Earl Spencer makes fresh claims as his upcoming memoir is due to the shelves this week, ITV News’ Philip Sime reports
Earl Spencer has said he felt it was his “duty… as an eyewitness to history” to write a new memoir chronicling the life of his sister, Princess Diana, which has included a series of damning claims about the King.
The earl spoke about his motivations for writing the book in an interview with the BBC, which aired on Sunday.
He said: “I’m aware of mortality and I wanted to just put things down once and for all that were true.
“This is not a threat, it’s a fact, I know lots of things about the King which I chose not to include in the book because they were not relevant”, he added.
The interview came after he accused the King of gaslighting him following Buckingham Palace’s push back against explosive claims that Charles said “we’ll forget her soon enough” after Diana, Princess of Wales, died.
In response to the claims made in the memoir, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said on Wednesday: “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 earl called the palace’s response a “rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote”, The Mail on Sunday reported.
He said: “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King.
“It was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the King being able to deny what I’d said.
“I also thought it was a rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote, which was a much more elegant way of putting things, but in these circumstances entirely out of place.”
In the interview with the BBC, the earl also spoke about his nephews – Princes William and Harry.
While he did not take sides, he said he hoped the dispute between the brothers would be “resolved”.
“I hope one day it’s resolved, but I don’t know all – I certainly don’t know what’s been done in the finer detail and so I would feel intrusive if I got more involved than to say of course a mother would want her two sons to be happy together and love each other,” he said.
The earl spoke on the press’s coverage of Harry and Meghan as having a “cancerous influence”, adding it would be “beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example”.
He said: “If you look at an article in a tabloid about Diana or the couple that you were mentioning, Harry and Meghan, you know, they can be really, really unpleasant.
“And I think it would be really beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example.
“I’m not here to speak for Harry and Meghan, but for anyone who’s being destroyed in this way daily, it must be such a cancerous influence in their life.”
The earl said Diana was “really brought low” by the “criticism” she received from the media, adding it was a “pity” to see “echoes of that” in the press coverage of Harry and Meghan.
The Sussexes, who returned to the UK from the US on August 26, have long been critical of their treatment by the media, with Harry in 2021 telling Oprah Winfrey the tabloid press had created a “toxic environment”.
In July, he and six others, including Sir Elton John and Liz Hurley, lost a privacy case against the publisher of the Daily Mail, but Harry has previously won legal battles against the Mirror Group and News Group.
Also in the interview, the earl insisted he is “telling the truth” and described the King’s comments about his sister as “monstrous”.
Speaking about an alleged row over Diana’s funeral arrangements involving her sons, the earl claimed: “(The King) went ballistic, would be the right term, 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.
“And then he stopped, and I thought, ‘Oh now he’s going to pull himself together and say something more appropriate’.
“And then he said, ‘We’ll forget her soon enough’.”
Asked whether he has “evidence” of the King’s alleged comments, the earl told the BBC: “I told friends and family straight away, close friends and family, about what had been said, because it was so monstrous.”
He added: “I’m telling the truth.”
It’s claimed Charles made the comments about his ex-wife in a row with the earl over whether the then Prince William and Prince Harry should follow Diana’s funeral cortege.
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