Sept. 18, 2026
Another Bombshell From Princess Di’s Brother: King Charles “Giddily Elated” After Diana’s Death
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RSS Feed More shocking excerpts have been released from “Sean Song: Diana, My Sister.” The brother of Princess Dianna, Charles Spencer, provided new context and attributed more cold and hurtful quotes to then Prince Charles. Spencer describes some in the Palace as “relieved” upon hearing the news of Diana’s death.
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00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey there, folks. It is Friday, September 18th, and Princess Diana's brother is releasing more excerpts from his bombshell upcoming book. You tell us if the new excerpts are worse for the king than the first one. And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ Ropes. I'll pose that question to you first, right? That first excerpt that came out said that The king said, we'll get over her death soon. That was the first one. That headline was everywhere. Now, they've released some new excerpts from the book. Just ask you, first of all, do these sound worse than the first one did?
00:00:38
Speaker 2: Collectively, yes, just because it paints a larger picture and it's not a pretty one. It's not a pretty one of all many of the royal families. He didn't get specific with naming who acted the way he claims they did and who didn't, but certainly King Charles does not come out looking good in this at all, not even a little bit.
00:01:02
Speaker 1: I thought the one excerpt they released about him saying that we'll get over her death soon enough, that was gonna be the worst thing. I thought they hit us with that one first and nothing more was coming.
00:01:12
Speaker 2: Ooh, weesh. Yeah, a lot of times we see that in books, right? They pick out one and pretty much the only controversial statement, sell a book on that, and then you realize, oh, none of it is even that bad. Well, actually, these new excerpts that were released, ooh, this and maybe the palace, Buckingham Palace, knew this was all coming out and they knew what Charles Spencer had said before previously.
00:01:37
Speaker 1: Then why, it seems like they didn't know, like this is a wave now. He didn't just drop everything and let them respond once. The palace has already responded to the first excerpt.
00:01:48
Speaker 2: They can't respond again.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: Can't keep going.
00:01:50
Speaker 2: It was a rare thing for them to do it in the first place. And now that more excerpts have come out, they're just going to have to let their original statement stand. And they had to know that in this book there had to be more. But I even wasn't prepared for how chilling some of these exchanges are. as Charles Spencer remembers it, but basically... He's a little brother, right?
00:02:10
Speaker 1: He was a little brother, right?
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yes, he was her younger brother, and he says some royals in the palace were what he called relieved that Diana was gone, and gleeful even. He uses ways to describe how they were reacting, and it is terrible to imagine.
00:02:28
Speaker 1: That word is tough.
00:02:30
Speaker 2: Gleeful.
00:02:31
Speaker 1: They use gleeful. Giddily.
00:02:33
Speaker 2: Giddily.
00:02:33
Speaker 1: Rose, that's a tough word.
00:02:34
Speaker 2: Giddily, you're right.
00:02:35
Speaker 1: Giddily. The death of Princess Di when the world's heart was breaking. You're telling me the royals were giddily reacting to this? Rose, that word is everywhere. End quote. Giddily.
00:02:46
Speaker 2: Giddily. Yes. And they also claim, or he claims, Charles Spencer claims, that the royal family denied Diana the one thing she wanted played at her funeral. They refused. So we can get into some of these new excerpts because I have them here right in front of me. These are quotes from the book, and this is going to be released next week, Swan Song, Diana, My Sister, from Charles Spencer. I'll let you react to some of these, babe. He writes, Diana remained theirs. In Buckingham Palace's eyes, even in death, her family, despite her divorce, were simply expected to fall into line with any royal decisions.
00:03:28
Speaker 1: Again, babe, this all, this is a thing. Nobody's going to have a tough time believing this stuff. It all reads. It's what we've been told. It's what we've been hearing about. It's what we've been entertained by. All these streaming shows about the, right? It's what Meghan Markle has been telling us for the past six plus years, right? So, This is stuff, it's tough for people to see. It's like, ah, he's just making stuff up.
00:03:50
Speaker 2: I know, if we, I watched The Crown, I watched The Queen. If you start watching any of these historical fictionalized series, I mean, it all has the same tone to it.
