Earl Spencer has set out for America on a highly public campaign, bringing with him a book, a long list of grievances and a clear determination to keep the royal family in the spotlight.
His three-part mission is straightforward: promote his memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister; maximise its commercial success; and continue criticising the Royal Family, with King Charles frequently at the centre of his attacks.
“They have to gaslight,” he said in one interview. “They have to pretend there’s something wrong with my mind or my memory. There’s nothing wrong with either.”
For Charles Spencer, the American tour has become an opportunity to revisit old tensions. He arrived in the United States with his polished wardrobe, his grievances intact and plenty to say about the years following Diana’s death.
Television, radio, podcasts, newspapers and magazines have all featured on his itinerary. At every stop, he has promoted his account of royal life while taking repeated aim at his former brother-in-law. The so-called “War of the Charleses” shows no sign of ending.
At his New York book launch this week, Spencer was interviewed by royal biographer Tina Brown before a live audience. It did not take long for the conversation to move beyond Diana and towards his version of events involving the then-Prince Charles.
Rather than dwelling on Diana’s public legacy, the discussion returned to the tense exchanges that followed her death in 1997—and to Spencer’s recollection of what was said at the time.
“So, I was very calm,” Spencer told Brown. “And we know that Prince Charles can be not calm.” He also revived the story of Charles allegedly damaging a pen during a fit of anger, a detail that has become one of his repeated criticisms.
Charles Spencer is pursuing a highly personal campaign—and it is gaining attention, writes Jan Moir
Brown laughed at the jibe, as did members of the audience, while Spencer continued to contrast his own behaviour with that of the King. “The point is, this is a man with a temper, and I was very even that day,” he said.
Yet his criticism of Charles has become increasingly intense. Spencer’s public comments suggest that his anger towards the King remains a central feature of his American media campaign.
Earlier, Spencer appeared on CBS Mornings with presenter Gayle King, a close associate of Oprah Winfrey and a prominent supporter of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The appearance offered a sympathetic setting. Spencer’s complaints about the Royal Family closely echo the grievances expressed by Prince Harry and Meghan, who have argued that the institution protects its own while excluding those who believe they have been denied recognition and respect.
In the studio, Spencer appeared in a blazer while King wore a pink trouser suit. Her tone was warm and familiar; his was measured and polished. The interview quickly took on the atmosphere of a friendly exchange rather than a hostile examination.
King praised Spencer for looking out for his nephews, Prince William and Prince Harry, urged viewers to buy the book and described it as “sensational”. She also raised the criticism he has faced over its contents, though Spencer rejected the suggestion that readers had turned against him.
“I’m getting a lot of criticism fed by Buckingham Palace but not from other people and not from readers,” he said. The claim went largely unchallenged, with King responding by congratulating him.
Spencer then appeared on The Current, the Canadian radio programme hosted by Matt Galloway and heard by an estimated 10 million people each week.
During that interview, he suggested that Diana may have had ADHD and dyslexia and said her phone might have been hacked. He also disputed accounts that she manipulated or collaborated with the media, arguing instead that she “harnessed their power” to promote charitable causes. He provided no evidence for those claims.
Spencer also repeated a provocative assertion from his book: that Prince Charles sounded “giddily elated” when discussing Diana’s death during a phone call. His distinctive, carefully controlled delivery gave the allegation added emphasis.
“He was really relaying to me how he had told William and Harry about their mother’s death,” Spencer told the programme. “I just noted his tone as being sort of buoyant… he did sound upbeat.”
Buoyant, upbeat? As Diana lay on a mortuary slab in a Paris hospital? I’m still finding this bitter interpretation of events and emotions very hard to believe.
When pressed by Galloway, Spencer admitted that he cannot remember what this jaunty, happy cheeky chappy Charles actually said in those dark moments, he only remembers the tone. ‘It was so jarring.’
Then, of course, there was the row about the funeral procession. According to Spencer, Prince Charles was ‘totally out of control, you know when somebody’s lost it. I mean, we know this is a man who loses it. We saw him lose it with a fountain pen…’
Not the pen again!
‘…signing documents just after he had become king. It was a bit like that. Sort of a rant is a good word… and he was rude about Diana and her sense of beauty…’
What?
‘Then he came in with that killer line, [‘we’ll forget her soon enough’]and that was really upsetting.’
Charles Spencer appears on CBS Mornings to promote his book alongside Gayle King
Spencer thinks it is up to King Charles, not him, to explain these words. Yet we had a revealing moment of clarity when Galloway challenged Spencer’s portrayal of the King as a callous individual who disparaged Diana.
‘I didn’t set out to criticise the King,’ huffed the author. ‘And they’re not criticisms. They’re reportings of fact. I’m sure people in Canada will never remember but I was a TV journalist for a decade. I’m a historian, I’m a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I’m not a salacious gossip, I deal in fact, and these are facts that I thought were really illuminating.’
Darlings, he is not a gossip, he’s a historian. That’s a bit like saying, I’m not a stripper, I’m an exotic dancer.
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And while he vehemently dislikes the royals, he wants you to know he’s a member of a royal society. What a hypocrite.
