, adding that her inner and outer beauty would never disappear from their memories.
Reflecting on the alleged dispute with Charles before the funeral, Spencer said: “You can see evidence of that conversation in the final eulogy.
“I really stress Diana’s sense of duty—duty comes across very clearly in the eulogy, and then it culminates in something which I think really underlines the truth of my assertion here.
“If you get to the final bit of my eulogy, it is that her fantastic qualities ‘will never be extinguished from our minds’.
“It was a direct rebuttal of ‘we’ll forget her soon enough’.”
The earl also rejected suggestions that he was threatening the King when he said his memoir could have included further unflattering details about him.
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“This is not a threat, it’s a fact,” Spencer said. “I know lots of things about the King which I chose not to include in the book because they were not relevant.”
Challenged that his remarks did, in fact, sound a bit like a threat, he continued: ‘No, it’s not at all a threat. It’s just the reality. I want to give the context of what I said and what I didn’t say, I’m not threatening.
‘I’m not a salacious writer on any level, but if I was a salacious writer and wanted to write that sort of thing, I have plenty of other things I could have said, and really have no interest in doing so.’
Earl Spencer later claimed he had no intention of making any further claims about the Royal Family, saying: ‘That’s it. That’s me done.’
Earl Spencer has accused King Charles of ‘gaslighting’ him over the suggestion his memoir is ‘clouded by grief’
He has claimed that in the days after Diana’s death, the then Prince Charles told him ‘we’ll forget her soon enough’
Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed in Saint-Tropez, France, on August 22, 1997 – just days before they died
Describing his account of the first of two phone conversations with Charles following Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997, he told the BBC: ‘I felt there was a sort of giddy tone.’
‘I’d had a lot of calls that day from people who cared, who were stunned… and I just felt there was a lightness in his tone about Diana’s death that really jarred with me.’
He claimed he then received a second call from Charles after expressing concerns to a member of the Buckingham Palace household about William and Harry walking behind their mother’s coffin.
‘He said “I gather you don’t think William and Harry should walk behind Diana’s coffin” and I said “of course not, sir, she wouldn’t want it”.
‘Then he said, “I walked behind Lord Mountbatten’s coffin”, and I said “yes, but you were 30, and he wasn’t your mother”.
‘He went ballistic and started really going for my family as a whole about their sense of duty not being adequate enough and ranted for a while, I have no idea how long, but it was a significant period and I just listened.
‘Then he stopped, and I thought, oh, now, now he’s going to pull himself together and say something more appropriate, and then he said, “We’ll forget her soon enough”.’
Asked what went through his mind, he said: ‘Well, I’m not sure I can say exactly what went through my mind, but I really was so stunned, and I just, after a stunned silence, I said, “I cannot believe you just said that”, and I hung up on him.’
Pressed on whether he was effectively accusing the King of lying, Earl Spencer replied: ‘I can hardly be responsible for what Buckingham Palace says.
‘All I can tell you is what was said and what I heard and what shocked me.
‘What else would have made me hang up on the king that day? It was something as outrageous as that slur against Diana.’