In the opening pages of Swan Song: Diana, my sister, Charles Spencer makes a vow: he will “tell things how I remember them, lay them down for good, once and for all.” It is a lovely promise, and roughly the entire economy of Diana remembrance exists to make sure he cannot keep it.
The book, by the younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, arrived Tuesday into what can fairly be described as a mad swirl of headlines — nearly 29 years after her sudden death in 1997, and one year short of an anniversary the documentary industry has been planning for like a lunar landing.
The claims driving the swirl are serious. Spencer writes that after Diana’s death, King Charles said his former wife would soon be forgotten — the book’s most incendiary assertion, and the one that got out first. Diana, he says, told him that Charles had said he was not in love with her before their wedding. He writes that Queen Elizabeth offered to restore Diana’s HRH title shortly after her death, and that he believed the royals were not properly supporting the younger of Diana’s sons, Prince Harry, in the days immediately after she died.
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 recognize, even many years after such a loss
That was Buckingham Palace, breaking its own no-comment rule within days of the first excerpt — the institutional equivalent of leaving the throne room to argue with a hedge. Royal-watchers immediately reached for the family precedent, Queen Elizabeth’s “recollections may vary,” issued after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. The formula has been refined: where the late queen merely suggested your memories might wobble, her son’s household now suggests your grief is doing the wobbling for you. It may be the most Windsor sentence ever composed — condolences and a subpoena in a single breath.
Beneath the crossfire sits the question anyone opening the book is actually asking: what was she like? On the early years, Spencer delivers. Diana kept her room in perfect order. She tended her stuffed toys with devotion. She loved flowers. There is darkness too — he recounts abuse at the hands of a nanny — and one splendidly human moment of sibling war, when Diana shoved him off his bike. The detail thins as the years pass, because his proximity to her thinned; he readily acknowledges the family fell out with Diana “on many occasions.”
The detail returns, thick and sudden, at the end. Spencer signals it early: the Round Oval, an ornamental lake in the parkland of Althorp, the family estate, was Diana’s “favourite spot,” with a classical temple at its far end. “Nobody ever seemed to disturb this spot, and it was where we two youngest children of the family felt safe from the world,” he writes. “It was our happy spot.” It is there, by that water, that she is buried.
The book is structured around the eulogy Spencer delivered in Westminster Abbey on Sept. 6, 1997 — the fiery address in which he vowed that William and Harry’s “blood family” would protect them and carry on Diana’s “imaginative and loving” legacy. Each chapter opens with phrases from that speech. “As with my eulogy, I want to speak on Diana’s behalf,” he writes. But the structure is only partly under control, bouncing around in time and place, so the overall portrait proves harder to hold than the individual moments deserve. His stated purpose — to give Diana “hope and applause” — is itself an odd gift for someone gone almost thirty years, and he keeps straying from it into his abiding grievances with the press, above all the paparazzi’s relentless pursuit of his sister. That outrage is genuine and widely shared, not least by her sons; it just doesn’t leave much room for applause.
Why now? Spencer says he is writing because, with the 30th anniversary approaching, he has spent years declining “endless, repeated requests to appear in documentaries about her” — including, he notes, from her biographer Andrew Morton and from an unnamed nephew, a detail that promptly set off the inevitable speculation he means Harry. Some have suggested his motives are financial; he denies it. Whatever the motive, the market he is recusing himself from will not miss a beat. More documentaries, more dramas, more books, at varying distances from fact, are already guaranteed by the calendar alone.
Spencer may indeed have said his last public word about his sister. But “once and for all” requires the audience to stop asking, and the audience has spent three decades demonstrating the opposite. He buried her at the one spot on the estate where the world never intruded; the world has been tramping down to the Oval ever since. “Once and for all,” it turns out, is a one-person treaty.