Charles Spencer’s Diana, My Sister has surfaced in vanities with John Crace’s digest of the memoir, and the timing is the point: Spencer says the 30th anniversary of the most tragic death in human history is approaching. He also says he wrote before someone like Amol Rajan could, making the book part timing play, part family reckoning.
Cape Town to London
Spencer says he was in Cape Town when he heard Diana had died, and that he was stunned. He adds that the first reports said she was merely slightly injured, before Prince Charles phoned and sounded giddily elated. On the plane back to London, Spencer says his thoughts moved to the funeral eulogy, the one part of the story he clearly treats as his own.
Raine and boarding schools
The memoir pushes a version of childhood that cuts against the familiar public portrait. Spencer says he and Diana were both the secure recipients of parental love, that they were more content when their parents separated, and that they were sent to boarding schools that thrived on neglect. He also says he and Diana adored the way their father was miserable for much of their lives, and that his later years were made still more miserable by marrying Raine.
That is the pressure point in the book. Spencer is not only revisiting Diana’s life; he is arguing that the public has misunderstood the emotional terms of that childhood, then tying that argument to his own authority as the brother who says he knew her well enough to tell the story.
Prince Charles and the eulogy
Spencer says Prince Charles told him, “Get in there,” and “Finally I can be left in peace with my top bit on the side.” He also says he thought he was the only person who could be entrusted with Diana’s eulogy, while also thinking Norman St John-Stevas had ruined his father’s service with crass middle-class antics. Those lines keep the memoir from reading like simple remembrance; they frame the royal family as the subject, not just the backdrop.
Spencer’s method is blunt: he says he could do with the money, he wanted to get in before someone like Amol Rajan did, and he presents the book as a last, self-aware turn before the anniversary crushes in. For readers, the practical takeaway is simple — the memoir is now part of the public record around Diana, and the open question is whether Spencer’s version of her childhood, and his account of the funeral, will harden into the dominant one or remain his challenge to it.
