{"id":612206,"date":"2026-09-26T08:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T08:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/612206\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T08:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T08:00:16","slug":"review-dianas-brother-flips-royal-family-the-bird-in-scathing-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/612206\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Diana\u2019s brother flips royal family the bird in scathing new book"},"content":{"rendered":"

Revenge is a dish best served cold, so the saying goes. Charles Spencer’s new memoir<\/a>, Swan Song, arrives nearly three decades after his sister Diana’s death, and it is icy in its contempt for both the British tabloid media and the “arrogance and entitlement” of the royal family.<\/p>\n

By Kate Cantrell for The Conversation<\/p>\n

Dedicated to “all those who have lost a sibling”, and billed as revealing “the true framework of Diana’s life”, the memoir has been marketed as “the most intimate, loving and honest portrait” of Diana yet.<\/p>\n

However, the book is as much about Spencer as it is about Diana. Over 350 pages, his litany of grievances swamps the loving tribute he ostensibly set out to write. King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, is cast as a petulant child and “bellowing buffoon” who was “always extremely jealous of Diana’s star power”.<\/p>\n

Among the most damaging claims is that Charles was “giddily elated”<\/a> on learning of Diana’s death, a reaction Spencer attributes to Charles’ “pent-up contempt for Diana and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death”, as well as what he sees as Charles\u2019s relief at finally being free to marry the woman he loved.<\/p>\n

“Rest assured,” Charles allegedly hissed, “we’ll forget [Diana] soon enough!”<\/p>\n

Last week, the Palace \u2013 reportedly engaged in a war of words with Spencer \u2013 pushed back against the claims<\/a>. “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 judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.”<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, British commentator and journalist Piers Morgan announced he is suing Spencer and his publishers over “demonstrable lies” in the book, chiefly Spencer’s wrongful claim that Morgan was editor of the Daily Mirror when it published intrusive photos of Diana working out in a leotard. Spencer has since apologised to Morgan for the factual error, but he stands by other claims about Morgan and the media\u2019s role in Diana\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

“I always believed the press would kill her in the end,” Spencer says. “It was only a matter of time.”<\/p>\n

\"Charles<\/p>\n

Charles Spencer dedicates his memoir to ‘all those who have lost a sibling’. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n

Regrets, resentments and righteous rage<\/p>\n

Spencer, a former journalist and historian with nine non-fiction books to his name, including four Sunday Times bestsellers, knows how to tell a story. Indeed, his first memoir, about surviving boarding school, was described by the Guardian as combining “righteous anger with therapeutic honesty”.<\/p>\n

In Swan Song, his second memoir, he positions himself as Diana’s fierce defender \u2013 a role he came to embrace as her youngest sibling, childhood playmate and only surviving brother. The youngest of four, the pair grew up together in “a household divided by divorce and darkly punctuated by the death of a sibling”. (Diana\u2019s older brother John, who was born with “a hole in the back of his head”, died after birth due to a thalidomide-like medicine that his mother was prescribed for morning sickness.)<\/p>\n

After that, “[Diana and I] both had a real fear of the dark,” Spencer writes. “She could not overcome her deep fear of the dark corridors that lay between us.” Elsewhere, he writes: “My mother told me many times that she felt I knew Diana better than anyone else in the world.”<\/p>\n

Weaving his early memories of Diana with the planning of her funeral, the memoir is structured as an extended eulogy that, in Spencer’s words, attempts to “get it as right as [he] can \u2013 for Diana primarily, but also for posterity”.<\/p>\n

“I am going to tell things how I remember them,” he declares, “lay them down for good, for once and for all.” Spencer does exactly that, settling scores, nursing slights, and oscillating between self-pity and self-regard.<\/p>\n

Charles in the crosshairs<\/p>\n

The royal family fares badly, and Charles worst of all. Spencer alleges Charles “disrespected Diana and disparaged [the Spencer family’s] sense of duty”.<\/p>\n

