Princess Diana’s brother has reopened one of the most painful chapters in modern royal history. In excerpts from his forthcoming memoir, Earl Spencer says that when the then-Prince of Wales called him after Diana’s death, Charles did not sound crushed. He sounded, Spencer writes, “giddily elated — like a lottery winner.”
The claim, serialized this week by the Daily Mail and reported worldwide, has already drawn a rare public pushback from Buckingham Palace. The book itself, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, is due out on 22 September 2026 — days from now, and less than a year before the 30th anniversary of the crash that killed Diana at 36.
The night the world stopped
In the early hours of 31 August 1997, a Mercedes carrying Diana and Dodi Fayed left the Ritz Hotel in Paris and entered the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. The car, driven by Henri Paul and followed by paparazzi, crashed at high speed. Fayed and Paul died at the scene. Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones survived. Diana was still alive when rescuers reached her.
She was taken to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Doctors found catastrophic internal injuries. After a second cardiac arrest and emergency surgery, she could not be revived. While that fight was underway in Paris, her sons — William, 15, and Harry, 12 — were asleep at Balmoral in Scotland with their father and grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.
Spencer, then in Cape Town, first received confused overnight calls from family. The phone kept ringing as the news hardened from accident to death.
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What Spencer says Charles sounded like
In the memoir, Spencer describes the moment the then-Prince of Wales reached him. Other callers, he writes, were barely able to speak. Charles was different.
“Unlike my other callers, who were stunned, barely able to articulate their condolences and offers of help, he sounded giddily elated — like a lottery winner, I remember thinking at the time.”
According to Spencer, Charles also said he had already told William and Harry “first thing that morning, in their bedrooms at Balmoral.” The tone, Spencer adds, “sounded strangely matter-of-fact, given the enormity of the disaster.”
Looking back nearly three decades later, he offers an interpretation rather than a transcript of Charles’s inner life: that the prince’s first thought may have been how the death “might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not.” He adds that after a bitter divorce it can be “hard to feel too much sympathy for an ex-spouse.”
Charles and Diana had divorced in August 1996, a year before the crash. Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. She is now Queen Camilla.
Balmoral is where the boys were staying when the news arrived. The image of that isolated Scottish estate has become inseparable from the story of how two children learned their mother was gone.
A second claim: “We’ll forget her soon enough”
An earlier extract, published a day before the “lottery winner” passage, is equally explosive. Spencer says that in the days after the death, during a furious argument over funeral arrangements, Charles subjected him to a “stream of anger.” Spencer had argued that Diana would not have wanted William and Harry to walk behind her coffin.
Then, Spencer writes, Charles “unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death.”
“‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough.’”
Spencer also claims palace officials wanted him and the princes in the procession in part because Charles was determined to walk, and aides feared the public might shout abuse at him if he walked alone. In the end, Prince Philip, William, Spencer, Harry and Charles walked together on 6 September 1997. An estimated 2.5 billion people watched the funeral.
That walk remains one of the most famous images of the 1990s: two boys in black, heads down, following a coffin through a silent London street lined with flowers.
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Spencer’s eulogy that day — calling Diana “the most hunted person of the modern age” and promising to protect her sons from a similar fate — is still treated as one of the defining public speeches of the late 20th century. The new book is framed as a continuation of that role: speaking, he says, “on Diana’s behalf.”
Why the book exists now
Spencer has said he decided to write after being “inundated yet again” with interview requests as the 30th anniversary approached. He wanted to put down his own memories “once and for all,” rather than keep reading versions of Diana’s life that he believes rest on untruths. The publisher, Penguin Michael Joseph, describes the 384-page book as both a family memoir and a source of “many revelations.”
Other extracts reportedly include a claim, attributed to a close friend of Diana, that Charles told her before their July 1981 wedding that he was happy to marry her but was not actually in love with her. Spencer also writes that Diana contemplated suicide more than once, and that love for her sons stopped her. Those passages sit outside the immediate “reaction to her death” story, but they form the bitter backdrop against which Spencer asks readers to judge Charles’s alleged tone in 1997.
The marriage that began as a global fairy tale had already collapsed in public: the 1992 separation, the Camillagate and Squidgygate tapes, the 1995 Panorama interview, the 1996 divorce. By August 1997, Charles and Diana were legally free of each other. They were not free of each other’s history.
Buckingham Palace’s unusual reply
Palaces almost never comment on books. This time it did.
A spokesperson 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 wording is careful. It does not call Spencer a liar. It suggests that grief, even 29 years later, can distort recollection. It is the closest the institution has come to a public rebuttal of a Spencer family account since the funeral week itself.
Dickie Arbiter, who was press secretary to the Queen at the time of Diana’s death, was far less diplomatic. He told the BBC the “giddily elated” description was “hogwash,” that it was “not in [Charles’s] character,” and that Charles was “devastated at the time.” “There’s no way he could have ever said anything like that,” Arbiter added. He predicted the King would be “exasperated” but would “get on with the job.”
Those two responses — the Palace’s cool institutional warning about memory, and Arbiter’s blunt personal denial — now sit beside Spencer’s vivid, first-person scene. No recording of the 1997 call has been produced. The public is being asked to weigh a brother’s long-held impression against the word of the man who was then the Prince of Wales and of people who worked beside him that week.
What the record already showed — and what it did not
None of this erases what millions saw with their own eyes. Charles flew to Paris to bring Diana’s body home. He walked behind the coffin. He was photographed with William and Harry among the flowers. He later spoke, in more measured years, of the “agony” of that period and of raising two grieving boys.
At the same time, the public never had a window into a private phone call between two men who already distrusted each other. Spencer and Charles had clashed before. They clashed again over the funeral. Spencer’s 1997 eulogy was widely heard as a rebuke of the royal household. A memoir published in 2026 is the latest chapter of that same unfinished argument.
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Charles did marry Camilla eight years later. William and Harry grew up in the shadow of a mother the world refused to forget. Harry has spent years accusing the institution of failing Diana and of failing him. William has stayed inside the institution and rarely comments on these books. Neither son has issued a statement on Swan Song as of Friday.
A claim that lands because the wound never closed
The reason Spencer’s sentences travel so far is not only their shock value. It is that Diana’s death never became ordinary history. The crash, the hospital, the boys at Balmoral, the flowers at Kensington Palace, the funeral walk, the conspiracy theories, the inquest, the documentaries, the dramas — all of it stays live. A single adjective, “elated,” dropped into that story in 2026 is enough to reopen every old question about love, duty, Camilla, and whether the palace ever truly mourned the woman it had already discarded as Princess of Wales.
Spencer is not a neutral witness. He is Diana’s brother. He buried her. He has spent decades protecting, in his view, her memory. Charles is not a neutral subject. He is the former husband, the father of her children, and now the King. Memory after trauma is unreliable; so is family grievance. Both things can be true at once.
The book arrives next week. More pages will almost certainly follow the excerpts already in print. Whether they change anyone’s settled view of August 1997 is another matter. What they have already done is remind a new generation — and an older one that never stopped watching — that the argument over how Charles reacted when Diana died is not over. For Spencer, the first sound on the line was not grief. For the Palace, that memory itself may be the thing that cannot be trusted.
Diana was buried at Althorp on 6 September 1997. The boys who walked behind her that day are now 44 and 41. The man Spencer says sounded like a lottery winner is 77 and on the throne. The sister at the centre of the claim has been gone for 29 years. The phone call, if it happened exactly as written, lasted only minutes. The dispute has lasted a lifetime.