The Buckingham Palace formally responded this Wednesday to Charles Spencer, brother of the Princess of Wales, after excerpts from The Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, a memoir volume he wrote that will be released worldwide on September 22, were revealed.
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Among them is a passage where he states that the current King Charles III said days after the death of his ex-wife that “we will forget her soon”.
According to Spencer, the then Prince of Wales also subjected him to an “avalanche of anger” after he insisted that his sister would not have wanted Princes William and Harry, who were then 15 and 12 years old, to participate in her funeral procession.
In response, a Palace spokesperson stated that “while as a principle we do not comment on books, His Majesty is aware that the pain of sibling grief can cloud reason, affect judgment, and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss”.
The book is expected to be very critical of the royal family; however, so far only the Daily Mail newspaper has had access to it. This happened after copies of the Duke of Spencer’s biographical volume were stolen from a truck in the Netherlands.
According to the BBC, four copies of the Dutch edition were taken from the vehicle while it was traveling from the publisher’s printing house in that country to its warehouse.
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In the first excerpt made public this Wednesday, the Earl of Spencer claims that a senior Buckingham advisor informed him that the young princes would walk alongside Princess Diana’s coffin, which he opposed.
Soon after, he reportedly received a call from Charles. About this, he wrote in his memoirs: “He unleashed over the phone what I have always interpreted as his suppressed contempt for Diana and his horror at the impact her death had on the world. ‘Don’t worry,’ he hissed, ‘we will forget her very soon’”, he detailed in the text.
The response given today is unusual for Buckingham Palace, which normally does not comment on books or reports about members of the House of Windsor.
In 2023, the British monarch’s administrative headquarters remained silent after the publication of Prince Harry’s biographical volume, titled Spare, despite it containing numerous claims about the king and the royal family.
