Earl Spencer questions if King Charles ‘livid or embarrassed’ after Palace assertion
Ahead of his forthcoming bombshell memoir on his late sister Princess Diana, Earl Spencer has broken his silence on the Buckingham Palace statement in response to his allegations on King Charles’ conduct following her death
The then Prince Charles with Earl Spencer, the brother of Princess Diana (Image: PA)
Earl Spencer has questioned whether King Charles was “furious or is he embarrassed” after Buckingham Palace released a statement on his bombshell claims, during a BBC interview.
The Earl broke his silence on the royal reaction to his claims and has insisted he is “telling the truth” about a claim in his new book. He alleges that the King told him that his sister Diana would be forgotten “soon enough” following her death, among other claims.
He claimed the King went “ballistic” before telling him “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”, days after Diana’s death in 1997. He described the King’s comments “monstrous” to the BBC.
Earl Spencer with then Prince Charles, Harry and William at the funeral of his sister Princess Diana(Image: POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The Palace responded to the comments earlier this week claiming “fraternal grief can cloud reason”.
Speaking to BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Earl Spencer added “Well, is he furious? Is he furious or is he embarrassed?” in his first public reaction to the statement.
He continued: ““I’ve only ever had two calls on the line with Prince Charles at any stage of my life.
“I was hyper-alert to what he was saying, and those are precisely the words 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.”
Earl Spencer defended the claims in an interview with the BBC(Image: BBC)
Earl Spencer further claimed in his memoir of his sister, which extracts off have been published by the Daily Mial, that the King sounded “giddily elated… like a lottery winner” when he rang the earl following the princess’ death.
In other passages of the book, the earl described how his sister drove “more than once” to the cliffs at Beachy Head in East Sussex and was “contemplating ending it all”, adding that “her love for her sons stopped her from going further”.
The excerpt went on to claim Diana told her brother “my husband is in love with his valet” after telling him she was going to get divorced.
The former brother-in-law of King Charles made the explosive claims about Diana(Image: GETTY)
The Earl continued the interview with the BBC by describing the call after stating that his sister would not have wanted a young Prince Harry and William walking behind the funeral. The Princes did walk behind with their father but the call with Charles before the day saw the Earl claim he hung up on the King.
Earl Spencer told the BBC: “He went ballistic, would be the right term, and started really going for my family as a whole, about their sense of duty, not being adequate enough, and ranted for a while, I have no idea how long, but it was a significant period, and I just listened.
“And then he stopped, and I thought, ‘Oh now he’s gonna pull himself together and say something more appropriate’, and then he said, ‘We’ll forget her soon enough’.”
He added: “I really was so stunned, and I just, after a stunned silence, I said, ‘I cannot believe you just said that’, and I hung up on him.”
The palace has yet to respond to the latest claims.
