Palace Says Grief May Have “Coloured” Earl Spencer’s Memory After He Claims King Charles Said “We’ll Forget Diana Soon Enough”

Nearly 30 years after Princess Diana’s death, King Charles is once again facing questions about how he spoke about his former wife behind closed doors.

The Daily Mail had already secured an exclusive serialisation of Swan Song and began publishing authorised extracts before the book’s September 22 release. Days earlier, thieves broke into a lorry in the Netherlands and stole four copies. Nothing links that theft to the Mail’s serialisation.

In his forthcoming memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, Charles Spencer claims the then Prince of Wales told him, “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough,” during a furious phone call in the days after Diana died.

According to Spencer, the argument centred on whether Prince William and Prince Harry, then just 15 and 12, should walk behind their mother’s coffin at her funeral. Spencer says he objected, insisting Diana would never have wanted her sons subjected to such a public ordeal. Charles reportedly invoked his own experience walking behind Lord Mountbatten’s coffin, only for Spencer to point out that Charles had been 30 at the time.  

Spencer writes that Charles then launched into what he interpreted as “pent-up contempt” for Diana before allegedly making the remark that stunned him into ending the call.

Buckingham Palace has now taken the unusual step of responding and responding fast. A spokesman 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.’

BBC

That statement is striking for what it does not say. The Palace did not simply state that Charles never made the remark. Instead, it questioned the reliability of Spencer’s memory by pointing to his grief. For a family supposedly governed by “never complain, never explain,” that is quite an explanation.

Diana Was Supposed to Fade Away

If Spencer’s account is accurate, history has delivered a brutal answer to Charles’s alleged prediction. Diana was not forgotten.

Almost three decades after her death, books about her still dominate headlines. Her clothes still draw crowds. Documentaries revisit her life. Her sons continue to speak about her influence. Even the monarchy’s treatment of women who came after her is routinely viewed through the shadow of what happened to Diana. And let’s not forget her daughter-in-law, the current Princess of Wales, who has repeatedly worn looks compared to Diana’s, giving the press endless opportunities for headlines about Kate Middleton “channelling Diana.”

That may be the most enduring irony of all. Diana could have remained one of the monarchy’s greatest assets had the institution found a way to accommodate the qualities that made her popular: emotional openness, accessibility and an instinctive ability to connect with people.

Instead, she became something far more difficult for the institution to control: a permanent symbol of its failures. The comparison with Meghan Sussex is also difficult to ignore. Different women, different circumstances, different eras, but the same underlying problem remains. When a woman inside or adjacent to the monarchy becomes more culturally powerful than the institution expects, the relationship appears to turn adversarial rather than adaptive.

The Media Helped Rehabilitate Charles and Camilla

What happened after Diana’s death also matters when assessing Spencer’s claim. Less than two years later, Charles and Camilla made their carefully managed public debut as a couple outside London’s Ritz Hotel. The 1999 appearance became known as Operation Ritz, a PR exercise designed to introduce Camilla publicly and begin normalising the relationship.

The symbolism was distastefully striking. Diana had died after leaving the Ritz in Paris in 1997. By January 1999, another Ritz provided the backdrop for Charles and Camilla’s first orchestrated appearance as a couple. That moment formed part of a much wider effort to rehabilitate Camilla’s image and reshape public perceptions of Charles’s failed marriage.

Even the British press has documented that campaign. ITV described Operation Ritz as a carefully planned public debut, while the Daily Mail later published Tom Bower’s allegation that Charles and Camilla sought to portray Diana as a “scheming hysteric” as Camilla’s image was rebuilt. In 2002, The Guardian reported that Charles privately funded two security officers for Camilla, though the Palace declined to confirm it. If that report was accurate, Charles privately funded Camilla’s protection. He also gives Andrew an annual allowance that includes money for private security, while Harry lost automatic police protection and has spent years fighting RAVEC over his family’s safety.

Harry later revealed in Spare that after he moved out of Clarence House, Camilla turned his former bedroom into her dressing room. “I tried not to care. But especially the first time I saw it, I cared,” he wrote.

Taken together, those details show how thoroughly Charles’s private and public life was reorganised around Camilla while the institution and sections of the media were simultaneously working to remake her image.

One 2018 Daily Mail headline was particularly blunt, describing an alleged effort to portray Diana as a “scheming hysteric” while Camilla fought to win public acceptance. Years earlier, in 2012, Amanda Platell wrote another extraordinary headline in the same newspaper: “The firm has won. Diana’s been erased from history.”

Diana has not been erased, and at this point she looks destined to remain as enduring a historical figure as Anne Boleyn. What those headlines do show is that the battle over Diana’s reputation continued long after her death, while Charles and Camilla benefited from a sustained PR campaign, amplified by sections of the media, to reposition their relationship in the public imagination.

That history gives Spencer’s allegation added weight as a matter worth examining, even though his account remains his recollection of a private conversation.

And it makes Buckingham Palace’s response all the more interesting. Rather than denying Spencer’s account outright, the Palace chose to question his memory. It is a familiar tactic. When Harry and Meghan said a member of the Royal Family had raised concerns about their unborn child’s skin colour, Buckingham Palace responded on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II that “some recollections may vary.” In both cases, the institution avoided a direct denial and instead cast doubt on the recollections of the person making the allegation.

The Funeral Procession Still Matters

Spencer’s objection to William and Harry walking behind Diana’s coffin also gains weight from what Harry himself later said. In 2017, Harry described the experience of walking behind his mother’s coffin at 12 while thousands watched in person and millions watched on television. He said no child should have been asked to do it “under any circumstances.”

Spencer had already said publicly that he opposed the plan and believed royal officials misled him into thinking William and Harry wanted to participate. He described the procession as the most horrifying half-hour of his life and said it must have been vastly worse for the two boys.  

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There is also an uncomfortable historical context around the decision. Alastair Campbell’s published diaries said St James’s Palace feared Charles could face hostility from the public during the procession unless William and Harry walked with him.

That does not prove Spencer’s new account of the phone call. But it does make his objection to placing two grieving boys in that procession look more like a concern he genuinely held at the time.