Earl Charles Spencer, the younger brother of Princess Diana, has published a memoir titled “Swan Song” that includes new claims about his sister’s private life, her marriage to then-Prince Charles, and the aftermath of her death in 1997.
Among the revelations, Spencer writes that Diana once asked him whether he thought she would make a good American first lady. He says one of Diana’s “many powerful aging American suitors, keen to secure her as the ultimate trophy wife,” told her he was certain to win the presidency if she married him. According to Spencer, Diana was more drawn to the idea of living in the White House than to marrying the “would-be elderly husband” himself.
Spencer describes his sister as having a “mischievous attraction to reinventing herself in a role that would make her enemies in the British Royal Family sick with jealousy, while ushering in an era of glamour in the White House that would surely have surpassed even that of the Jackie Kennedy years.”
The memoir also details Diana’s relationship with heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan after her divorce. Spencer writes that she harbored a “naïve yet impossible” hope of moving with Khan to South Africa, where Spencer lived at the time, because England had become “intolerable” to her. She imagined Khan working at a hospital in Cape Town so the two could live “happily — normally — nearby” her brother, calling the idea a possible “asylum” on the other side of the world.
Claims About Charles’s Reaction to Diana’s Death
Spencer writes that on the morning Diana died in the 1997 Paris car crash, then-Prince Charles sounded “giddily elated — like a lottery winner,” and was “strangely matter-of-fact, given the enormity of the disaster.” Spencer says he later came to believe Charles’s initial reaction reflected relief that he was now free to “marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not.”
According to the memoir, during a dispute over funeral arrangements, Charles told Spencer, “Rest assured … we’ll forget her soon enough!” Spencer writes that he was stunned into silence for a few seconds before replying, “I can’t believe you just said that,” and hanging up. Earlier in that same conversation, Spencer says Charles accused the Spencer family of lacking a sense of duty after Spencer objected to Princes Harry and William walking behind their mother’s coffin. Spencer attributes the outburst to Charles’s “pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death.”
Buckingham Palace responded to the excerpt when it was first released last week, stating: “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 color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss.” The palace told Fox News Digital it would not offer further comment.
The Bashir Interview and Other Family Details
Spencer also revisits the circumstances surrounding Diana’s 1995 “Panorama” interview with Martin Bashir, who allegedly told Diana a series of falsehoods — including that she was under MI6 surveillance, that Prince William was unwittingly bugging her through his watch, and that her children’s nanny had aborted a child fathered by Charles. Spencer writes that Diana nearly canceled the interview and pulled out a few days beforehand, but that Bashir and the program’s executive producer persisted, arranging a clandestine meeting in a parking garage where Spencer believes they convinced her that doing the interview was the best way to protect herself from imminent danger.
The memoir recounts a conversation Spencer says he had with Charles following their own father’s funeral, in which Charles told Spencer he was “lucky” his father had died because he inherited while still young. Charles reportedly complained that at 43, while employing 50 people, his parents still treated him “like — like a child!”
Spencer also writes that Queen Elizabeth once dismissed a courtier’s concern that Charles resented a reprimand, telling him: “He even resented it when I taught him the alphabet.” Separately, Spencer says Diana told him early in her marriage that the queen had considered having Charles’s ears pinned back after he was teased at school, a plan Prince Philip reportedly stopped. Spencer says he does not know whether the story is true but that Diana believed it.
When Diana first told her brother she planned to divorce Charles, Spencer writes that she claimed the prince was “in love with his valet” — a claim Spencer says he found improbable but did not press her on, given that he was absorbing the news that she was ending her marriage and her “dreams.”
Spencer describes his sister’s more personal tastes as well, noting she had “traditionally feminine” interests as a child, collected stuffed animals, loved forget-me-nots, listened to the Beatles and David Bowie, and enjoyed the soap opera “Crossroads.” As she grew older, he writes, she “devoured” romance novels by Barbara Cartland and once told him she had watched “The Sound of Music” 16 times.
“Swan Song” was released nearly a year ahead of the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death. She was killed in a car crash in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997.