00:04:02
Speaker 1: Yes, he is continuing that theme with what he's saying, which makes it not a problem. stretch robes for people to believe what he's saying. Wow.
00:04:10
Speaker 2: So he goes on to say, my sisters knew that Diana had always wanted Mozart's Requiem to be played for her after her death. But when I passed this on, it was rejected as a possibility. No part of a Requiem can be played at a Church of England funeral, I was told. I later found out that was not the case. The first of several untruths that the authorities would push my way at the time. So they're liars and they want it their way and their way alone.
00:04:38
Speaker 1: A dead woman just wanted a song and y'all wouldn't play it for her is how I read that. And that's how the public, it's that simple. This lady we love in death wanted one thing. Y'all wouldn't give her.
00:04:51
Speaker 2: Charles Spencer also wrote that while some in the royal inner circle were kind, quote, there were others in the palace I already knew who were relieved, indeed pleased. that she had gone. Wow. And he didn't just say that was King Charles or Prince Charles at the time. He said others, plural, were relieved, indeed, pleased that she had gone.
00:05:17
Speaker 1: So I guess that's one of those things, right? Robes that helps sell a book. Because he's going to be on a book tour. And he's going to be asked that question a million times. Who are you talking about?
00:05:27
Speaker 2: Absolutely. And look, he'll be, I'm sure, cheeky about it and not say, but We can guess who he's speaking of. And then he gets into detail that he alluded to when that first excerpt was released about this feud that he had with then Prince Charles over William, young William and Harry, walking behind Diana's coffin. We remember that. Of course. And Harry was so little at the time. Was he 11?
00:05:54
Speaker 1: He was 12.
00:05:55
Speaker 2: They were 15 and 12. 15 and 12. But for whatever reason, they looked younger than that. Both of them did.
00:06:00
Speaker 1: Harry looked really young.
00:06:01
Speaker 2: He looked like a baby. So this is the exchange as Charles Spencer writes it. Well, that's not going to happen, I said in a matter-of-fact tone. It was a suggestion that struck me as utterly barbaric and quite out of the question. He told Charles, Diana, quote, would never have wanted to put them through anything so ghastly. This is what Charles said in response. I gather you've said you don't want William and Harry to walk behind Diana's coffin. Well, of course not, sir. Diana would never have wanted that. Charles said he did it at the funeral for his uncle, Lord Mountbatten. Spencer said, but you were 30, sir, and he wasn't your mother. He went nuts. That's the problem with your family. They've got no bloody sense of duty before he descended into a general rage. So he's just describing this anger. And that's when then this is all the setup to what we got that one excerpt yesterday. 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. Rest assured, he hissed, we'll forget her soon enough. I was so stunned that it took me a few seconds to reply. I can't believe you just said that, I said flatly before hanging up. So now you get the full picture of what he says happened and it really, it just, It packs a punch.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: It makes the king sound so bad. And this is all, look, has he been holding on to this pain and been wanting to say this for 30 years?
00:07:49
Speaker 2: It sounds like it. And he even said at the end of the press release, basically, that he had, after he did the audio book, so if you, you can read the book if you want, but I, you know me, I love an audio book. And I especially love it when the author reads the book. But he said after he finished it, he felt, At total peace because he said he knew that Diana would have approved of every single word of it. But yes, I think the worst excerpt that came out yesterday was that he said Prince Charles sounded giddily elated like a lottery winner in a phone call after his sister died.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: I don't know. How are they going to take this, Robes? The public. The public. How's the British public going to receive this, babe? That woman is beloved. She's as close to a saint, not connected to the church, as you're going to get, probably, for a lot of people in the world. Rose, the current king of England, the royal family. Rose, they always have a scandal or this or that. You still got Andrew's thing floating around. You got strife with the boys. You got strife with the dad. Harry just moved back. There's always some stuff happening. And they try to keep the king away from it just like they try to keep the queen away from it. Rose, she is the most consequential royal of our lifetime, does she not? Okay, we can argue the queen, fine. But as far as popularity and reach and impact, she's it.
00:09:21
Speaker 2: She's the heart of the royal family. And when you go after the heart.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: I didn't have one.
