A deeply personal memoir by Earl Charles Spencer about his late sister, Princess Diana, has gone on sale across Britain and beyond, days after serialised extracts sent shockwaves through the monarchy with explosive claims concerning King Charles III.
Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, a 384-page account billed as chronicling Diana’s life from her younger brother’s perspective, was published by Penguin on Tuesday in several English-speaking countries and translated into 12 languages for wider release. It arrives almost three decades after Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997.
Extracts published last week in the Daily Mail triggered sensational headlines, with Spencer alleging that the then Prince of Wales told him by telephone shortly after Diana’s death: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.” He also claimed Charles had “sounded giddily elated, like a lottery winner” at the news of her death.
Buckingham Palace issued a rare rebuttal from the 77-year-old King, stating: “His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.”
But Spencer stood by his account in an interview with the BBC, insisting: “Those are exactly the words he said. I don’t hear (Charles) saying he didn’t say that.” He later told The Mail on Sunday: “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the king.”
‘Cheering From The Rafters’
Spencer, 62, a former US television journalist who inherited the family’s Althorp estate where Diana is buried, said he wrote the book to correct “untruths that have become accepted over time”. He told The Mail on Sunday that “Diana would be cheering from the rafters at this book”.
Among the memoir’s other claims, Spencer alleges Diana at times contemplated suicide during her tumultuous 1981–1996 marriage to Charles, once driving to a notorious clifftop in southern England where people had deliberately fallen to their deaths, but that her love for her sons “stopped her from going further”.
He also writes that Diana felt “revulsion” for Mohamed Al-Fayed, father of her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, who was also killed in the Paris crash, alleging the late Harrods owner had groped her and made sexually suggestive comments.
Spencer further claims Charles “went ballistic” after he insisted Diana would not have wanted her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry — then aged 15 and 12 — to walk behind her coffin at her funeral.
Shoppers Weigh In
At a bookshop in central London, self-described Diana fan Mary Scheible, 69, from the United States, told AFP she wanted to read the full account before forming a judgement. “What I’ve seen are sentences taken maybe out of context. So I want to read the book to get the full story and then make my opinion,” she said.
Despite the intense publicity, the memoir sat only 12th on Amazon UK’s non-fiction bestseller list on Tuesday.
Royal experts have questioned some of the book’s claims. Biographer Robert Hardman wrote on X that he witnessed Charles “distraught and in tears” — rather than elated — at Diana’s funeral, while Andrew Morton, author of the 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, described Spencer’s account of the phone call as “incendiary and disputed” in The Times. Royal commentator Jennie Bond told the BBC the memoir was “vindictive”.
Diana’s death at just 36 sparked an outpouring of grief across Britain and beyond for the woman dubbed “the people’s princess”, and triggered accusations that the then Queen Elizabeth II failed to respond swiftly with empathy. After Diana’s death, Charles married his long-time mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, who is now Queen.
Spencer, who delivered a raw eulogy at Diana’s funeral in which he vowed to always look out for her two sons and accused the media of having “blood on their hands”, has said the memoir is his attempt to set the record straight.
