Charles Spencer: ‘It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King’

Charles, the Earl Spencer, is such a spectacularly unique critic of King Charles and the monarchy. For the most part, even the biggest critics of the monarchy in general or the king in particular have to play the game or have to fight for access or standing. Many are written off as kooks or they’re casually delegitimized by the British establishment. That cannot happen with Charles Spencer – his earldom is one of the most powerful in England, and he’s always been a bestselling author and historian in good standing. People also know that he was close to his sister Diana, and that Diana told him about her life in real time. He’s so clearly trying to add to his family’s historical record before he’s gone and before the king is gone as well. Add to all of that, Charles Spencer is winning the IDGAF War. He’s giving interviews in real time, pushing back on the king and the palace. Speaking of:

Earl Spencer last night accused King Charles of ‘gaslighting’ him in a dramatic escalation of their furious row over Princess Diana. Speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday, the earl denied that he wrote his bombshell memoir because he was motivated by money and said his late sister would be ‘cheering from the rafters’ at his book. The Royal Family is reeling from a string of explosive claims in the memoir – entitled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – after extracts were exclusively published by the Mail last week.

Earl Spencer’s incendiary claim that – days after Diana’s 1997 death – the then Prince Charles told him: ‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough’ provoked a highly unusual response from the Palace. But in a statement, a Palace spokesman last week questioned the veracity of Earl Spencer’s explosive account and said that fraternal grief can ‘cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory’.

Now, in his first newspaper comments since the war of words erupted, Earl Spencer, 62, has hit back, describing the Palace’s statement as gaslighting, a form of psychological abuse where the victim is manipulated into questioning what they know to be true. He also said the Palace’s statement was a ‘poor imitation’ of Queen Elizabeth’s famous ‘recollections may vary’ retort to Harry and Meghan after their interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.

‘It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King,’ he said. ‘It was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the King being able to deny what I’d said. I also thought it was a rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote, which was a much more elegant way of putting things, but in these circumstances entirely out of place.’

Writing in today’s MoS, the Mail’s Richard Kay – one of Diana’s most trusted confidants – recalls Earl Spencer telling him, in the week before the Princess’s funeral, that there had been a ‘furious row’ and that Prince Charles had been ‘utterly pathetic’.

Earl Spencer last night said: ‘I am a historian – I appreciate that a lot of the public don’t know that – and my primary responsibility as a historian is to tell the truth. My motivation in this book has been to tell the truth about Diana and all she had to put up with in her public life through the eyes of the brother who grew up with her. Along the way I’ve been able to deal with various myths that have grown up which needed to be dealt with once and for all. I’m in my sixties, neither of my parents made it to 70 and I wanted to do this while I could.’

Some royal commentators have claimed the earl is ‘cashing in’ on his late sister’s memory. Charles Spencer, however, strenuously denied that his motivations in publishing the book are financial.

‘Money has never even been the remotest consideration in my choosing to write my tribute to Diana,’ he said. ‘Diana always had an expression which is don’t judge others by yourselves – and I think this applies to anyone who accuses me of something so ridiculous.’

[From The Daily Mail]

“…Because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the King being able to deny what I’d said….” Exactly. The palace can’t say outright that Charles Spencer lied, because if they did that, it becomes a real battle of historians and people who were actually there, and actually know what King Charles was like in the 1990s. Beyond of the PR gurus who were once on the king’s staff, people who actually knew and know the king will absolutely admit that Spencer’s recollections of the king at that time sound completely in character. A lot of people remember how the Windsors had to be dragged kicking and screaming into acting right. A lot of people remember how then-Prince Charles spent years gaslighting Diana and then lying about what he and Camilla did to her.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, cover courtesy of the Mail.