On the eve of the couple’s wedding, he claims Charles told Diana “he was very happy to marry her, but he was not actually in love with her”. While engaged, he allegedly told Diana she was “a bit chubby” around the waist. Spencer concludes his sister’s eating disorder “partly stemmed from a feeling that she was unloved by the man she adored”.<\/p>\n

Later, he writes of the prince’s “growing frustrations at being a middle-aged man still waiting to reign”. After the death of Spencer and Diana\u2019s father, Charles reportedly told the earl: “You\u2019re just so lucky \u2013 you know inheriting when you\u2019re so young!”<\/p>\n

\"On<\/p>\n

On the eve of the couple\u2019s wedding, Spencer claims Charles told Diana ‘he was very happy to marry her, but he was not actually in love with her’. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n

In another scene, Spencer recalls the teenage Andrew \u2013 now the disgraced former prince \u2013 smirking during a service at Sandringham when the priest mentioned “the virgin’s womb”.<\/p>\n

Princess Anne brusquely dismisses the teenage Spencer’s awkward attempts at small talk, while Princess Margaret, still unable to forgive Diana\u2019s infamous interview with Martin Bashir on the BBC\u2019s Panorama program (“an unforgivable act of treachery against the Royal Family”), refuses to bow as Diana\u2019s coffin passes.<\/p>\n

Even Spencer’s own family comes under fire. After Elton John was booked to sing at Diana\u2019s funeral \u2013 he had originally planned to perform Your Song \u2013 “a conservative member” of the Spencer family allegedly objected: “Surely we can\u2019t have a pop song delivered by a homosexual at Diana\u2019s funeral?”<\/p>\n

In one of the more bizarre scenes, Spencer recounts how Prince Philip discovered the queen was weighing up surgery to pin back the young Charles’ ears, since “their protrusion” had made him a target of teasing at school and in the press. Philip reportedly blocked the procedure and had the ears of one of the queen’s corgis operated on instead.<\/p>\n

“While I have no idea if these disturbing tales were true,” Spencer writes, “Diana believed them.”<\/p>\n

After Diana’s funeral, Queen Elizabeth reportedly offered to restore Diana’s Royal Highness title. Spencer declined, dismissing the gesture as “hollow, however well-meaning”.<\/p>\n

“The title should never have been removed during her life,” he says, “in which case it would not have been necessary to offer it to her in death. [\u2026] While she was no longer married to one future king, she would always be mother to another.”<\/p>\n

‘A form of mental torture’<\/p>\n

While Spencer’s grudges overshadow the memoir, its obsessive returns and repetitions are characteristic of trauma. Beneath the score-settling, this is the story of a brother still grieving his dead sister, a man reeling from “the astonishing, incomprehensible, fact that [his] youngest sister was dead”.<\/p>\n

Trauma resists closure, and Spencer keeps circling back to the moment of loss, unable to let go.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in thrall to two immense and related forces,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe shock of being a brother, with my dead sister before me; and the duty of being an uncle, whose young nephews needed my support.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diana’s funeral \u2013 a “grim procession of human tragedy and royal pageantry” \u2013 was “suffocating in its intensity”. Spencer protested at the time against walking behind the coffin, and he recalls it as “the most harrowing experience of [his] life”, one that has “replayed for [him] in dozens of fitful nightmares”.<\/p>\n

“It is the sounds that have haunted me since. The horses’ hoofs, and the soldiers’ heavy boots crunching rhythmically on the road ahead. [\u2026] But it was those endless waves of emotion, crashing in at us from every side, that took their toll. Despite being so well-meaning, they constituted a form of mental torture.”<\/p>\n

His respect for his nephews, William and Harry, alone in their “despair and torment”, never wavers.<\/p>\n

