Earl Spencer has alleged that King Charles sounded giddily elated when he telephoned him after Diana died in 1997. He said the call came during the chain of calls that followed the car crash on 31 August, 1997, and that his memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, is due next week.
Spencer wrote that the then-Prince Charles sounded like a “lottery winner” after the news. In the same account, he said a friend of Diana’s told him Charles had earlier described himself as “very happy to marry her, but… not actually in love with her” on the eve of the wedding in July 1981.
Earl Spencer in Cape Town
Spencer said he was at home in Cape Town, South Africa, when his sister Jane phoned to alert him to the car crash on 31 August, 1997. He wrote that Charles telephoned during the calls that followed and that the conversation confirmed Diana’s death.
He also said Charles told him he had informed Princes William and Harry of their mother’s death first thing that morning in their bedrooms at Balmoral. The memoir extract places the allegation almost 30 years after Diana’s death in Paris and returns the story to a moment that has remained intensely disputed within the family.
Buckingham Palace response
Buckingham Palace pushed back on Wednesday after an initial extract claimed Charles had said, “We’ll forget her soon enough.” A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said, “While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.”
The response did not address the broader memoir excerpt point by point, but it directly challenged the reliability of recollection after grief. That puts the book’s central allegation into a contest between Spencer’s memory of the call and the palace’s statement that memory can be altered by loss.
Swan Song next week
Swan Song: Diana, My Sister is due to be published next week, which means the dispute is likely to turn on the full text rather than the published extract. For now, the most immediate fact is that Spencer has put a specific accusation on the record, and Buckingham Palace has answered by questioning the certainty of memory almost 30 years later.
