Earl Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, finally hit shelves today after weeks of serialisation in the press.
Beneath the headlines is a deeply personal read in which he talks about Diana’s childhood, her relationship with the media, and a side of her the public never saw.
From the start, Earl Spencer paints a picture of an inseparable bond between himself and the late Princess of Wales, in stark contrast to their older sisters, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale.
He writes: “We [Charles and Diana] were both, by this stage, at different, single-sex boarding schools. Our school holidays saw us remain together, with each parent.
“Meanwhile Sarah and Jane came in and out of our lives: being that much older, they were allowed to choose which parent they saw, when they wished. We both envied them this freedom.”
Elsewhere, Earl Spencer revealed a slightly clumsy side to Princess Diana that many royal fans may not have realised, with one incident in the 1970s resulting in a train crash.
He penned: “Diana and I would take the overnight train, the ‘sleeper’, together, from London to Scotland. Once we were in a train crash, in one of Glasgow’s stations, that was serious enough to garner a mention on the BBC’s evening news bulletin. The wall mirror in our compartment shattered when another engine hit our stationary train at speed, and Diana received a nasty cut in her scalp that required stitches.
“Another time, while my mother was away from Ardencaple for the day, Diana accidentally sliced deep into her hand while carving some cold pork that had been left in the fridge for our lunch. The hospital and stitches were again required.”
Earl Charles Spencer’s forthcoming book, titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, is scheduled for release on September 22 | PENGUIN
Deeply personal revelations have also come to light, including the late Princess’s weight struggles; Diana famously opened up about suffering from an eating disorder during her 1995 Panorama interview.
The Earl said: “Diana was often, as teenagers can be, worried about her weight, which she monitored on the scales in our shared bathroom. Her concerns were not helped by the catering packs of Mars bars and chocolate biscuits that my mother stocked in Ardencaple’s chock-full larder. We grazed on these, daily.
“Having no sports clothes, Diana would sometimes run down the drive and beyond, in raincoat and boots, to expend calories. In the summer, she might dip in the extremely cold sea – it never reached 15 degrees C and was often a much lower temperature – hoping this would also, as she would say, ‘burn off some fat’.”
How Princes William and Harry will feel about these details coming to light raises questions; both Kensington Palace and the Duke of Sussex’s spokesman have so far declined to comment on the several revelations. Sources close to GB News claimed last week that Prince Harry had not read the book prior to its release. Earl Spencer told People: “I can say that Harry is completely fine about it. He said, I hope there’s nothing embarrassing about him in it. I said, ‘There isn’t’.”
Earl Spencer additionally laid out his reasoning for writing a book: “In some ways, the aim of this book is to tell the truth about Diana from her brother’s perspective, just as I attempted to do when speaking at her funeral. She deserves my best efforts, in the face of so much invention and lazy half-truth out there.
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The deeply personal revelations and fallouts between family members are likely to cut the relationship between the Windsors and the Spencers forever into two camps
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“I have never read a biography of Diana, but the snippets that have come to me in bite-sized form via newspapers have never chimed with what I knew and know. They have all been notable for their inaccuracy. So, why write this now?
“With the thirtieth anniversary of Diana’s death in view, I was again declining endless, repeated requests to appear in documentaries about her – from, to name just a few, a nephew, from Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton, and from Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell – and I thought, You know what?
“Rather than even contemplate being a talking head in a production that will follow the usual flawed lines, with an agenda set by some TV producer I will never meet, or by a network I will never watch, I am going to tell things how I remember them, lay them down for good, once and for all.”
While it is believable that Earl Spencer was asked to appear in various documentaries on Princess Diana, though neither the Duke of Sussex’s aides nor Kensington Palace have commented on the “nephew” claim, it will be hard for monarchists to not view this move as a cash grab.
The Earl himself addressed this critique during his BBC interview, where rather than defending the millions he stands to make, he pivoted back to his core defence, stating that writing the book was his “duty as an eyewitness to history”.
The book does contain several interesting anecdotes about the current monarch, King Charles III, which will undoubtedly cause a stir at Buckingham Palace.
Earl Spencer wrote: “Another of Diana’s revelations I found even stranger. Apparently, Prince Philip had learnt that the Queen was contemplating the possibility of having Prince Charles’s ears pinned back a little by a doctor; their protrusion had led to him being teased at school and mocked in the media.
“Philip not only stopped the medical procedure from being considered further, but he also had one of the Queen’s corgis’ ears operated on. This was to serve as some sort of lasting reminder of a plan that Prince Philip had decided was ridiculous for its softness and vanity.
“While I have no idea if these disturbing tales were true, Diana believed them. They evidently made her feel both desperately sad for, and fiercely protective of, Prince Charles, even though he was a dozen years her senior.”
There is no way of verifying these accounts, as both Queen Elizabeth II and the late Duke of Edinburgh have died over the past five years. But how will they make the King, or his two sons, feel?
It could be the case that Earl Spencer has a personal gripe with King Charles; after all, the then-Prince of Wales did divorce the Earl’s sister in 1996 and, during the planning of her funeral, strongly disagreed with him over whether William and Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin.
Buckingham Palace issued the following statement last week as the book began to be serialised in The Mail: “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.”
Earl Spencer has concluded he has no relationship with the monarch, despite referring to him as “my king” and believing in the monarchy as a whole. Ultimately, both men will have a relationship with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex, as well as their children. If Diana had lived to see this fallout, likely, she would not have appreciated old wounds being reopened after three decades.
Would I recommend royal fans buy the book? As Earl Spencer says, the accounts frame him as an “eyewitness to history”, and lots of lovely anecdotes about Diana made the cut.
But the deeply personal revelations and fallouts between family members are likely to cut the relationship between the Windsors and the Spencers forever into two camps.
