At issue is Earl Spencer’s account of a conversation with the then Prince Charles after the death of Diana, with the prince accused of telling Earl Spencer: “We’ll forget her soon enough.”<\/p>\n
He is accused of sounding “giddily elated” and like a “lottery winner” after the news of her death.<\/p>\n
Buckingham Palace hit back with a response, which although dressed in courtier-like politeness, was essentially saying the conversation had never happened like that.<\/p>\n
The King was said to be “mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways that others do not recognise”.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has lost someone knows how feelings can run high, people can hear different things about the same conversations – and families can fall out, or come together, in the wake of a death.<\/p>\n
Psychotherapist Nick Hatter says he doesn’t have a view on which version of events is correct, but he says that during traumatic events memories can be “distorted”. A phone call doesn’t have any of the visual clues or body language to give a fuller picture, he adds.<\/p>\n
Hatter says there can be very different and unpredictable responses to grief, including a condition known as “bereavement mania” where someone can seem inappropriately hyper or even euphoric after the loss of a loved one.<\/p>\n
The first opinion poll on who to believe has been published by YouGov – and it suggests a very split view, with 31% believing Earl Spencer’s allegations, 36% suspecting it’s not true and 33% saying they don’t know.<\/p>\n
Low thinks the book is unlikely to change many opinions, as “people have settled into their camps about how they regard Charles, how they look back on the Diana years”.<\/p>\n
There could also be a feeling that it’s “tawdry” to rake up these claims so many years later, he says.<\/p>\n
That’s echoed by historian and author Sir Anthony Seldon who says Earl Spencer showed great courage at the time of Diana’s funeral, but says his memoir is a “sad and unnecessary publication”.<\/p>\n
Royal commentator Richard Palmer says the book threatens to take the royals back to the difficult days of 1997.<\/p>\n
“This book and the run-up to next year’s 30th anniversary of Diana’s death threaten to undermine the Royal Household’s three decades of work to rehabilitate Charles and Camilla’s image,” he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At issue is Earl Spencer’s account of a conversation with the then Prince Charles after the death of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":775547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-775546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}