Few lives have been scrutinised as relentlessly as Diana, Princess of Wales’s, and yet her younger brother believes much of the story has been polished in ways that miss the real woman. In Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, Earl Spencer turns his memories into a book that is equal parts love letter, elegy and accusation. The memoir arrives with painful timing, reopening a grief that has never really healed. Among the most striking claims is the suggestion that King Charles said, shortly after Diana’s death, that “we’ll forget her soon enough.” Buckingham Palace has denied this, and it has reignited a familiar war of words. But Spencer insists he is not out to scandalise; he is trying to hold on to a sister he lost. He recalls the girl who laughed, who worried, who seemed to feel everything too much. He also remembers the anguish of watching her enter a family that, in his telling, never quite embraced her. For Spencer, writing is a way of keeping Diana human rather than letting her become a portrait on a commemorative plate. The book is not a biography. It is a brother’s testimony, told with tenderness and anger, and it asks the rest of us to remember that behind the princess there was a woman of warmth, vulnerability and fierce love for her sons.
One of the most difficult passages involves Prince Charles’s telephone call to Spencer three days after Diana’s death in Paris. The world was still staggering from the news; Spencer writes that he could barely make sense of the phones ringing and the impossible condolences. Then Charles came on the line. Instead of sounding shocked or grief-stricken, Spencer says, he sounded “giddily elated—like a lottery winner.” The prince reportedly explained, in a strangely matter-of-fact way, that he had gone to William’s and Harry’s bedrooms at Balmoral that morning to tell them their mother was dead. Spencer was taken aback by the emotional mismatch. Looking back, he came to believe Charles was not celebrating Diana’s death but was thinking more of how this tragedy might free him to marry the woman he loved. Whether or not that interpretation is fair, the memory captures something cruel about the collision between private family tragedy and public royal machinery. In a single phone call, Spencer saw a man who was still a father and a husband, but also a man trapped in an impossible relationship with a wife the world adored and a woman he loved in the shadows. It is a story about the ways grief can arrive in strange clothes, and about how a few words on a telephone can shape a relationship for decades.
Later, Spencer turns to an encounter at his own father’s funeral, a moment that seemed to reveal a very different side of the King. John Spencer had died, and his coffin was carried into the church by six long-serving staff members. Spencer was overwhelmed by the sight, catching his breath and weeping. His sister Sarah reached out and touched his shoulder, a small gesture of support. Then Prince Charles, standing opposite, suddenly remarked: “You’re so lucky.” Spencer asked if he had heard correctly. Charles elaborated: “You’re just so lucky—you know, inheriting when you’re so young!” He went on to complain that he was forty-three and employed fifty people, but his parents still treated him like a child. To make his point, he stamped his foot. Spencer could not help noticing how much the gesture looked like a petulant child’s. The conversation, if it happened as described, seems almost too strange to be true. But grief and envy can make people say things they later regret. Charles may simply have been thinking aloud about his own frustrated position, unable to see that Spencer was in the middle of burying his father. Spencer, for his part, was not quick to condemn. He recounts the episode with a kind of bewildered sadness, as if he had glimpsed something fragile and embarrassing in the future King, another man who had always had everything and yet was still hungry for approval.
Amid the criticism and the conflict, Spencer wants to make sure no one forgets what kind of mother Diana was. He calls her the best mother he has ever known. In his memory, she was determined to give William and Harry the childhood she had not entirely had herself—a childhood full of love, laughter and ordinary experiences. She wanted her boys to become the best versions of themselves, not merely acceptable princes. Spencer writes that the public could rest easier knowing that, whatever the royal family’s flaws, Diana was there to give her sons values, insight and emotional security that previous generations of princes had been denied. But after her death, that reassurance vanished. Spencer was left wondering what would happen to the two boys. They were still young enough to be influenced, perhaps to forget her guidance. At exactly the moment they seemed set on an enlightened path their mother had charted, would they be pulled back into the monarchy’s archaic ways? He feared the cold traditions of royalty might still root out the seeds Diana had planted. That question has haunted the years since. Watching Harry and William forge their own paths, sometimes in painful public splits, it is hard not to see the echo of Diana in their choices—and also, occasionally, the chill she was trying to protect them from. Spencer’s words are a reminder that the princess was not merely a fashion icon or a tragic figure. She was a mother who loved her children with an intensity that could not be erased by protocol.
Even before the wedding, Spencer says, Diana’s love story was already breaking her heart. Months before the royal wedding, she was at a party with Elton John and her family, hoping to be reunited with Charles, who had just got back from New York. But he showed almost no interest in her. She had dreamed of standing at his side at Windsor Castle; instead she spent the evening nursing a quiet pain. Eventually she went to her father and told him she could not marry Charles, because the man clearly did not love her. It was a moment of terrifying honesty for a young woman caught in a fairy tale that was already going wrong. She went ahead with the wedding anyway, and the world watched as she smiled in the carriage. Spencer’s account makes that famous day feel less like a celebration and more like a sacrifice. Later, another painful story: Diana confided in him that Mohamed Fayed, the father of Dodi, had groped her. According to Spencer, Fayed dropped a hand onto her buttocks and squeezed them while making a lewd joke about “father-in-law gets first go” in Egypt. Diana laughed when recounting the ghastly episode, but she had been warned about what kind of man Dodi’s father truly was. It is a small, ugly detail in a life full of betrayal. The fact that Diana could laugh about it, even as she was repulsed, speaks to her strange ability to turn horror into a story she could survive. But it also shows how often she was treated as property, even by people who claimed to care for her.
Unsurprisingly, the book has already caused an uproar. Buckingham Palace has denied the central accusation about the King’s comments. Piers Morgan has threatened to sue over what he calls “salacious” claims, and the book is already being sold at half price just hours after release. The controversy will continue, and the arguments about who owns the story of Diana’s life and death will not settle easily. What Spencer has done is take a place in that argument, offering his own memories as evidence that the woman he loved deserves more than easy myth. He is not impartial, of course. A brother’s grief is never impartial. Yet that is exactly why the book feels so human. It is not a historian’s account or a journalist’s investigation. It is a man trying to make sense of the sister he lost, and of the family that he believes failed her. Some readers will question his memories; others will feel he has been brutally honest. But perhaps the most important thing about Swan Song is that it refuses to let Diana become simply a name in a headline. It brings her back to life as a woman who danced at parties, cried over love, worried about her children, laughed at inappropriate jokes and endured graceless men. In doing so, Earl Spencer gives the rest of us a chance to remember her not as a ghost but as a person—and to see the royal family through the eyes of someone who loved her long before the world did.