If he were a true historian, would he want to rewrite history to suit himself and his own agenda? Wouldn’t he want the whole truth, not supposition and innuendo supplied by himself?
Elsewhere on this tour, Earl Spencer claimed never to have read Prince Harry’s best-selling autobiography Spare, which was published in 2023. What historian would turn away from his own family history and the important role he himself plays in it? None of it makes much sense.
As Earl Spencer continues his publicity tour, I seethe with the same annoyance and frustration as when Meghan and Harry were out on the stump, airing their peeves, implying the Royal Family was racist, belittling an entire country they found unbearable, intolerable.
Charles Spencer is on the same self-serving trajectory – and he is making an impact. His book now tops US bestseller lists while he spreads his grim message about our King and the monarchy across America.
After the Tina Brown interview, one commentator wrote; ‘We should never invite the British Royal Family to any American state occasions again.’ One feels that is precisely what Charles Spencer wants, along with destroying an elderly man who once got annoyed at a leaky fountain pen.
Wow! The sensibility of a real star
Esme Creed-Miles attending the Australian premiere of Sense and Sensibility this week
To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect… Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience – or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope… If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Oh, la! There is barely a word in Sense and Sensibility that is not as relevant today as it was more than 200 years ago, when Jane Austen wrote her first novel.
A sumptuous new film version has just been released, starring radiant Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood and George MacKay as Edward Ferrars.
I love them both, the costumes are exquisite, right down to the last pin tuck, the bonnets are bonny while the suppressed longing delicious to behold, yet somehow it’s all just a bit… boring. I got fed up of arty shots of bees buzzing around flowers in ye olde English countryside and readers, fell asleep twice.
Yet there was one wideawake highlight – Esme Creed-Miles as Marianne Dashwood. Esme’s portrayal of the younger and more impetuous sister might have been a bit frantic, but wow. She has really got something. When Esme, pictured, is on screen, you simply cannot take your eyes off her.
She is the daughter of Samantha Morton and Peaky Blinders’ Charlie Creed-Miles, and clearly a talent to watch. Not all nepo babies are a waste of space!
As pricey as ever, it’s the gift that keeps on taking
Meghan Markle has launched a Christmas calendar called The Joy of Anticipation
All I don’t want for Christmas is Meghan’s advent calendar.
The Duchess of Sussex has launched her first As Ever Christmas calendar, called The Joy of Anticipation. It features an illustration of her Montecito home and contains 24 chocolates behind the festive doors and windows. And guess what? It only costs £112, which works out at about £4.60 per chocolate.
Choc flavours include raspberry, orange marmalade and ganache truffle. Each ‘piece’ is finished with its countdown number etched in Meghan’s personal penmanship, hand-painted in edible gold lustre.
A fiver for a chocolate? Is she taking the pith? Out of the citrus fruits, I mean. Stop it.
The attempted hijacking of the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday showed the best and worst of humanity. One pilot stabbed the other and allegedly wanted to crash the plane and kill everyone on board. He was stopped by the heroics of many onboard, including the stricken pilot and passenger Yaniv Hayun, who with another man dragged the hijacker out of the cockpit before going back in to ‘pull up the yoke and straighten the plane’, which he knew how to do after watching a tv programme called Air Crash Investigation. A horror, a nightmare and a miracle, all on one short journey. Thank goodness for a happy ending, for once.
What about Ed’s freedom of speech?
Ed Sheeran speaks on stage as he addresses the controversy over Macklemore being pulled from his tour after pro-Palestinian comments
If you want to understand the sheer idiocy of cancel culture, look no further than the Ed Sheeran debacle.
The pop singer has lost 500,000-plus Instagram followers because of something that wasn’t his fault and which he tried his best to rectify.
That’s cancel culture in a nutshell; the blind leading the stupid in a parade of know-nothing lemmings acting without thinking for the greater glory of performative identity politics and their own good selves.
To recap: the rapper Macklemore was dropped as an opening act from Ed Sheeran’s Loop stadium tour after he made a ‘Free Palestine’ statement before performing a protest song at two concerts last month.
He was dropped from the tour not by Sheeran, but by the venues themselves, who want all their visitors to feel safe, not just the keffiyeh-wearing rent-a-mob. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
Sheeran himself has said that lots of children come to his concerts and he has always wanted to create a feeling of joy in a politics-free zone. U2 confirmed this week that when they collaborated earlier this year on the song Yours Eternally, which is about Ukraine, Sheeran expressed resistance about doing such a politically-minded song. ‘You’re not going to get me into politics, are you?’ he fretted to Bono.
I respect his wish to stay above the fray. I applaud it! Isn’t that his freedom of speech, too? The other support acts dropped out, too. Among them was Finneas – pop star Billie Eilish’s brother – who said: ‘Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.’
For God’s sake. As if the opinion of some nonentity third on the bill matters to the crowds, who have paid their money to attend a pop concert, not a political rally.
I wouldn’t mind so much, but there is never a peep of protest against Hamas, a murdering death cult whose acts of savagery – at a music festival! – are somehow always overlooked by these pious peaceniks.
Meanwhile Ed is on the outs and Macklemore has gained more than two million followers. Sometimes I loathe young people.
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