Charles Spencer is lifting the veil on the royal family.

In his new book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, released today, Princess Diana’s younger brother makes a series of explosive claims about the royals. Among them are allegations about King Charles III’s reportedly insensitive treatment of his former wife and his reaction to her death.

Ahead of the book’s publication, Charles issued a pointed response, suggesting that grief had affected Spencer’s judgment and recollection.

“His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss,” a representative told Page Six.

Here are the major claims outlined in Spencer’s book.

Two of Diana and Spencer’s nannies were allegedly physically abusive towards them

Spencer alleges that he and Diana endured physical abuse from two nannies during their childhood. He says the siblings never told their parents, John Spencer, the 8th Earl Spencer, and Frances Spencer.

According to Spencer, one nanny struck their outstretched hands with a wooden spoon. He describes another nanny as more severe, alleging that she sometimes slammed their heads against a concrete wall outside the nursery bathroom.

“The result was dizzying, throbbing pain and bewilderment,” he writes.

Even so, Spencer says he and Diana were not “broken by the cruelty” and remained “strong-willed children.”

Charles allegedly sounded “giddily elated” when Diana died

Spencer also recalls a phone call with Charles shortly after Diana died in a 1997 car crash in Paris, France. He alleges that the prince sounded “giddily elated — like a lottery winner.”

He further claims that Charles was “strangely matter-of-fact” when saying he had already told his and Diana’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, that their mother had died.

“Looking back now, I suspect the prince’s first reaction must have been to think more of how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not,” Spencer writes. He is referring to Camilla, now Queen Camilla, whom Charles married in 2005.

Princess Diana’s dad allegedly had a “romantic connection” with Queen Elizabeth

Spencer also claims that his and Diana’s father once had a “romantic connection” with Charles’ mother, Queen Elizabeth II, before she married Prince Philip in 1947.

He alleges that Lord Mountbatten, Philip’s uncle, intervened and personally ordered John Spencer to end the relationship, calling it “nonsense” that had to stop immediately.

“Perhaps Mountbatten was clearing the way for his nephew, Prince Philip,” Spencer writes.

Spencer says his father followed the order but later “loathed Mountbatten with a passion.”

Elizabeth’s shocking six-word response to hearing about Diana’s death

He also draws a comparison between what he describes as Charles’ detached response to Diana’s death and Queen Elizabeth’s alleged initial reaction to news of her daughter-in-law’s car accident: “What is she up to now?”

Spencer notes that the Queen reportedly had not yet been told that Diana had died when she made the comment.

Charles allegedly wanted his mom to abdicate the throne so he could be king

The book further claims that people close to Charles believed he wanted Elizabeth to abdicate because he was frustrated by “being a middle-age man still wanting to reign.”

Spencer alleges that the reported succession tensions spilled into the royal household, creating friction between Elizabeth’s staff and Charles’ staff during Diana’s funeral.

Spencer also alleges that on the day of his dad’s funeral, Charles told him he was “lucky” that his father died early. John died at age 68 of a heart attack in 1992.

He alleges Charles told him during an akward conversation, “You’re just so lucky — you know, inheriting when you’re so young!”

He claims Charles then proceeded to throw a tantrum about his parents treating him like a child despite him being 43 years old, even allegedly stomping his foot in emphasis.

Charles allegedly vowed Diana would be forgotten ‘soon enough’

Spencer claims Charles later threw another tantrum years later over him not wanting William and Harry to walk behind Diana’s coffin at her funeral, which Charles wanted them to do.

He claims they had an angry phone call, in which he accused the Spencer family of having “no sense of duty.”

“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,” Spencer writes. “’Rest assured,’” he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough!’”

William and Harry were 15 years old and 12 years old, respectively, at the time, and ended up walking behind their mother’s coffin alongside Charles, Spencer and Philip.

Diana made an eerie comment just 2 months ahead of her death

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Spencer says the last time he saw Diana was on her 36th birthday, when they ran into each other unexpectedly while having dinner at London’s Tate Gallery.

He writes that earlier that day, Diana made a comment about her home looking like a funeral parlor after a family member gave her flowers for her birthday.

He recalls Diana joking, “I’ve been so lucky! My house is so full of gorgeous flowers that the place looks like a funeral parlour!”

Spencer then observes, “Now here I was, just two months later, trying to write something suitable for her funeral.”

Diana wanted to pull out of marrying Charles but was forced to go through with it by their dad

Spencer writes Diana was heartbroken when it became obvious Charles did not love her ahead of their wedding day.

