Diana has been dead for almost thirty years, but within the British royal family that week never seems to have really ended. A few pages of a new book, a phone call reconstructed decades later and a phrase attributed to the then Prince Charles are enough for Buckingham Palace to decide to do what it normally carefully avoids: answer.
The book is Swan Song: Diana, My Sisterthe new memoir by Charles Spencer, younger brother of the Princess of Wales. At the center is not only Diana, but above all what happened between 31 August and 6 September 1997, in the days in which Great Britain fell into collective mourning and, behind the walls of the royal palaces, the family had to decide how to say goodbye to the most famous woman in the world.
It is precisely on those days that Spencer returns with accusations destined to reopen one of the most controversial chapters in the recent history of the Windsors. And this time the Palace does not choose silence.
“His Majesty understands that grief over the loss of a brother or sister can cloud reason, influence judgment and color memories in ways that others may not recognise, even many years after such a loss,” a spokesperson said.
The sentence is calibrated, as always happens when Buckingham Palace speaks, but the meaning is difficult to misunderstand: Carlo does not recognize that version of events and questions, even before the individual episodes, the way in which Spencer remembers them.
The phrase attributed to Carlo
The most explosive passage of the memoir concerns the decision to have William and Harry walk behind their mother’s coffin. The two princes were 15 and 12 years old. Spencer says he opposed it, convinced that Diana would never have wanted to see her children exposed in front of hundreds of thousands of people and cameras around the world in one of the most traumatic moments of their lives.
According to the count, during the clash Carlo uttered a brutal sentence: “Don’t worry, we will soon forget it”. It is precisely here that Spencer’s account enters the most delicate territory, because that private conversation cannot be independently verified and the Palace openly disputes its reconstruction.
But it’s not the only episode destined to make noise.
«It looked like he had won the lottery»
Spencer also claims that, in the first phone call he received from Charles after Diana’s death, the then prince’s tone seemed surprisingly relieved, almost euphoric. In the book he compares it to that of a person who had just won the lottery.
It is a very heavy image, perhaps the heaviest in the entire memoir, because it does not concern an institutional choice or the organization of a funeral, but claims to restore Carlo’s state of mind in the hours immediately following the death of his ex-wife.
And it is precisely here that we need to distinguish between what Spencer remembers and what can be established as fact. That is his perception of a conversation that occurred in the midst of personal and family tragedy; the Palace gives it a completely different interpretation.
In the book the count also links that feeling to the relationship between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, arguing that Diana’s death had removed one of the most obvious obstacles to the possibility that their relationship could one day be fully accepted by the monarchy and public opinion. Carlo and Camilla would marry in 2005, eight years later.
Sources close to the sovereign have instead described Charles as deeply affected by Diana’s death and reject the image proposed by the princess’ brother.
Buckingham Palace’s strategy, however, is significant: not to dismantle the accusations one by one, but to contest the memory from which those accusations arise.
A line that inevitably recalls the famous “recollections may vary”, “memories may differ”, used by Elizabeth II in 2021 after the interview granted by Harry and Meghan to Oprah Winfrey. Even then the monarchy avoided entering into a war of details, however making it clear that the version told publicly did not coincide with the one kept within the family.
William and Harry behind the coffin
The central point remains the funeral of 6 September 1997. The image of William and Harry walking behind their mother’s coffin, together with their father Charles, Prince Philip and Charles Spencer, has become one of the symbolic photographs of Diana’s death. In subsequent years, both sons spoke about how difficult that experience had been.
Spencer claims he tried to stop her. In the memoir he says that between the princess’s family and the royal house there were very tough discussions not only on the presence of the boys in the procession, but on numerous aspects of the funeral, from the music to the ways in which Diana would be publicly remembered.
The count also states that Elizabeth II would have considered the possibility of posthumously returning to Diana the title of Royal Highness, lost after her divorce from Charles. Spencer would have considered the proposal useless.
This detail also reflects the climate of those days: not only a family devastated by a sudden death, but two worlds forced to decide, in a few hours and under unprecedented public pressure, who Diana really belonged to after her death. To the monarchy, to the Spencer family, to her children or to that public who had now transformed her into a global icon.
The brother who wants to take Diana back
Swan Song it is not just a book against Carlo and is not limited to the days of the funeral. Spencer returns to the childhood he lived with his sister, to his parents’ separation, to the years preceding the royal wedding, to Diana’s entry into a system that would have made her simultaneously a princess and a media phenomenon.
Above all, the count tries to recover the person behind the character, that Diana who, he claims, risks now being known more through documentaries, television series and reconstructions of her death than through those who knew her before she became “Lady D”.
It is not a secondary element. The thirtieth anniversary of her death will fall on August 31, 2027 and Spencer explained that he wants to fix his own version before a new wave of anniversaries, documentaries and commemorations once again define his sister for him.
The memoir thus also becomes a battle over memory.
On the one hand, the brother who claims the right to tell Diana as he remembers her. On the other, a king who, through Buckingham Palace, responds that pain can change the way we remember what we have experienced.
Diana, once again
This is perhaps the most interesting point of the new clash. Almost thirty years later, we are no longer discussing just what Diana did or suffered, but who has the definitive version of her story. Charles Spencer tells it like a brother. Carlo remembers her as an ex-husband and father of her children. William and Harry have built their relationship, public and private, with that loss over the years.
And every time one of these memories emerges, the others are inevitably called into question.
Diana thus continues to occupy a paradoxical place in the British monarchy: she has not been part of it for decades, yet she remains one of the most cumbersome presences in its recent history. Not because there is a lack of books about her, but because even today no one seems to have managed to write the last page.