00:09:26
Speaker 2: She did. She humanized the royal family. She made everyone feel like We understood them. They weren't so disconnected from the rest of us. She brought them to us. She was the bridge.
00:09:39
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: And to hear that the current king was giddy when she died.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: Happy she's dead. Relieved. Man, come on.
00:09:46
Speaker 2: That's. It's horrific.
00:09:47
Speaker 1: How many more statements? They might have to. Babe, this is. How much more is there?
00:09:51
Speaker 2: It's tough. Well, how about this? When we come back, here's the interesting thing. We had said that you and I, well, we haven't. And now I totally want to.
00:09:59
Speaker 1: Harry.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: Book Spare. There is an excerpt from Harry's Book Spare that literally backs up what Charles has written. We're going to tell you what that is, and we'll remind you once again of the very cleverly written Buckingham Palace Statement. Welcome back, everyone, to Amy and TJ. We are going over the latest excerpts released in Charles Spencer's new book, Swan Song, Diana, My Sister, out next week, where he details, and he pays homage to his sister's life, but the really incendiary parts of this book are the details that he writes about in the days following Diana's tragic death back in 1997.
00:10:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, all this stuff he's talking about is not, this was like immediate aftermath stuff we're talking about. Not days, this is... Like right after, they're expressing glee even to the brother, to the family?
00:11:01
Speaker 2: Where he hung up on then Prince Charles, essentially, because he was so upset with him. And in that, where he recounted that exchange about the boys walking behind the coffin, it's so interesting. If you go back into Harry's book, Spare, he has a very similar, he writes about a very similar back and forth. And so in a way, people are saying, look, Harry didn't know that his uncle was writing this book, or certainly they didn't compare notes, you wouldn't imagine, but it's a similar account. So this is how Harry wrote about that in his book. It seemed a lot to ask of two young boys. Several adults were aghast. Mummy's brother, Uncle Charles, raised hell. You can't make these boys walk behind their mother's coffin. It's barbaric. An alternative plan was proposed. Prince William would walk alone. He was 15 after all. Leave the younger one out of it. Spare the spare. But the answer came back. It must be both princes. To garner sympathy, presumably. Uncle Charles was furious, but I wasn't. I didn't want Willie to undergo an ordeal like that without me. Had the roles been reversed, he'd never have wanted me, indeed allowed me, to go it alone. It's kind of interesting, right? You have Harry remembering it from his vantage point, and even he remembers it. how upset his uncle was. That was known to the boys.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: It's, damn, it's a damn shame. Because what Harry is describing there is the thing we would love to see now. Some fraternal camaraderie, right? That I wouldn't let my brother do that alone. My brother wouldn't let me do that alone, right? You're hearing it, like you said, wrote the same situation from different perspectives. And I'm sure if King Charles got to tell the story, The facts might line up, but from his perspective, he might explain it in such a way why this was important, important for the nation, important for everybody to see him and to see them, those boys at the time. I would listen to that argument, baby. This is the royal family, this is duty, and this is different. And this was a part of everybody's healing. Look, if those are my kids, don't get me wrong, I would say, hell no, I'm not putting my 12-year-old through that. But, Ro, this is an interesting one. I would love to hear them actually explain this from the royal side.
00:13:20
Speaker 2: Right? And according to Charles.
00:13:21
Speaker 1: We won't, though, hear that.
00:13:22
Speaker 2: We won't. But the only thing we'll hear is Charles is... Like how he recounted Prince Charles, now King Charles, how he reacted. And to that exact point, he said, that's a problem with your family. They've got no bloody sense of duty. And he said, I had to do it for my uncle... I had to walk behind when I was, you know, he was 30. I guess there was a difference. He was like, I had to do it. My sons will do it. There is this sense of duty within the royal family that he said basically flat out to Charles, you don't get it. You don't understand it. The royal family has a different responsibility. And so.
00:13:57
Speaker 1: Sounds like what they've been trying to tell Meghan Markle for the past seven, eight years. Yes.
00:14:02
Speaker 2: And it is a difficult thing perhaps for us commoners to get.
00:14:05
Speaker 1: Our heads around. They do see it that way, baby.
