‘I’m telling the truth’: Earl Spencer doubles down on claims of reaction to Diana’s death

Earl Charles Spencer has doubled down on his bombshell claims in the upcoming book about his late sister Princess Diana in two new interviews.

Earlier in the week, a serialisation of Swan Song: Diana, My Sister revealed Earl Spencer alleged in the book that then-Prince Charles “sounded giddily elated, like a lottery winner” at news of his ex-wife’s death in 1997.

Another extract of the book claimed the now King told his former brother-in-law the world would “forget her soon enough”, leading to a rare and blistering rebuke from Buckingham Palace.

“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 colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss,” a palace spokesperson said on behalf of King Charles.

On Friday – just hours after the next extract of his book was published, alleging Queen Elizabeth offered to give Diana back her HRH title after her funeral – Earl Spencer said he is the one “telling the truth” in the Charles v Charles debate.

In the first sit-down interview to air ahead of his book’s launch next week, Earl Spencer told the BBC he’d only had two phone calls with Prince Charles in his life and that was one of them, hence his sharp recollection almost 30 years later.

“I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said,” Earl Spencer told reporter Laura Kuenssberg.

“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.”

Diana’s brother said the Buckingham Palace statement, while seemingly firm in their rejection of his claims didn’t outright refute them.

“They’ve sort of smudged that one, haven’t they? They’ve said that recollections may vary,” he said.

Earl Spencer doubled down on his claims around what was said in that phone call during the BBC interview, saying “it was so monstrous” that he told friends and family about it straight away.

Diana’s brother, now 62, said the then-Prince of Wales “went ballistic” and  “ranted for a while” before saying “we’ll forget her soon enough”. The Earl recalled after a “stunned silence” he hung up on the heir.

Meanwhile, a preview of an interview to air on CBS Sunday Morning this weekend, aired on CBS Mornings on Friday.

In that clip, Earl Spencer told reporter Mark Phillips his former brother-in-law sounded “excited in an upbeat way” during that call.

“Obviously, I’m not justifying or criticising,” he said. “I’m just reporting that’s the fact.”

Earl Spencer also doubled down on his claims in the book that his young nephews at the time shouldn’t have been made to walk behind their mother’s coffin, suggesting this could have helped Prince Harry especially.

“I just wonder if a gentler, more understanding treatment of his grief then might have helped him,” he told CBS News.

“That everyone might have found a happier course ahead.”

Buckingham Palace refused to comment on these latest Earl Spencer interviews.

However, a number of royal insiders have thrown doubt over the Earl’s claims.

Among them, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, who recalled this week talking to Diana weeks before her death and hearing that the former princess and her ex-husband were getting along so well after their divorce she admitted she “would go back to Charles in a heartbeat”.

“At the end of Diana’s life, she and Charles were on the best terms they’d been for a very long time,” The Palace Papers author told Telegraph UK.

“Charles got into the habit of dropping in on her at Kensington Palace and they would have tea and a sort of rueful exchange. They even had some laughs together.”

Swan Song: Diana, My Sister is being released in the lead up to the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death next year and marks the first time Earl Spencer’s spoken at length about his sister.

The book also contains claims Prince Charles told Earl Spencer he didn’t love Diana on the eve of their wedding, and has more details about Diana’s eating disorder as well as claims the former Princess of Wales contemplated suicide more than once.