He alleges that during Charles’ younger brother Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday celebration, instead of Charles spending time with her, he ignored her, leaving Diana “deeply hurt, confused and increasingly concerned.”

After the party, Spencer claims Diana told their dad that she could not marry Charles when he obviously didn’t love her, but he told her it was impossible to pull out at that point.

Later, Spencer alleges that Diana confided in a close friend that the day before her 1981 wedding to Charles, her husband-to-be bluntly told her that while he was happy to marry her, he was not in love with her.

“Diana had to absorb that hammer blow while also feeling certain that Prince Charles was entering their marriage with his heart elsewhere,” he writes.

Diana allegedly contemplated suicide

Spencer muses that like him, his sister suffered from Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), which he describes as intense emotional pain at being rejected or criticized.

He notes that negative tabloid reports greatly affected her and claims that in her later years, she drove herself multiple times to Beachy Head, the highest cliff in England, “while contemplating ending it all.”

He says her love for her sons is what stopped her.

He believes Diana had undiagnosed ADHD

Aside from Spencer believing Diana had undiagnosed RSD, he also says he’s “convinced” she had Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

He notes that Diana struggled with learning difficulties in the classroom growing up, but was never tested for anything.

He writes that as early as kindergarten, her teacher noted that she had a short attention span and was unable to focus. He says that her later teachers made similar observations about her, noting she had difficulty concentrating which “hampers her progress.”

Diana allegedly slapped her dad after he secretly married his second wife

Spencer alleges that Diana was so angry that their dad married his second wife, Raine McCourquodale, that she slapped him in the face.

According to Spencer, he and Diana had accepted their dad’s previous girlfriends after their parents divorced in 1969, but they “intensely disliked” Raine, whom he calls a “gold-digger.”

He alleges that after Diana found out about the 1976 secret marriage from reading a newspaper, she slapped their dad and said, “That’s for the pain you’re causing us all” — referring to her and her siblings.

Spencer alleges that after their dad suffered a stroke in 1978 and his health deteriorated, their stepmom blocked his children from him, instructing his nurses to stop them from seeing him.

One of Diana’s post-divorce suitors was allegedly an American politician

Though he doesn’t name names, Spencer says Diana told him that “one of her powerful, ageing American suitors” wanted her as the ultimate trophy wife.

The politician allegedly told Diana that he for sure would win the presidency if she married him.

Charles writes that Diana was “titillated” by the idea of possibly becoming the First Lady of the US more than she was excited about the “elderly” man trying to win her affections.

One of Charles’ right-hand men allegedly leaked lied about him to the press

Spencer claims that a friend who runs a PR agency told him that one of Charles’ right-hand men frequently asked him to spread lies about him to newspapers.

He also accuses a powerful editor of encouraging the outlet as well as other newspapers to attack him with negative press any chance they got.

Spencer says the stories damaged his reputation to the point where he repeatedly thought about suicide.

He writes, “I fell back on one thought: Diana had had it much, much worse, and she had kept going.”

After Charles, 77, hit back the allegations in the book, Spencer, 62, doubled down on his claims in his interview with the BBC, insisting he’s “telling the truth” about Charles’ alleged reaction to Diana’s death.

“I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said,” he stressed.

“I was hyper alert to what he was saying and those are precisely the words that he said and I promise that to you now. Genuinely, that is what he said. I don’t hear him saying he didn’t say that.”

I’m standing at the top of a vast hill in the grounds of a stately home, looking out across Bath’s beautiful skyline.

It is Good Friday 2025. Sunlight breaks through the clouds as my husband, Simon, and I catch our breath after pushing the double buggy, with our two children inside, up the steep incline from the lake below.

We are lucky enough to call this city home. The view is idyllic and, at 37, my life appears to be better than I could have imagined only a year earlier.

Yet as I look from my two young children, aged three and nine months, to my husband, I hear myself say: ‘I just don’t think I can go on like this.’

I dissolve into tears and tell him that I believe he and the children would be better off without me.

A crushing sense of shame overwhelms me. I can barely pretend to be cheerful for my children. My limbs feel heavy, I have no energy and all I want is to go home and sleep forever.

Simon begins to cry as well. He guides me back to the car, then holds me tightly and reminds me how deeply I am loved—not only by him and our children, but by many other people too. He urges me to understand how much the children need me, and how much he needs me himself.

It is difficult to understand how I reached this point, just nine months after the birth of my second child. The first six months of his life had been among the happiest I had ever known.

Only three months earlier, we had celebrated a magical first Christmas as a family of four. Simon and I repeatedly caught each other’s eye as we watched the two people we had created, telling one another, ‘we are so lucky’ and ‘life doesn’t get much better than this’.