00:14:08
Speaker 2: And so that's where it is. And look, wanted to remind everyone, because you had talked about how cleverly written this Buckingham Palace statement was. Look, these things are well curated, well crafted, extremely thought out, and rarely issued. But this is what Buckingham Palace had to say. 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.
00:14:44
Speaker 1: That's tough. That's wild. Those folks can write. They're like, yeah, we've been doing this for hundreds of years. This is nothing new. What else you got? That statement is, that is a royal smackdown. It was a little sarcastic. It was a little condescending.
00:14:59
Speaker 2: You can't prove it was, but it certainly felt like it is.
00:15:01
Speaker 1: But why does it still feel perfectly British and appropriate? In the way that it still comes off with that thing that no matter what you say and how rude you say it, if you say it in a British accent, it just sounds nice. It does.
00:15:16
Speaker 2: You could even drop a few curse words in there and it's like, oh, that was pleasant. A little cheeky, but pleasant.
00:15:21
Speaker 1: Cheeky is what they call it.
00:15:23
Speaker 2: But look, I don't know how much more to come. It seems like they have pulled out the really salacious parts to sell books. And I think it's going to be extremely effective. Like I said, I'm here for the audio book. I want to listen to him recount all of these moments because this is insight that we rarely get. And look, the question is, is it insight you can trust? This is coming from a man who who is defending the honor of his sister, who wants the world to remember his sister as we approach her 30th anniversary of her death. And this is his memory of those days that followed her tragic death.
00:16:03
Speaker 1: All right, we'll stand by. Robes, will there be more? Will there be another statement? uh, from the King. I just, I just can't, babe. They can't respond to everything that leaks out, but some of this, they should have given it a beat so they could cover everything.
00:16:17
Speaker 2: I bet Harry, I bet you, Meghan Markle and Harry are the happiest people, uh, that they could possibly be in terms of this book being released now. It takes the pressure off of them. It paints the monarchy in not so great of a light and maybe gives them a bit of a reprieve from all of the negative attention they've been receiving since returning to the UK.
00:16:39
Speaker 1: Yes, Harry and Meghan would like to call their first witness Charles Spencer, right?
00:16:44
Speaker 2: Exactly. All right, we'll stay on top of this developing story, but we always appreciate you listening to us, everyone. I'm Amy Robach alongside TJ Holmes. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 1: Hey there, folks. It is Friday, September 18th, and Princess Diana's brother is releasing more excerpts from his bombshell upcoming book. You tell us if the new excerpts are worse for the king than the first one. And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ Ropes. I'll pose that question to you first, right? That first excerpt that came out said that The king said, we'll get over her death soon. That was the first one. That headline was everywhere. Now, they've released some new excerpts from the book. Just ask you, first of all, do these sound worse than the first one did?
00:00:38
Speaker 2: Collectively, yes, just because it paints a larger picture and it's not a pretty one. It's not a pretty one of all many of the royal families. He didn't get specific with naming who acted the way he claims they did and who didn't, but certainly King Charles does not come out looking good in this at all, not even a little bit.
00:01:02
Speaker 1: I thought the one excerpt they released about him saying that we'll get over her death soon enough, that was gonna be the worst thing. I thought they hit us with that one first and nothing more was coming.
00:01:12
Speaker 2: Ooh, weesh. Yeah, a lot of times we see that in books, right? They pick out one and pretty much the only controversial statement, sell a book on that, and then you realize, oh, none of it is even that bad. Well, actually, these new excerpts that were released, ooh, this and maybe the palace, Buckingham Palace, knew this was all coming out and they knew what Charles Spencer had said before previously.
00:01:37
Speaker 1: Then why, it seems like they didn't know, like this is a wave now. He didn't just drop everything and let them respond once. The palace has already responded to the first excerpt.
00:01:48
Speaker 2: They can't respond again.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: Can't keep going.
00:01:50
Speaker 2: It was a rare thing for them to do it in the first place. And now that more excerpts have come out, they're just going to have to let their original statement stand. And they had to know that in this book there had to be more. But I even wasn't prepared for how chilling some of these exchanges are. as Charles Spencer remembers it, but basically... He's a little brother, right?
00:02:10
Speaker 1: He was a little brother, right?
