Charles Spencer has disclosed the frosty two-word nickname his sister Princess Diana used privately for Queen Elizabeth II.
The Earl Spencer, 60, reveals in his new memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister that Diana habitually referred to the monarch as “the boss.” The book, released in September 2026, surfaces the nickname through Spencer’s recollection of a 1984 clash over Diana’s hairstyle choices.
That year, Diana wore a chignon to the State Opening of Parliament, a style more reminiscent of old Hollywood glamour than royal convention. The look triggered a media frenzy and displeased the Queen. Spencer wrote that Diana “was told off, and she, ever respectful of ‘the boss,’ as she called the queen, from that point on, always wore her hair more simply at events that they both attended.”
The nickname was not merely a passing remark. Letters and biographical accounts indicate Diana employed it for years, persisting until her death in Paris in August 1997.
An October 1995 letter to Roger Bramble, a friend of the then-Prince Charles, captures Diana using the exact phrase in a lighter register. She wrote: “I just hope your arrival at Westminster Abbey was before the Boss (The Queen) and if not, I expect to have been mentioned in the excuses!”
The letter, dispatched two years before her fatal car crash, shows the term had evolved into something of a running joke among Diana’s circle, a compressed acknowledgment of Elizabeth’s authority within both family and institution.
The dynamic between the two women had begun in a markedly different register. Andrew Morton, in his 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story: In Her Own Words, recorded that “Diana was quite simply terrified of her mother-in-law” during the early phase of her marriage to Charles.
That terror gave way to a more complicated dependency as the marriage fractured. When Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles intensified, Diana reportedly sought guidance from the Queen and received little comfort. In 1993 tapes featured in the 2017 documentary Diana: In Her Own Words, Diana recalled approaching Elizabeth with her distress.
“I don’t know what I should do,” Diana told her.
The Queen’s reply, as Diana relayed it: “I don’t know what you should do.”
Diana added, as reported: “And that was it. That was ‘help.'”
The distance between them appears to have endured. Spencer’s memoir claims that upon learning of Diana’s death in the 1997 Paris tunnel crash, the Queen’s first reaction was to ask, “What is she up to now?”
The nickname “the boss,” deployed across more than a decade of private correspondence and conversation, thus carries a double weight: deference and distance, respect and something colder, the vocabulary of an employee rather than a daughter-in-law.