Neither of us said those words casually.

After our first son was born, my mental health collapsed. I was diagnosed with postnatal depression and anxiety, and had never felt so low or worthless in my life.

Anyone who has experienced postnatal mental health problems will understand how quickly shame can take hold when you feel anything other than gratitude after your baby arrives. It can leave you convinced that you are the worst person in the world.

That feeling was particularly powerful for me. I had spent much of my early 30s single, desperately hoping to become a mother while worrying that it might never happen.

I met my husband, who is now 38 and works in tech, during the pandemic. We connected through a dating app, and the love was immediate—unlike anything I had experienced before.

The fact that we had survived the depths of my depression during our first year as parents showed the strength of our relationship. But it also left both of us frightened at the prospect of trying for another baby.

We prepared as carefully as we could, making sure we had a strong support network around us in case I relapsed.

At first, at least, the therapy and personal work I had undertaken, along with our greater confidence as second-time parents, made the experience feel far easier after the birth of my second son. It seemed much less complicated.

This time, I found it easier to experience the profound contentment that had been overwhelmed by terror and fear after my first child was born.

It is not an exaggeration to say I woke up every single day of those first six months feeling so relieved not to be depressed, even while totally exhausted by the task of caring for a two-year-old and a newborn at once.

So why did I sink so low and why so suddenly nine months later?

Well, around the six-month mark, a few days before New Year’s Eve 2024, two big things changed. The first is that I finished breastfeeding and the second is that like hundreds of thousands of other Brits around that time, I started taking tirzepatide, a GLP-1 agonist medication known by the brand name of Mounjaro.

The drugs arrived a few days after all the excesses of Christmas and, bang, within hours my appetite was utterly gone. I could hardly believe it.

I was seemingly very sensitive to the drugs. I’ve since learned that not everyone reacts so drastically, but the pounds just fell off.

I was euphoric for three weeks after I started taking them, then things began to go horribly wrong.

One minute I was fine – a happy, tired mum catching up with friends in my kitchen – the next, I’d feel my thoughts cloud over and everything turn dark.

I was at a coffee morning with my friends when I first noticed something wasn’t quite right. I became completely disconnected from my surroundings. As it got worse, I began to feel terrified. My heart rate went through the roof and sweat dripped from every pore.

I called Simon, who was at work, to come home immediately because I was sure something was seriously wrong.

Worried, I contacted the pharmacy that had prescribed the GLP-1 and it suggested I swap to Wegovy instead. Which I duly did. But rather than getting any better, I began to deteriorate even more.

I started reading around the side-effects of weight-loss drugs and discovered that some patients taking Wegovy had reported ‘suicidal ideation’ as a reaction to taking the medication. Could this be happening to me? The problem was, no one really knew.

It was so new to the market back in the first half of 2025, it felt like I was part of a mass human drug trial. No one – from the pharmacist to my GP – could give me answers beyond ‘just stop taking it’. Which is exactly what I did.

I told myself that Simon and my babies needed me to be well and I couldn’t take a risk on anything that might risk my mental health – even for the sake of losing the 15kg (2st 5lb) that I’d put on after the birth of my second son, a weight gain that was also making me miserable.

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The fact is I have struggled with my body image all my life. The perception of my weight as bad and wrong has been constant and relentless since the age of seven. Those feelings of shame are difficult to shake.

It wasn’t just me who had a problem with my weight, it was other people. It didn’t matter if they loved me, their words hurt – and many would be mortified to find out how much.

There was the family member who told me that my legs shouldn’t rub together when I walked while wearing a pair of much-loved CK Jeans shorts. I was ten and I never wore them again.

The GP who advised my parents they should take me to Slimming World meetings aged 15 (where, incidentally, a well-meaning woman told me they’d get me ‘skinny in no time’ – I was a size 12).

The best friend I made at university who told me – in a way that sounded like she thought it was a compliment – her friends visiting from home thought that I had ‘such a pretty face’, I’d be a ten-out-of-ten if I lost weight.

The drunken boss who told my colleagues at a Christmas party I had the ‘best t**s in the office’ and what a shame I didn’t have the body to match.

The boyfriend who told me he loved my curves before threatening to leave me if I didn’t lose weight.

The friends and family members who repeatedly told me when I did lose weight at the age of 28 – at which point I had an incipient eating disorder – that the boyfriend had ‘done me a favour’ with his threats because I looked the best I ever had.

And more. So many more.

In isolation each of these moments stung a lot, but I was able to move past them. Taken together, they added up to a concerted attack on my self-esteem, my sense of identity and my confidence in the world.

