King Charles’s Aide Speculates About Surprising Reason Why Princess Diana’s Brother Wrote Bombshell New Book
King Charles’s Aide Speculates About Surprising Reason Why Princess Diana’s Brother Wrote Bombshell New Book
Rachel BurchfieldSun, September 20, 2026 at 5:07 PM UTC
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Charles Spencer and King Charles.Credit: GettyThe Gist -
On September 22, Princess Diana’s brother Charles Spencer’s new memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister will finally hit shelves.
Excerpts from the book have come out within the last week, many about King Charles—and his aides have speculated about Spencer’s real motivations behind writing the explosive memoir.
Meanwhile, Spencer said he feels “gaslit” by the king after a statement released by the palace last week.
Amid a rift that’s suddenly playing out on the public stage, Princess Diana’s brother Charles Spencer said in a new interview that he feels “gaslit” by King Charles after the king released an unprecedented statement last week—and as aides speculate as to Spencer’s real motivations behind writing a new memoir.
After explosive excerpts of Spencer’s forthcoming book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister were released on September 16—including that the king felt “giddily elated” after Diana’s death in a 1997 car crash and that he felt the public would forget her “soon enough”—the palace hit back with a rare response. Later that same day, a spokesperson for the king said in a statement, “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.”
Charles Spencer and his sister Princess Diana.Credit: Getty
In the ongoing tit-for-tat, Spencer told The Mail on Sunday, “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the king.”
“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,” Spencer continued. Referring to a statement from Queen Elizabeth after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s bombshell 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Spencer added, “I also thought it was a rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote, which was a much more elegant way of putting things, but in these circumstances entirely out of place.”
Ahead of his interview with The Mail on Sunday, Spencer doubled down on the claims in his book in a September 18 interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, where he said, after being asked about the palace’s statement, “I’m telling the truth.”
Princess Diana and Prince Charles on November 2, 1992.Credit: Getty
“I’ve only ever had two calls on the line with Prince Charles at any stage of my life,” Spencer said. “I was hyper alert to what he was saying, and those are precisely the words that he said, and I promise that to you now. Genuinely, that is what he said. I don’t hear him saying he didn’t say that.”
After being asked whether he had evidence to back up the allegations raised in Swan Song, Spencer said he told family and friends about Charles’s comments “straight away” because “it was so monstrous.”
Charles Spencer’s new memoir, ‘Swan Song: Diana, My Sister,’ comes out on September 22, 2026.Credit: Getty
“Along the way I’ve been able to deal with various myths that have grown up which needed to be dealt with once and for all,” he added of his rationale behind writing the memoir. “I’m in my 60s. Neither of my parents made it to 70, and I wanted to do this while I could.”
He clarified, “Money has never even been the remotest consideration in my choosing to write my tribute to Diana. Diana always had an expression which is ‘don’t judge others by yourselves’—and I think this applies to anyone who accuses me of something so ridiculous.”
Charles Spencer, Prince William, Prince Harry, and Prince Charles at Princess Diana’s 1997 funeral.Credit: Getty
A friend who has been with the king all week told The Sunday Times, “He is saddened that the sorrows of old are being dragged up again.” An aide added, “The king was rather more concerned about the future of mankind than the unkind claims of one man picking at the scars of the past.”
“It is an irony lost on no one, except perhaps the author, that a man who once accused the media of hounding Diana to the grave has now peddled in the public bazaar what little remained of her privacy,” a friend of the king said.
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Even aides don’t believe that money is Spencer’s motivation behind writing Swan Song. “There’s usually a painting or a patch of land he can sell off to pay the alimony bills,” the aide said, no doubt taking a swipe at the fact that Spencer is on his fourth marriage. “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s more that, contrary to some public expectations and perhaps a few private hopes, the king and queen [Camilla] have proved rather adept and popular in their new roles. God knows they have not had their troubles to seek these past years. But partly through the way they have dealt with it all, Britain and the wider world has come to have a good deal of fondness and respect for them both. I suspect that’s what Spencer can’t bear. So out have come the crested carving knives.”
Queen Camilla and King Charles at the White House in Washington, D.C. on April 30, 2026.Credit: Getty Images
Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles—now Queen Camilla—famously had an extramarital affair throughout most of Charles’s marriage to Diana, which lasted from 1981 until their divorce was finalized in 1996. Diana died the next year at just 36 years old.
Currently, the king remains at Balmoral, staying at Birkhall, his home there with Camilla. As for how this melee over Swan Song could affect the king’s legacy, a friend told The Sunday Times, “It dents the bonnet but doesn’t crack the chassis. Ultimately, for all the claim and counterclaim, I suspect most people in the real world either don’t care about the whole thing or, if they do, they will make up their own minds about the reliability and morality of a much-married man like Charles Spencer. And they will see a king and a queen simply getting on with the job in tough times, because ultimately, that’s what really matters.”
In The Sunday Times, one royal source said that Spencer’s depiction of the king as “heartless doesn’t ring true.” Another source who knows the monarch well told the outlet, “It is all a soap opera. He will weather this storm by ploughing on with his recalibrated view of monarchy, reckoning that a lot of people are bored by the continuing saga over Diana. I’m not convinced there is a crisis. Spencer will do damage, but it will fade. It will be vitiated by the king doing his job without being fazed.”
King Charles on May 1, 2026.Credit: Getty
“They just have to batten down the hatches on Spencer’s book,” a royal source said. “It comes out, it gets loads of publicity for a few weeks, it’s very uncomfortable, then people move on. But it doesn’t undermine him as a monarch.”
Royal biographer Katie Nicholl told Hello! that the king’s statement last week is an example of the monarch “not sitting back and taking it” and an example of Charles “establishing very clear boundaries.”
“I think this is the king’s way of perhaps taking hold of a narrative before it can run away and take on a new meaning altogether,” she continued. “So you’re seeing them being proactive rather than reactive.” Nicholl added, “I think we are seeing an institution at a moment of change.”
Spencer has said that he was motivated to write Swan Song as the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death approaches next summer and “to tell the truth about Diana and all she had to put up with in her public life through the eyes of the brother who grew up with her.”
Princess Diana visiting Liverpool, England.Credit: Getty
Charles Spencer and Diana Spencer in 1968.Credit: Getty
Spencer insisted that he had “every right to write about my own sister,” adding, “I can tell you that Diana would be cheering from the rafters at this book. I have no doubt about that.”
“She loved it when we stuck up for one another,” he added.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