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yes, he was her younger brother, and he says some royals in the palace were what he called relieved that Diana was gone, and gleeful even. He uses ways to describe how they were reacting, and it is terrible to imagine.
00:02:28
Speaker 1: That word is tough.
00:02:30
Speaker 2: Gleeful.
00:02:31
Speaker 1: They use gleeful. Giddily.
00:02:33
Speaker 2: Giddily.
00:02:33
Speaker 1: Rose, that's a tough word.
00:02:34
Speaker 2: Giddily, you're right.
00:02:35
Speaker 1: Giddily. The death of Princess Di when the world's heart was breaking. You're telling me the royals were giddily reacting to this? Rose, that word is everywhere. End quote. Giddily.
00:02:46
Speaker 2: Giddily. Yes. And they also claim, or he claims, Charles Spencer claims, that the royal family denied Diana the one thing she wanted played at her funeral. They refused. So we can get into some of these new excerpts because I have them here right in front of me. These are quotes from the book, and this is going to be released next week, Swan Song, Diana, My Sister, from Charles Spencer. I'll let you react to some of these, babe. He writes, Diana remained theirs. In Buckingham Palace's eyes, even in death, her family, despite her divorce, were simply expected to fall into line with any royal decisions.
00:03:28
Speaker 1: Again, babe, this all, this is a thing. Nobody's going to have a tough time believing this stuff. It all reads. It's what we've been told. It's what we've been hearing about. It's what we've been entertained by. All these streaming shows about the, right? It's what Meghan Markle has been telling us for the past six plus years, right? So, This is stuff, it's tough for people to see. It's like, ah, he's just making stuff up.
00:03:50
Speaker 2: I know, if we, I watched The Crown, I watched The Queen. If you start watching any of these historical fictionalized series, I mean, it all has the same tone to it.
00:04:02
Speaker 1: Yes, he is continuing that theme with what he's saying, which makes it not a problem. stretch robes for people to believe what he's saying. Wow.
00:04:10
Speaker 2: So he goes on to say, my sisters knew that Diana had always wanted Mozart's Requiem to be played for her after her death. But when I passed this on, it was rejected as a possibility. No part of a Requiem can be played at a Church of England funeral, I was told. I later found out that was not the case. The first of several untruths that the authorities would push my way at the time. So they're liars and they want it their way and their way alone.
00:04:38
Speaker 1: A dead woman just wanted a song and y'all wouldn't play it for her is how I read that. And that's how the public, it's that simple. This lady we love in death wanted one thing. Y'all wouldn't give her.
00:04:51
Speaker 2: Charles Spencer also wrote that while some in the royal inner circle were kind, quote, there were others in the palace I already knew who were relieved, indeed pleased. that she had gone. Wow. And he didn't just say that was King Charles or Prince Charles at the time. He said others, plural, were relieved, indeed, pleased that she had gone.
00:05:17
Speaker 1: So I guess that's one of those things, right? Robes that helps sell a book. Because he's going to be on a book tour. And he's going to be asked that question a million times. Who are you talking about?
00:05:27
Speaker 2: Absolutely. And look, he'll be, I'm sure, cheeky about it and not say, but We can guess who he's speaking of. And then he gets into detail that he alluded to when that first excerpt was released about this feud that he had with then Prince Charles over William, young William and Harry, walking behind Diana's coffin. We remember that. Of course. And Harry was so little at the time. Was he 11?
00:05:54
Speaker 1: He was 12.
00:05:55
Speaker 2: They were 15 and 12. 15 and 12. But for whatever reason, they looked younger than that. Both of them did.
00:06:00
Speaker 1: Harry looked really young.
