Earl Spencer has claimed his incendiary allegations about the King following the death of Princess Diana will ‘not be a surprise’ to Prince William and Prince Harry.
The earl today suggested that he had informed the two brothers in the past that Charles remarked during a row over her funeral that their mother would soon be forgotten.
The brothers are understood not to have been aware of the contents of Earl Spencer’s forthcoming memoir about his sister, which include the King’s reported comments.
In an interview with the BBC‘s Laura Kuenssberg, he said: ‘I don’t like to talk about what I’ve been speaking about to William and Harry, but this will not be a surprise to them.
‘I will tell you that these words will not be a surprise to them.’
The Royal Family is reeling from a string of explosive claims in the memoir – entitled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – after extracts were exclusively published by the Mail last week.
Earl Spencer’s incendiary claim that – days after Diana’s 1997 death – the then Prince Charles told him: ‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough’ provoked a highly unusual response from the Palace.
The Prince of Wales’s alleged comment was made during a blistering row with the earl over whether Princes William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12, should walk in their mother’s funeral procession.
But in a statement, a Palace spokesman last week questioned the veracity of Earl Spencer’s explosive account and said that fraternal grief can ‘cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory’.
Earl Spencer has claimed he had an explosive row with Charles after suggesting that he was uncomfortable with Harry and William, then both children, walking behind their mother’s coffin in the funeral procession, which led to Charles attacking his family’s sense of duty.
He told the BBC today that evidence of his argument with Charles – and his reaction to his alleged comments – was actually contained within his famous eulogy at Diana’s funeral.
The earl today suggested that he had informed the two brothers in the past that Charles remarked during a row over her funeral that their mother would soon be forgotten
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Earl Spencer said: ‘I don’t like to talk about what I’ve been speaking about to William and Harry, but this will not be a surprise to them.’
As well as his notorious remarks that Diana’s ‘blood family’ would ensure her sons were protected, his eulogy also included the line: ‘Above all, we give thanks for the life of a woman I’m so proud to be able to call my sister: the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds.’
Earl Spencer said today of his explosive row with the future king on the eve of the funeral: ‘You can see evidence of that conversation in the final eulogy.
‘I really stress Diana’s sense of duty – duty comes across very clearly in the eulogy, and then it culminates in something which I think really underlines the truth of my assertion here.
‘If you get to the final bit of my eulogy, it is that her fantastic qualities “will never be extinguished from our minds”.
‘It was a direct rebuttal of “we’ll forget her soon enough”.’
The early also had to deny that he was making a threat against the King when he suggested that he had more unflattering material which he chose not to use in his book.
He said: ‘I have a duty as an eyewitness to history. I’m aware of mortality and I wanted to just put things down once and for all that were true.
‘This is not a threat, it’s a fact, I know lots of things about the King which I chose not to include in the book because they were not relevant.’
Challenged that his remarks did, in fact, sound a bit like a threat, he continued: ‘No, it’s not at all a threat. It’s just the reality. I want to give the context of what I said and what I didn’t say, I’m not threatening.
‘I’m not a salacious writer on any level, but if I was a salacious writer and wanted to write that sort of thing, I have plenty of other things I could have said, and really have no interest in doing so.’
Earl Spencer later claimed he had no intention of making any further claims about the Royal Family, saying: ‘That’s it. That’s me done.’
Earl Spencer has accused King Charles of ‘gaslighting’ him over the suggestion his memoir is ‘clouded by grief’
He has claimed that in the days after Diana’s death, the then Prince Charles told him ‘we’ll forget her soon enough’
Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed in Saint-Tropez, France, on August 22, 1997 – just days before they died
Describing his account of the first of two phone conversations with Charles following Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997, he told the BBC: ‘I felt there was a sort of giddy tone.’
‘I’d had a lot of calls that day from people who cared, who were stunned… and I just felt there was a lightness in his tone about Diana’s death that really jarred with me.’
He claimed he then received a second call from Charles after expressing concerns to a member of the Buckingham Palace household about William and Harry walking behind their mother’s coffin.
‘He said “I gather you don’t think William and Harry should walk behind Diana’s coffin” and I said “of course not, sir, she wouldn’t want it”.
‘Then he said, “I walked behind Lord Mountbatten’s coffin”, and I said “yes, but you were 30, and he wasn’t your mother”.
‘He went ballistic and started really going for my family as a whole about their sense of duty not being adequate enough and ranted for a while, I have no idea how long, but it was a significant period and I just listened.
‘Then he stopped, and I thought, oh, now, now he’s going to pull himself together and say something more appropriate, and then he said, “We’ll forget her soon enough”.’
Asked what went through his mind, he said: ‘Well, I’m not sure I can say exactly what went through my mind, but I really was so stunned, and I just, after a stunned silence, I said, “I cannot believe you just said that”, and I hung up on him.’
Responding to the Palace’s statement pushing back on the story, Earl Spencer said: ‘I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said.
‘I’ve only ever had two calls on the line with Prince Charles at any stage in my life.
‘I was hyper-alert to what he was saying, and those are precisely the words he said. And I promise that to you now. Genuinely, that is what he said.
‘I don’t hear him saying he didn’t say that.’
The earl said he told ‘close friends and family’ about the ‘monstrous’ comment.
Pressed on whether he was effectively accusing the King of lying, Earl Spencer replied: ‘I can hardly be responsible for what Buckingham Palace says.
‘All I can tell you is what was said and what I heard and what shocked me.
‘What else would have made me hang up on the king that day? It was something as outrageous as that slur against Diana.’
Earl Spencer also expressed hope that William and Harry, his nephews, could one day reconcile – which is what their mother would have wanted.
‘There’s a lot of reasons on both sides why (their estrangement) has got to this stage, and as an uncle, I hope one day it’s resolved,’ he said.
‘But I certainly don’t know what’s been done in the finer detail and so I would feel intrusive if I got more involved than to say, of course, a mother would want her two sons to be happy together and love each other.’
The earl went on to blame the BBC and its former Panorama reporter Martin Bashir for obliterating Diana’s trust in others and leaving her ‘vulnerable’ on the night she died.
An inquiry established that Bashir had mocked up fake bank statements, suggesting individuals were being paid to keep Diana under surveillance, and showed them to Earl Spencer to secure a bombshell interview with her in 1995.
‘The consequences of Diana being told “you cannot trust anyone” meant that she was alone that night, really, and I think that she was so convinced that she got rid of her driver, a totally innocent man.
‘He wouldn’t have been in Paris, but police bodyguards, private protection officers, they were got rid of too.
‘People said “oh, she was paranoid” – she wasn’t paranoid. She was convinced that she couldn’t trust people because the evidence was there, and I think that left her vulnerable that night.’
He described his sister’s death as ‘very, very preventable’ and suggested that Harry should be granted proper protection now he is back in the UK.
