- Spencer’s book about Diana goes on sale on Tuesday
He was 17 when his 20-year-old sister, fast becoming the most photographed woman in the world, married the then-Prince Charles in a fairytale wedding in 1981. He inherited the family’s 30-bedroom ancestral mansion in central England in 1992, when his father died, and started writing history books in the late 1990s, one of which was shortlisted for an award and many of which were top sellers.
“Swan Song: Diana, My Sister” will be published on Tuesday, and is his take on his sister’s life and her unhappy marriage to the now King Charles. In pre-released excerpts, Spencer claims Charles was “giddily elated” in the aftermath of Diana’s death in 1997, reopening a painful episode for the royal family. Spencer, 62, said he wrote the book because it was his duty “as an eyewitness to history”, but his version of events has been rejected by Buckingham Palace in unusually strong terms. “The pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory,” it said, in a statement that added to the publicity surrounding the book. Spencer told CNN in an interview some years later how at the time he was more interested in “exams and playing my sports at school” than the global event. “I didn’t fully understand actually how very difficult things were for her at times,” Spencer told Good Morning America in an interview before the book was released. He writes that Charles said of Diana “we’ll forget her soon enough”, before shouting at Spencer for suggesting the then 15-year-old William and 12-year-old Harry, should not be expected to walk behind her coffin at the funeral. “It was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the King being able to deny what I’d said,” he told the Daily Mail.