“I could not get over how tiny, and slight, and bereft, Harry looked,” Spencer writes. “Too small to be doing this, I thought, and I wondered how on earth this heartbroken child could bear the ordeal of that moment, or how he could possibly be expected to deal with the agony.”<\/p>\n

William, then 15 and “suffering equally terribly”, was more “self-possessed”: “the image of his mother then, tall and handsome and dignified”. Harry was Spencer’s primary concern.<\/p>\n

\"Spencer<\/p>\n

Spencer describes walking in Diana\u2019s funeral procession as the \u2018most harrowing experience\u2019 of his life. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n

The tabloid media, whom Spencer famously accused of having “blood on their hands”, are again condemned as culpable, “egged on by members of Prince Charles’ household” and described as occupying, in relation to Diana, “the opposite end of the moral spectrum”.<\/p>\n

Diana’s “gilded existence”, Spencer writes, was snuffed out by the press: “those who inhabit the murky swamps of malevolence, and who need to suck their victims dry of their souls” (a line he decided to remove from his eulogy).<\/p>\n

‘We knew we helped to kill her’<\/p>\n

In one particularly troubling chapter, Spencer tells how Bashir, “a self-serving fraud”, tricked Diana into her 1995 Panorama interview in which she famously declared, “Well, there were three of us in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded”. To obtain the interview, Bashir forged bank statements that falsely suggested Diana’s private secretary was being paid to keep her under surveillance.<\/p>\n

According to the book, Bashir ensnared Diana in a web of lies, telling her the queen was seriously ill with a heart condition and expected to soon die, that an established royal had contracted HIV\/AIDS, and that William’s watch had been bugged to record conversations between him and his mother “for use by her enemies”.<\/p>\n

“It is amazing, now, how outrageous Bashir’s inventions were,” Spencer writes, before adding: “I believe Diana was so open to Bashir’s accusations because she was an early and unknowing victim of phone-hacking” and because his fabrications fit with “Diana\u2019s reasonable concerns at that time”.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The famous diamond and pearl necklace and earring set Princess Diana wore in 1997, said to have been a gift from Dodi Al-Fayed. (Source: Bang Showbiz)<\/p>\n

Spencer also has harsh words for Mohamed Al Fayed, the late Harrods owner and father of Dodi \u2013 Diana’s partner, who died with her in the Paris crash. More than 400 allegations of sexual misconduct have been made against Fayed, including rape, sexual assault and human trafficking. He died in 2023 without facing any charges.<\/p>\n

Spencer recalls Diana confiding in him “with revulsion how, early in her romance with Dodi, Mohamed had come up to her, dropped a hand onto her buttocks and squeezed them while saying in a leery, suggestive tone, ‘And in Egypt, father-in-law gets first go\u2026'”<\/p>\n

“She laughed when recounting the ghastliness of the episode,” Spencer writes, “but she had been alerted to who Dodi’s father really was.”<\/p>\n

The memoir makes clear that Diana, hounded by the press and distrustful of those around her, feared for her life. (A tabloid editor reportedly told a member of Spencer’s team, “We knew we helped to kill her, but we didn\u2019t need Spencer to tell the world.”)<\/p>\n

The real tragedy<\/p>\n

In the end, Swan Song, despite its claim to be the authoritative account of Diana’s life, is only another interpretation.<\/p>\n

The irony of Spencer’s self-confessed need “to speak on Diana’s behalf” is that his memoir is now part of the machine he abhors. It reminds us Diana remains, as always, subject to others’ opinions: claimed, contested and reimagined by those who loved her, those who profited from her, and those who cannot let her go.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that is the real tragedy: she can no longer speak back.<\/p>\n

Kate Cantrell is a senior lecturer in humanities at the University of Southern Queensland.<\/p>\n

This article was republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons Licence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Revenge is a dish best served cold, so the saying goes. Charles Spencer’s new memoir, Swan Song, arrives…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2567,156,111,139,69,6747,1745],"class_list":["post-612206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-arts-and-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-royalty","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}