Charles Spencer has accused King Charles of sounding “giddily elated” upon learning of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, a claim Buckingham Palace has dismissed as grief-clouded memory.
The Earl Spencer, 60, makes the allegation in his forthcoming memoir, *Swan Song: Diana, My Sister*, scheduled for publication next week. In an excerpt published by the outlet, Diana’s younger brother recounts receiving a phone call from then-Prince Charles in the hours after the fatal Paris car crash that killed the Princess of Wales on August 31, 1997.
“Unlike my other callers, who were stunned, barely able to articulate their condolences and offers of help, he sounded giddily elated,” Spencer wrote in the excerpt.
The Earl added that he remembers thinking the future King “sounded like a lottery winner” when he heard the devastating news.
Spencer further alleged that Charles told him he had broken the news to Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, 12, “first thing in the morning in their bedrooms at Balmoral.” The Earl found the account strikingly detached given the circumstances, writing: “It all sounded strangely matter-of-fact, given the enormity of the disaster.”
In the memoir, Spencer speculates openly about Charles’s state of mind. “Looking back now, I suspect the prince’s first reaction must have been to think more of how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not,” he wrote. “It can be hard to feel too much sympathy for an ex-spouse, or those who care for them profoundly, after bitter divorce.”
The Palace pushed back hard. In a statement, Buckingham Palace said: “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.”
The statement notably avoids direct denial while framing Spencer’s account as potentially distorted by lingering sorrow.
Spencer also revisits a fraught dispute over Diana’s funeral arrangements. He claimed that when the two men clashed over whether William and Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin in the procession, Charles responded with what Spencer described as “a stream of anger.” The Earl wrote that the then-Prince “unleashed down the phone” what he took “to be his pent-up contempt for Diana,” and allegedly told him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
Spencer maintained he argued the procession was not what Diana would have wanted for her sons.
The brothers-in-law had already endured a bitter history. Charles and Diana wed in 1981 in a globally televised ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral, but their marriage collapsed amid mutual infidelities and public acrimony. Their divorce was finalized in 1996, one year before Diana’s death, though the couple had separated years earlier. Diana died alongside her companion Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul when their Mercedes crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris while being pursued by paparazzi.
The forthcoming memoir marks Spencer’s most direct public account of that period, drawing on his position as both witness and grieving sibling.
