Memoir by Princess Diana's brother goes on sale after rocking UK monarchy
Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, has reignited controversy surrounding the late royal’s marriage, death and relationship with King Charles III in a new memoir.
An employee puts out copies of "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister", Charles Spencer's book about his late sister Princess Diana, into a window display at a bookstore in central London on September 22, 2026. (AFP)
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LONDON — Charles Spencer's book about his late sister Princess Diana, packed with explosive claims concerning King Charles III that have rocked Britain's monarchy, went on sale Tuesday.
"Swan Song: Diana, My Sister", a memoir written by Diana's younger brother, has been published by Penguin in various English-speaking countries and translated into 12 languages.
Billed as chronicling her life from his perspective, Spencer's 384-page book comes almost three decades after Diana was killed in a 1997 car crash in Paris.
Extracts serialised in the British tabloid the Daily Mail last week have triggered sensational headlines around allegations involving her ex-husband King Charles.
Charles issued a rare rebuttal after Spencer wrote that the then Prince of Wales told him in a phone call shortly after Diana's death: "Rest assured, we'll forget her soon enough."
Spencer also claimed Charles had "sounded giddily elated, like a lottery winner" at the news of her demise.
"I'm looking forward to reading it," self-described Diana fan Mary Scheible, 69, from the United States, told AFP as she bought a copy from a bookshop while visiting London.
"What I've seen are sentences taken maybe out of context. So I want to read the book to get the full story and then make my opinion."
Spencer, 62, who has worked as a US television journalist, has said he wrote the memoir to correct "untruths that have become accepted over time".
'Fraternal grief'
But despite the recent publicity, the book only sat in 12th position in Amazon UK's non-fiction bestseller list Tuesday.
Diana's death, aged just 36, sparked an outpouring of grief in Britain and beyond for the woman dubbed "the people's princess".
And it triggered accusations that the then monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, failed to respond swiftly with empathy and understanding.
Spencer told the BBC that Charles "went ballistic" after he insisted Diana would not have wanted her sons, princes William and Harry, to walk behind her coffin in her funeral procession. They were then aged 15 and 12, respectively.
A Buckingham Palace spokesperson last week issued a rare reaction from the 77-year-old king.
"His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss," it stated.
But Spencer insisted to the BBC that Charles told him Diana would soon be forgotten, saying "those are exactly the words he said".
He apologised, however, to former tabloid editor Piers Morgan for factual errors about him in the book, while doubling down on some aspects of his account of a phone conversation.
Morgan, who has pledged to sue despite the apology, added: "If Earl Spencer can be so incredibly, defamatorily wrong about such basic facts involving me, well, why should we believe anything else he puts in this book?"
He detailed how she once drove down to a clifftop in southern England notorious as a place where people killed themselves, but that her love for her sons "stopped her from going further".
'Distraught'
After Diana's death, Charles later married his long-time mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, who is now the queen.
In another passage, Spencer wrote Diana had felt "revulsion" for Mohamed Al-Fayed, the father of her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, who was also killed in the Paris crash.
He said she claimed the late Harrods owner, who has been accused of large-scale rape and other sexual abuse, had groped her and made sexually suggestive comments.
Royal experts have questioned some of the book's claims.
Andrew Morton, author of the 1992 book "Diana: Her True Story," in a comment in The Times, wrote that Spencer's claims about the phone call with Charles were "incendiary and disputed".
Speaking to the BBC, royal commentator Jennie Bond argued that the memoir was "vindictive".
After Diana's death, Spencer accused the media of having "blood on their hands".
In his raw eulogy at Diana's funeral, he vowed to always look out for her two sons.