A former communications secretary to the King has pushed back against Earl Spencer’s explosive claim that the then Prince of Wales dismissed Diana’s memory before her funeral, saying the monarch was “absolutely emphatic” that staff should never criticise the late princess.
Julian Payne’s defence comes after the Earl alleged in his new memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, that Charles had told him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough” during a heated telephone exchange ahead of the 1997 funeral.
Buckingham Palace took the highly unusual step of issuing a formal response on Wednesday, stating: “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.”
Payne served as director of communications for the then Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall over a five-year period beginning in 2016, a role that saw him working closely with the future King around the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death.
A former communications secretary to the King has pushed back against Earl Spencer’s explosive claim that the then Prince of Wales dismissed Diana’s memory before her funeral, saying the monarch was “absolutely emphatic” that staff should never criticise the late princess.
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Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said he did not recognise “the way the King is being characterised in those remarks”.
During the summer of 2017, he recalled, Diana came up repeatedly in discussions owing to the intensity of media coverage surrounding the anniversary.
“What I remember was he was very clear that there was never to be any criticism, never to be any pushback on the narratives that were usually highly critical of him,” Payne said.
He stressed that the King’s protective instinct was directed entirely towards Diana’s legacy rather than his own reputation: “That was absolutely about the late Princess and her memory, so it seems to me very odd that in the moment itself, with the grief of his family and his own shock, that he would choose that moment to use those words. It’s just not language that I recognise.”
According to Spencer’s account, the confrontation erupted during a disagreement over whether Princes William and Harry, aged 15 and 12 at the time, should walk behind their mother’s coffin during the funeral procession on 6 September 1997.
The Earl claims that Charles cited his own experience of walking in the funeral procession of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, to which Spencer responded that Charles had been 30 years old on that occasion. This, he alleges, caused the Prince to go “nuts”.
“Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting. Then he stopped,” Spencer writes in the memoir.
“I assumed the pause signalled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. ‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough.'”
The Earl claims that Charles cited his own experience of walking in the funeral procession of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, to which Spencer responded that Charles had been 30 years old on that occasion.
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A source with close ties to the King dismissed the alleged remark as “just not in his nature and it certainly wasn’t in his nature at that time, when he was a man absolutely grief-stricken”.
The same source described Charles as having been “paralysed with grief” in the aftermath of Diana’s death, noting that he had broken with established protocol to ensure she was given a full state-style ceremonial funeral.
The portrait painted by those around the King stands in stark contrast to Spencer’s depiction of a man consumed by resentment towards his former wife at the very moment the nation was united in mourning.
Payne offered an explanation for why the Palace had chosen to respond publicly, saying: “This is a much more personal situation, given its author, and therefore has a greater ability to do harm.”