Buckingham Palace blasts Charles Spencer: grief clouds reason & colors memory

Wednesday afternoon, the Daily Mail released the first excerpt from Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, a semi-memoir about his sister, Princess Diana. The first part of the Mail’s serialization was incendiary! The Earl Spencer claims that on a phone call over Diana’s funeral arrangements, the two men disagreed over whether Prince Harry and Prince William should walk behind their mother’s casket. The Earl was obviously very much against it, but then-Prince Charles basically unleashed a lengthy rant about Diana and what was then an outpouring of national grief. Charles Spencer wrote: “…Then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. ‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough!’” Well, soon after the Mail published their exclusive, guess who complained and explained?

In the book, Spencer, 62, recounts a phone conversation with then-Prince Charles shortly after Diana’s death on Aug. 31, 1997. The exchange got heated, with Spencer writing, “Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting. Then he stopped.”

“I assumed the pause signaled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death,” Spencer writes. “ ‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough!’ ”

A statement from a palace spokesperson released shortly after the story went live said, “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.”

[From People]

Not the palace trying to gaslight Diana’s brother in the exact same way they gaslit Diana!! All of that is palace-speak for “don’t believe Diana’s brother, all of the Spencers are bugf–k crazy.” As I said in the previous story, this not only makes the current king look like a complete psycho. This is yet another undoing of decades of careful, expensive efforts to remake King Charles’ image. He’s been doing all of this since the ‘90s, even before Diana’s death. He’s hired skilled PR people and they’ve spent decades trying to rewrite Charles’ image specifically around Diana’s death and his reaction to it (not to mention the monarchy’s reaction).

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.