00:06:01
Speaker 2: He looked like a baby. So this is the exchange as Charles Spencer writes it. Well, that's not going to happen, I said in a matter-of-fact tone. It was a suggestion that struck me as utterly barbaric and quite out of the question. He told Charles, Diana, quote, would never have wanted to put them through anything so ghastly. This is what Charles said in response. I gather you've said you don't want William and Harry to walk behind Diana's coffin. Well, of course not, sir. Diana would never have wanted that. Charles said he did it at the funeral for his uncle, Lord Mountbatten. Spencer said, but you were 30, sir, and he wasn't your mother. He went nuts. That's the problem with your family. They've got no bloody sense of duty before he descended into a general rage. So he's just describing this anger. And that's when then this is all the setup to what we got that one excerpt yesterday. 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. Rest assured, he hissed, we'll forget her soon enough. I was so stunned that it took me a few seconds to reply. I can't believe you just said that, I said flatly before hanging up. So now you get the full picture of what he says happened and it really, it just, It packs a punch.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: It makes the king sound so bad. And this is all, look, has he been holding on to this pain and been wanting to say this for 30 years?
00:07:49
Speaker 2: It sounds like it. And he even said at the end of the press release, basically, that he had, after he did the audio book, so if you, you can read the book if you want, but I, you know me, I love an audio book. And I especially love it when the author reads the book. But he said after he finished it, he felt, At total peace because he said he knew that Diana would have approved of every single word of it. But yes, I think the worst excerpt that came out yesterday was that he said Prince Charles sounded giddily elated like a lottery winner in a phone call after his sister died.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: I don't know. How are they going to take this, Robes? The public. The public. How's the British public going to receive this, babe? That woman is beloved. She's as close to a saint, not connected to the church, as you're going to get, probably, for a lot of people in the world. Rose, the current king of England, the royal family. Rose, they always have a scandal or this or that. You still got Andrew's thing floating around. You got strife with the boys. You got strife with the dad. Harry just moved back. There's always some stuff happening. And they try to keep the king away from it just like they try to keep the queen away from it. Rose, she is the most consequential royal of our lifetime, does she not? Okay, we can argue the queen, fine. But as far as popularity and reach and impact, she's it.
00:09:21
Speaker 2: She's the heart of the royal family. And when you go after the heart.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: I didn't have one.
00:09:26
Speaker 2: She did. She humanized the royal family. She made everyone feel like We understood them. They weren't so disconnected from the rest of us. She brought them to us. She was the bridge.
00:09:39
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: And to hear that the current king was giddy when she died.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: Happy she's dead. Relieved. Man, come on.
00:09:46
Speaker 2: That's. It's horrific.
00:09:47
Speaker 1: How many more statements? They might have to. Babe, this is. How much more is there?
00:09:51
Speaker 2: It's tough. Well, how about this? When we come back, here's the interesting thing. We had said that you and I, well, we haven't. And now I totally want to.
00:09:59
Speaker 1: Harry.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: Book Spare. There is an excerpt from Harry's Book Spare that literally backs up what Charles has written. We're going to tell you what that is, and we'll remind you once again of the very cleverly written Buckingham Palace Statement. Welcome back, everyone, to Amy and TJ. We are going over the latest excerpts released in Charles Spencer's new book, Swan Song, Diana, My Sister, out next week, where he details, and he pays homage to his sister's life, but the really incendiary parts of this book are the details that he writes about in the days following Diana's tragic death back in 1997.
00:10:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, all this stuff he's talking about is not, this was like immediate aftermath stuff we're talking about. Not days, this is... Like right after, they're expressing glee even to the brother, to the family?
00:11:01
Speaker 2: Where he hung up on then Prince Charles, essentially, because he was so upset with him. And in that, where he recounted that exchange about the boys walking behind the coffin, it's so interesting. If you go back into Harry's book, Spare, he has a very similar, he writes about a very similar back and forth. And so in a way, people are saying, look, Harry didn't know that his uncle was writing this book, or certainly they didn't compare notes, you wouldn't imagine, but it's a similar account. So this is how Harry wrote about that in his book. It seemed a lot to ask of two young boys. Several adults were aghast. Mummy's brother, Uncle Charles, raised hell. You can't make these boys walk behind their mother's coffin. It's barbaric. An alternative plan was proposed. Prince William would walk alone. He was 15 after all. Leave the younger one out of it. Spare the spare. But the answer came back. It must be both princes. To garner sympathy, presumably. Uncle Charles was furious, but I wasn't. I didn't want Willie to undergo an ordeal like that without me. Had the roles been reversed, he'd never have wanted me, indeed allowed me, to go it alone. It's kind of interesting, right? You have Harry remembering it from his vantage point, and even he remembers it. how upset his uncle was. That was known to the boys.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: It's, damn, it's a damn shame. Because what Harry is describing there is the thing we would love to see now. Some fraternal camaraderie, right? That I wouldn't let my brother do that alone. My brother wouldn't let me do that alone, right? You're hearing it, like you said, wrote the same situation from different perspectives. And I'm sure if King Charles got to tell the story, The facts might line up, but from his perspective, he might explain it in such a way why this was important, important for the nation, important for everybody to see him and to see them, those boys at the time. I would listen to that argument, baby. This is the royal family, this is duty, and this is different. And this was a part of everybody's healing. Look, if those are my kids, don't get me wrong, I would say, hell no, I'm not putting my 12-year-old through that. But, Ro, this is an interesting one. I would love to hear them actually explain this from the royal side.
