We don't cover a lot of royal family news here at Hot Air but this one seemed interesting. Princess Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, just published a book titled "Swan Song: Diana My Sister" offering his thoughts on his sister's life as well as events that happened after her death. The book is all over the news in the UK, especially because of some claims it makes about the behavior of then-Prince Charles and his reactions to Diana's death in a couple of phone conversations.
At first, Charles sounded “giddily elated — like a lottery winner, I remember thinking at the time,” the earl says. Perhaps, he writes, the prince was thinking about “now being free to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not” — a reference to the prince’s longtime companion, Camilla Parker Bowles, now Queen Camilla.
Worse was to come when the two argued over the funeral arrangements. Though the royal family had effectively excommunicated Diana after the divorce, the earl writes, it “felt entitled to take the lead” in planning the event; the Spencers “were simply expected to fall in line.”
He says that when Prince Charles learned that he objected to the plan cooked up by the royal family to have Princes Harry and William, then 12 and 15, walk behind their mother’s coffin as it approached Westminster Abbey, Charles telephoned him in a rage...
“That’s the problem with your family. They’ve got no bloody sense of duty!” Earl Spencer says Charles — whom he describes as a “bellowing buffoon” — told him...
At the end of his outburst, Charles turned his attention back to Diana, the book says. “‘Rest assured,’ he hissed,” Earl Spencer writes. “‘We’ll forget her soon enough!’” The earl hung up the phone after that, he says.
Richard Kay, who writes for the Daily Mail, published a response arguing that Spencer's account of those conversations "rings true."
He told me about the thousands of letters that had come by the sackload from all over the world. Then, pointedly and without further explanation, he said everyone he had been dealing with over the funeral – courtiers, officials, Downing Street – had been helpful, with one exception.
Who, I asked? ‘Prince Charles,’ came the reply.
He said they’d had a ‘furious row’. It was ‘about the boys’, but he was reluctant to go further. Cuttingly he added: ‘He has been utterly pathetic.’
So that's a contemporaneous account that seems to back up that Prince Charles and Earl Spencer were fighting at the time, just as he described in the book.
But Piers Morgan is also mentioned in the book and he says the story about him is completely false and that he plans to commence legal action to try to force the book to be withdrawn and pulped. Earl Spencer has already admitted that one claim he made about Morgan in the book was false but has doubled down on his other claims about a phone call that happened the same week he had his fight with Prince Charles. Morgan is pointing to the discrepancy to argue that Spencer's account of 30-year-old phone calls shouldn't be trusted.
Here's an ITV News report featuring an interview with Piers Morgan.
Finally, here's what Earl Spencer is saying about that error and about the rest of the claims in his book (which he stands behind).
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