“It Was Barbaric”: Charles Spencer’s CBS Interview on Diana, Harry, and the Royal Family

Nearly three decades after Princess Diana’s funeral, her brother Charles Spencer says he still cannot forget the sight of two young boys walking behind their mother’s coffin.

“He was so young. He was also so tiny,” Spencer says of Prince Harry, then 12. “I remember walking beside him and thinking, ‘This little boy shouldn’t have to walk behind his mother’s coffin.’”

In an interview with CBS, Spencer revisits that day and makes a striking allegation about how it came together. He says he was told William and Harry wanted to walk behind the coffin. He now believes he was lied to.

“I didn’t agree to it. I was told they wanted to do it, and I believe I was lied to,” he says. Asked whether the palace deliberately misled him, Spencer is direct: “That’s it.”

Asked whether he had discussed the matter with William and Harry, Spencer declines to reveal their private conversations. “I never discuss what I’ve discussed with William and Harry,” he says, “but I know the truth from all angles, I can put it that way.”

Spencer believes another reason the boys were pushed to participate was to shield Charles from a hostile public reaction, an account that is supported by Alastair Campbell’s contemporary diaries.

“There was a concern that if he walked alone behind Diana’s coffin … that he would be insulted by people in the crowd,” Spencer says, citing politicians involved at the time. “That couldn’t possibly happen if the boys walked behind, because their presence would protect him.” When he first learned of the plan, Spencer says he thought it was “such an absurd idea” that it simply would not happen. “I thought it was barbaric,” he says. “And most importantly, I knew Diana wouldn’t want them to.”

Campbell recorded Palace discussions acknowledging that William’s presence would reduce the risk of Charles being publicly attacked and that officials continued pressing for the teenager to walk.

A Difficult Call With Charles

Spencer also describes a heated phone conversation with Charles in the days after Diana’s death. He says he was adamant the boys should not walk behind the coffin, while Charles “had a bit of a rant, saying that my family didn’t understand the meaning of duty.”

Then, Spencer says, Charles made a remark he has never forgotten. Speaking of Diana, Charles said, “We’ll forget her soon enough.”

“He said it — I can’t really recreate it — but it was said with a bit of a hiss, to be honest,” Spencer recalls. “And I said, ‘I can’t believe you said that.’ And I hung up.”

The exchange made the funeral day awkward, he adds, when the two men had to sit in the same room. “It was very shocking, really.”

Spencer also revisits his claim that Charles sounded “giddy” or upbeat during an earlier call about funeral arrangements. “She had just been killed and he sounded upbeat,” Spencer says. He speculates in his book that Charles may have felt free to pursue Camilla, but he is careful to label it speculation. “I can’t say what he was thinking,” he says. “But I’m trying to think, why would somebody feel giddy at that time?”

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“I Blame the Media”

On the cause of Diana’s death, Spencer does not hesitate. “I blame the media,” he says, while acknowledging that the driver had been drinking. “If she wasn’t so interesting to the tabloids, she wouldn’t have been pursued into a tunnel by paparazzi and killed.”

He says senior media figures have privately conceded responsibility. One told him, he recalls: “We know we killed her, but we didn’t need you saying it in the pulpit at her funeral.”

That pulpit reference is to Spencer’s eulogy at Westminster Abbey, where he pledged that Diana’s “blood family” would protect William and Harry. He says the speech had three aims: protecting the boys, pointing to the “shocking circumstances” of her death, and celebrating “an incredible life.” He also used the moment to say he had always believed the media would kill her.

“I had been very worried about her personal safety for some time,” he says, describing paparazzi swarms so aggressive that Diana would have to pull out of a road blind. “She had no protection at this stage of her life. No bodyguards. It was just all so dangerous.”

A Queen Britain Never Had

Spencer believes Diana would have made a remarkable monarch. “I think Diana would have been a really amazing queen,” he says. “She’d not only have excelled in the role, but she’d have done so much for this country.” He cites her “natural glamour, and joy, and humour”, qualities, he argues, that would have made her a “superstar” in the role.

Instead, he says, she became “the victim of her own popularity” inside the royal household. Asked whether the establishment worked against her, Spencer points to “the men in gray suits”, royal aides, and says he does not know about malice, “but I do know about jealousy.”

Diana, he notes, was engaged at 19 and married at 20. “Nobody could have foreseen what royal world Diana was entering, because she broke the mould when she entered it.” By the end of her wedding, watched by an estimated 750 million people, “something ignited in the public consciousness about her.”

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“An Insecure Little Girl Underneath the Crown”

For all her global fame, Spencer says his sister remained profoundly unsure of herself. “There was a very insecure little girl underneath the crown,” he says, citing childhood learning difficulties and eating disorders. She read tabloids against advice and, he believes, absorbed their criticism. “If she had believed what she read, she was, at best, controversial, and perhaps unpopular.”

He thinks she would have been “absolutely astonished” by the outpouring after her death. Even now, he says, the effort to diminish her continues: at the church at Sandringham where she was baptised, the guidebook makes no mention of her. “The most interesting thing that ever happened in that church was Diana being baptised there,” he says. A docent told him, “We’re not allowed to say.”

Harry, William, and a Brother’s Duty

Spencer says he understands why Harry distrusts the press. “How your parents are treated, and particularly if it ends in tragedy, is going to sear into the soul of any child.” Of the rift between the brothers, he will say only: “It’s very sad when siblings fall out. It doesn’t matter whether you’re royal or not.”

He confirms he has no personal relationship with Charles today. “He came into my life as a brother-in-law, and that relationship ended,” he says. “He’s still my king. I respect the crown. But there’s no personal relationship.”

He denies bitterness. “I’m not a vengeful, resentful person. I’m just an eyewitness of history.”

As for the book, Spencer says he hopes it reconnects older readers with the Diana they remember and introduces her to those born after her death.

“It’s my contribution to Diana’s legacy, to, as her brother, do this for her,” he says. “It’s literally that. It’s a brother’s duty.”