Four Copies of Charles Spencer’s Diana Book Vanish Days Before Release

Four copies of Charles Spencer’s highly anticipated book about Princess Diana have been stolen from a lorry in the Netherlands, just days before its contents are due to begin appearing in the Daily Mail.

Charles Spencer will publish Swan Song: Diana, My Sister on September 22, offering his most personal account yet of his life with Diana and the turbulent week following her death in August 1997. Advance reports say the book also revisits her troubled marriage to the then Prince Charles.

According to reports, a lorry carrying thousands of copies from a central European printing plant stopped overnight in a rural Dutch lay-by, where someone broke into it. Rather than stealing boxes of potentially valuable stock, the thieves reportedly took just four black-wrapped copies of Swan Song. Dutch police are investigating.  

And yes, four copies is oddly specific.

The Netherlands Has Been Here Before

‘It’s extremely suspicious,’ one publishing source said last night. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened before. This is probably the biggest book of the year and the security surrounding it has been incredibly tight.

Daily Mail

The circumstances are oddly similar to another publishing controversy involving the Netherlands. In 2023, the Dutch publisher withdrew Omid Scobie’s Endgame after passages in the Dutch edition named King Charles and Kate Middleton in connection with alleged conversations about Prince Archie’s skin colour. The English edition omitted the names. Translator Saskia Peeters said she translated the material she received, while Scobie later said the publisher had received an earlier manuscript. The publisher disputed his account of how the editorial process unfolded.

Prince Harry’s Spare also broke its strict publication embargo in 2023, although that happened in Spain rather than the Netherlands. Booksellers accidentally put copies on sale early, allowing British newspapers to obtain and translate them before the official release and generate days of headlines in advance.

There is currently no evidence connecting Buckingham Palace, the British press or intelligence services to the theft. At this stage, the only established fact is that Dutch police are investigating a break-in in which four copies disappeared. Still, the timing could hardly generate more intrigue.

Yet, these “mysterious” leaks keep happening in the same jurisdiction, involving the same publishing pipeline, and conveniently produce advance material for the British tabloids. Nobody investigating these incidents ever seems to find the culprit.

Diana’s Story Has Always Been Fought Through Books

The anxiety surrounding what Spencer might reveal also carries an uncomfortable historical echo.

Long before critics accused Prince Harry of “attacking his family” with Spare, Charles worked extensively with Jonathan Dimbleby on his authorised 1994 biography, The Prince of Wales. The biography presented Charles’s account of an unhappy childhood, his strained relationship with his parents and the breakdown of his marriage to Diana. It followed his televised admission that he had committed adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles after, he claimed, his marriage to Diana had “irretrievably broken down.”

Diana subsequently gave her explosive Panorama interview in 1995, during an already public war over competing versions of their marriage.  

Nearly three decades after her death, that battle over Diana’s story clearly is not finished. Spencer has said he wants Swan Song to correct misconceptions about his sister and preserve who she was for a generation that never knew her. The publisher promises an account spanning their childhood, her royal marriage and the devastating week of her death.  

Four missing books may turn out to be nothing more than an opportunistic theft. But when the cargo contains Charles Spencer’s long-awaited account of Diana, even four copies are enough to start people wondering who was so desperate to read it first.