00:13:20
Speaker 2: Right? And according to Charles.
00:13:21
Speaker 1: We won't, though, hear that.
00:13:22
Speaker 2: We won't. But the only thing we'll hear is Charles is... Like how he recounted Prince Charles, now King Charles, how he reacted. And to that exact point, he said, that's a problem with your family. They've got no bloody sense of duty. And he said, I had to do it for my uncle... I had to walk behind when I was, you know, he was 30. I guess there was a difference. He was like, I had to do it. My sons will do it. There is this sense of duty within the royal family that he said basically flat out to Charles, you don't get it. You don't understand it. The royal family has a different responsibility. And so.
00:13:57
Speaker 1: Sounds like what they've been trying to tell Meghan Markle for the past seven, eight years. Yes.
00:14:02
Speaker 2: And it is a difficult thing perhaps for us commoners to get.
00:14:05
Speaker 1: Our heads around. They do see it that way, baby.
00:14:08
Speaker 2: And so that's where it is. And look, wanted to remind everyone, because you had talked about how cleverly written this Buckingham Palace statement was. Look, these things are well curated, well crafted, extremely thought out, and rarely issued. But this is what Buckingham Palace had to say. 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.
00:14:44
Speaker 1: That's tough. That's wild. Those folks can write. They're like, yeah, we've been doing this for hundreds of years. This is nothing new. What else you got? That statement is, that is a royal smackdown. It was a little sarcastic. It was a little condescending.
00:14:59
Speaker 2: You can't prove it was, but it certainly felt like it is.
00:15:01
Speaker 1: But why does it still feel perfectly British and appropriate? In the way that it still comes off with that thing that no matter what you say and how rude you say it, if you say it in a British accent, it just sounds nice. It does.
00:15:16
Speaker 2: You could even drop a few curse words in there and it's like, oh, that was pleasant. A little cheeky, but pleasant.
00:15:21
Speaker 1: Cheeky is what they call it.
00:15:23
Speaker 2: But look, I don't know how much more to come. It seems like they have pulled out the really salacious parts to sell books. And I think it's going to be extremely effective. Like I said, I'm here for the audio book. I want to listen to him recount all of these moments because this is insight that we rarely get. And look, the question is, is it insight you can trust? This is coming from a man who who is defending the honor of his sister, who wants the world to remember his sister as we approach her 30th anniversary of her death. And this is his memory of those days that followed her tragic death.
00:16:03
Speaker 1: All right, we'll stand by. Robes, will there be more? Will there be another statement? uh, from the King. I just, I just can't, babe. They can't respond to everything that leaks out, but some of this, they should have given it a beat so they could cover everything.
00:16:17
Speaker 2: I bet Harry, I bet you, Meghan Markle and Harry are the happiest people, uh, that they could possibly be in terms of this book being released now. It takes the pressure off of them. It paints the monarchy in not so great of a light and maybe gives them a bit of a reprieve from all of the negative attention they've been receiving since returning to the UK.
00:16:39
Speaker 1: Yes, Harry and Meghan would like to call their first witness Charles Spencer, right?
00:16:44
Speaker 2: Exactly. All right, we'll stay on top of this developing story, but we always appreciate you listening to us, everyone. I'm Amy Robach alongside TJ Holmes. We'll talk soon.