Earl Spencer Says King Charles ‘Gaslit’ Him Over His Diana Claim

• Earl Spencer says King Charles told him “We’ll forget her soon enough” on a phone call days after Princess Diana died in 1997.
• Buckingham Palace answered that “fraternal grief can cloud reason.” Spencer now says he has been “gaslit by the King.”
• The claim is in his memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, out from Penguin on Tuesday, Sept. 22.

Earl Spencer is not backing down, and on Sunday he raised the temperature again.

“It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King,” Princess Diana’s brother told The Mail on Sunday on Sept. 20, days after Buckingham Palace questioned his memory of a call with King Charles in 1997.

Two days earlier, the BBC had aired his first on-camera interview about it, recorded with Laura Kuenssberg at Althorp, the Northamptonshire estate where Diana is buried.

What does Earl Spencer say King Charles said about Diana?

That in the days after Diana’s death, during an argument over whether Prince William and Prince Harry should walk behind her coffin, the then Prince of Wales lost his temper on the phone.

He went ballistic, would be the right term, and started really going for my family as a whole about their sense of duty not being adequate enough. And then he said, ‘We’ll forget her soon enough.’

Earl Spencer, to Laura Kuenssberg, BBC

Spencer told Kuenssberg his answer was “I cannot believe you just said that,” and that he hung up. He says it was one of only two phone calls he has ever had with Charles, which is why he remembers it word for word.

Asked for evidence, he said he told close friends and family “straight away,” because it was “so monstrous.”

What did Buckingham Palace say?

The palace released a statement on Wednesday, Sept. 16. It did not deny the words. It questioned the memory behind them.

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.

Buckingham Palace spokesman

That is the line Spencer calls “astonishingly provocative and below the belt,” because, he says, it accuses him of lying “without the King being able to deny what I’d said.”

He also called it “a rather poor imitation” of “recollections may vary,” the phrase Queen Elizabeth II used in March 2021 to answer Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. Harry is covered in depth in our story on his family’s move back to the U.K.

What happened at Princess Diana’s funeral?

Diana died in a car crash in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997. Her funeral at Westminster Abbey was on Sept. 6. William, then 15, and Harry, 12, walked behind the coffin with their father, their grandfather Prince Philip and Spencer.

That walk is what the phone call was about. Spencer has said before that he opposed it.

In another excerpt from the book, he describes Harry as “tiny, and slight, and bereft,” and writes that on the train to Althorp after the service he was worried at “the lack of obvious care” for his nephew.

Spencer gave the eulogy at the Abbey that day, the speech that promised Diana’s “blood family” would help raise her sons.

Swan Song covers the siblings’ childhood and their parents’ divorce, Diana’s marriage and work, and the week she died. It is published on Tuesday. More from Royals, and everything on Prince Harry.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: Earl Spencer interview with Laura Kuenssberg, BBC (excerpt released Sept. 18, 2026); The Mail on Sunday (Sept. 20); Buckingham Palace statement (Sept. 16); Penguin (publication of Swan Song: Diana, My Sister); Daily Mail (book serialization); Hello! (Faye James). Photos: frames from BBC News, Earl Spencer defends Diana book claims about King Charles, and The Royal Family, The King’s Christmas Broadcast 2025.