So when I thought I’d finally found the answer in GLP-1s to years of anguish about my weight, it was a considerable blow to have to come off them.

Soon after the drug left my system, however, my thoughts calmed considerably. Coupled with a month of therapy, the dark clouds lifted. I began to feel well again.

With the energy I needed to be the mother I always wanted to be, I swore that I would never, ever go back on the jabs…

So why, one year later, am I back on them again? How unwise would you have to be to take something you strongly suspect gives your mental health such a kicking?

Only a fool, and a hypocrite, would prioritise weightloss over the stability of their life and family, surely?

Once the post-birth rollercoaster settled and my hormones calmed down, I went back to work as a freelance journalist. I felt stronger. But I couldn’t lose the weight.

I went to the gym five times a week and both Simon and I started eating a much better diet. But although I was trying really hard, the baby weight stubbornly refused to shift.

So in May this year, going against the guidance from the online pharmacist and taking just half of the starting dose – a tiny measure that on most people would have little effect – I started on the jabs again.

I pledged that if I was going to take the risk on Mounjaro I would take measures to protect myself.

Simon was wary but supportive. He knew how important it was to me.

I also enlisted the help of my friend, the head nutritionist at the health company Zoe, Dr Federica Amati, whose book The Appetite Reset explains how to plan for life before, on and after GLP-1 medication.

This time around I have alarms set on my phone to remind me to eat protein and fibre, such as scrambled eggs and smoothies packed with vegetables.

I keep track of everything I eat to make sure I’m hitting my goals and consuming the right nutrients.

All of which means that this time, my experience has been totally different. I don’t feel like I’ve been run over by a freight train and my appetite, though much diminished, hasn’t turned to ashes and nausea.

It’s true that my progress is slower, but I don’t have the fear I felt the first time.

I won’t lie and say I don’t have anxious moments. I always find my heart rate increases for a day or so after I inject, which tends to make me feel jumpy – like I’ve had too many coffees. But now I know this is normal and I’m no longer afraid of it.

I don’t know how much weight I’ve lost because I haven’t been weighing myself. I know how easy it is to become obsessed. But my clothes fit better. I’m a size 18-20 now and I certainly feel healthier.

I’ve kept up my strength training and the body scan they do at the gym has told me I’ve lost fat rather than muscle.

I have so much more energy because my mental health is better and I’m not consumed by shame about my body.

Even though for some people my current size would be a nightmare, for me it’s great.

I know I never want to go back to the darkness and fear I felt when I first took the jabs. And some might say I’m crazy to tempt fate. But, for now at least, I am proud of myself for finding a way through that has worked.

Rose’s new podcast, A Matter of Fat, co-hosted with obesity expert, Professor Giles Yeo MBE is out now

A Tennessee Wendy’s manager has been arrested after police said she tied a neurodivergent co-worker to a kitchen grill and claimed the act was part of a TikTok stunt.

Michiko Burton, 19, was charged Thursday and could face up to a year in jail over the alleged attempt to gain views online.

Burton, who has since been fired from the Murfreesboro fast-food restaurant, was not initially arrested because the worker was not injured. Police said she allegedly wrapped garbage bags around his leg before tying him to a grill.

The case moved forward after a colleague recorded a troubling video showing the worker restrained. The footage later came to light, prompting police to investigate further.

When questioned earlier this month, Burton told investigators that “the incident was part of a TikTok trend” and acknowledged tying the neurodivergent employee to a workstation, according to Murfreesboro police.

“The incident was referred to Adult Protective Services and investigated by detectives with the Special Victims Unit,” police said.

“The investigation led to warrants being obtained for Burton’s arrest.”

Burton faces charges of simple assault and false imprisonment, a misdemeanor offense that can carry a sentence of up to one year in jail.

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Wendy’s executives expressed outrage after seeing the video.

The chain’s area manager described Burton’s conduct as “unacceptable.”

“That is why Michi is not here anymore,” the area manager said. “Michi is no longer a manager for us.”

Nicholus Murphy, Burton’s former colleague and the person who recorded the video, also questioned her explanation of the incident.

“If there was a TikTok trend, then where’s the TikTok?” Murphy said.

Murphy said he believed he had a responsibility to defend his co-worker and bring attention to what happened.

“They deserve justice,” he said. “He deserves a person here having his back.”

“Doing the right thing is always the right thing to do.”

Around 20 percent of the global population is neurodivergent, according to the Neurodiversity Directory. The term is an umbrella designation that includes conditions such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia.