{"id":899561,"date":"2026-09-21T02:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T02:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/899561\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T02:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T02:22:11","slug":"harry-and-meghans-media-treatment-echoes-what-happened-to-diana-charles-spencer-tells-bbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/899561\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry and Meghan’s media treatment echoes what happened to Diana, Charles Spencer tells BBC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tell us about your experience. <\/p>\n

Princess Diana’s brother says Prince Harry and his wife Meghan should be given official security because the media now treats them much the same way as it treated his sister in the years leading up to her death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Diana was 36 when she was killed in a 1997 Paris car crash while being pursued by photographers on motorbikes.<\/p>\n

Her death sparked an outpouring of grief and a reckoning over whether the media, which splashed details of her life across front pages for years, bore some responsibility.<\/p>\n

\"Prince<\/p>\n

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan recently returned to the United Kingdom after six years in California. (AP: Jonathan Brady)<\/p>\n

Charles Spencer has been speaking to the media in the lead-up to the publication of his book about his sister, which is critical of her former husband, the now-King Charles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“From a security aspect, as an uncle who’s seen his sister die in very, very preventable circumstances, I would veer towards protection,” Earl Spencer said of Harry and Meghan when speaking to the BBC.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He said the tabloid treatment of Diana, and Harry and Meghan, could be “really, really unpleasant”, and that it was “beholden on people” to learn from that experience.<\/p>\n

Spencer’s book makes international headlines<\/p>\n

Earl Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, has made headlines around the world because it includes accusations about Charles making incendiary comments in the days after the princess’s death.<\/p>\n

In the book, Earl Spencer accuses Diana’s former husband, the then-prince of Wales, of sounding “giddily elated” in the hours after her death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Earl Spencer also writes that an angry Charles had told him that the world would forget Diana soon enough<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a rare move, the palace has hit back by saying the king is “mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in \u2060ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss”.<\/p>\n

Asked by the BBC how he could prove the conversations had taken place, Earl Spencer said he had included a specific line in his much-lauded eulogy at Diana’s funeral to counter the comments, ending it by saying she would “never be extinguished from our minds”.<\/p>\n

Earl Spencer said he had written the book, ahead of the 30th anniversary of her death, to celebrate her life.<\/p>\n

‘I’m telling the truth’: Diana’s brother on king’s ‘monstrous’ phone call<\/a><\/p>\n

Princess Diana’s brother has doubled down on his swathe of explosive claims about Britain’s royal family, insisting he is “telling the truth”, and suggesting the king is “embarrassed”.<\/p>\n

He said their childhood never had a dull moment. “We both have ADHD,” he said. “She was never diagnosed, but clearly we did.”<\/p>\n

The publication of the book and the surprise return of Harry and Meghan to Britain after six years living in the US pose a challenge for King Charles, who is still undergoing treatment for cancer.<\/p>\n

Princess Diana’s family accused the royals of showing a lack of support or care towards her before her death, a charge that was repeated by Harry and Meghan about their personal experience before they quit royal duties in 2020 to move abroad.<\/p>\n

Prince Harry has criticised the British government’s decision to strip him and his family of automatic police protection afforded to other senior royals since he quit royal duties.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Following a long-running legal battle, that is now under review.<\/p>\n

Earl Spencer, who recently hosted the couple, has serialised his book through The Daily Mail, just months after Prince Harry lost an expensive privacy lawsuit against the tabloid.<\/p>\n

Earl Spencer said his revelations about King Charles would not come as a surprise to Prince Harry or his older brother, heir-to-the-throne Prince William, and he said while he knew many more details about the king, he had chosen not to include them.<\/p>\n

Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tell us about your experience. Princess Diana’s brother says Prince Harry and his wife Meghan should be given…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":899562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,746,338117,465817,134,155269,1685,33664,97386,15385,5513,25441,6018,4206,114481],"class_list":["post-899561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-book","tag-charles-spencer","tag-earl-spencer","tag-entertainment","tag-harry-and-meghan","tag-media","tag-meghan-markle","tag-paparazzi","tag-prince-charles","tag-prince-harry","tag-princess-diana","tag-protection","tag-security","tag-swan-song"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}