King Charles vs Earl Spencer Over Diana: 'Gaslit by the King', Palace Breaks No-Books Rule, Harry Says Nothing, Kate with Tom Cruise

0:03 Caloroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly. I am your host, Mark Francis. It has been a week in which the most talked about person in Britain had been dead for 29 years. Her brother, Earl Spencer, published his memoir of her Buckingham Palace, which, as a matter of principle, never comments on books, broke that principle. to suggest his grief had corrupted his memory, and Spencer replied that he had been, in his phrase, gaslit by the king. Meanwhile, Diana's younger son is quietly developing a documentary of his own about her, and Saturday Night Live reanimated her as an AI assistant who announces partway through that she'll no longer be taking orders. There was other news. William served popcorn at a cinema till, and Tom Cruise held Kate's hand on a red carpet. But it all orbited the same strange fact. So the question worth holding is this.

1:04 Whose Diana is the real one? And nearly 30 years after her death, does anyone actually know? Let's get into it. The book is called Swan Song, Diana, My Sister. It came out on Tuesday, and its central charge isn't really about facts. It's about a man's coldness. Spencer's most quoted allegation is that in the days after Diana died, King Charles said of her, we'll forget her soon enough. He describes the phone call on the morning of her death when Charles reportedly sounded giddily elated, like a lottery winner. He recounts an argument over whether William and Harry, then 15 and 12, should walk behind their mother's coffin. Spencer objecting, Charles allegedly erupting that that's the problem with your family, they've got no bloody sense of duty. And he reveals that days after the funeral, the Queen offered through her private secretary to restore posthumously the HRH title Diana had lost in the divorce. An offer Spencer declined because, as he put it, what was the point now? Diana was dead.

2:08 There is more, and some of it is incendiary. Spencer claims Diana told him before the marriage even began that Charles had informed her he was not in love with her, and later that my husband is in love with his valet. A single line that received a decades-old, long-denied rumour about Charles' relationship with his aide Michael Fawcett. which the king has never dignified with a response and which remains entirely unproven. He alleges that the late Mohammed Al-Fayed once groped Diana. It is, in other words, a book full of grenades, lobbed by a grieving brother nearly 30 years after the fact. And here is what made it genuinely extraordinary, the response. Buckingham Palace does not comment on books. It is one of the oldest rules in the institution. Read that again.

2:54 It does not say the allegations are false. It says Spencer's grief has rewritten his memory. One former courtier called it And that phrase is the tell because Recollections may vary was the exact wording the palace used in 2021 to answer Harry and Meghan's Oprah interview. The institution's signature move turned now on the brother of the woman it stands accused of failing. Spencer was not having it. It's not every day, he said, you wake up to find you've been gaslit by the king. He insists he was hyper-alert on the call. He'd had only two conversations with Charles in his life and that those were precisely the words spoken. On the other side, Julian Payne, who ran Charles Communications through the 20th anniversary of Diana's death, said flatly that this is not language he recognises, that the king was always emphatic, her memory be respected. So there it is, two men, two memories, one a careful historian and note-taker, the other with decades of testimony to his character.

4:13 And between them, a conversation with no recording and no other living witness. This is the whole problem in miniature. The palace's defence is that Grief is an unreliable narrator. The trouble is, it's an unreliable narrator you can never cross-examine, because the only person who could settle any of it has been silent for 29 years. More Palace in just a moment. The book did take one real verifiable hit this week, and it came from Piers Morgan, of all people. Spencer had linked Morgan to intrusive gym photographs of Diana published in 1993. The trouble is, Morgan didn't edit the paper in question until 95. Spencer has apologised, and future editions will be corrected. But Morgan is suing Penguin, demanding the copies already on shelves be pulled and asking the sharpest question available to him. If Spencer can be that wrong about something this checkable, why trust the parts we can't check? It's a fair hit, and it hangs over everything else in the book. The motive question consumed the rest of the week and the commentators split cleanly. Richard Fitzwilliams found it suspicious that Spencer waited 29 years and timed the launch to Harry's return and wondered whether guilt over the Panorama interview Spencer introduced Martin Bashir to Diana was fueling the anger. Alison Pearson wrote that Spencer is on a mission to destroy the king. A friend of Charles supplied the line of the week calling Spencer an

5:45 arsonist trying to sell you a fire hose. On the other side, Jenny Bond found his explanation persuasive. A man of 62, whose parents both died in their 60s, wanting to set down his memories before he can't, while warning the palace that trading insults would only make things worse. Spencer's own defense was simple. I'm not vengeful. I'm an eyewitness to history. He insists he's on the side of both of my sister's sons, not one camp. And the fairest reading came from Emily Boodle, whose review found something more complicated than a hit job. A brother genuinely trying to explain his sister, moving between things he witnessed, things he was told and conclusions he's drawn since, and expressing real sympathy for both Charles and Diana over their doomed marriage.

6:30 Which is the quiet trap of the whole enterprise. The moment you publish your own grief about someone, you start speaking for a person who can no longer speak for herself. Which brings us unavoidably to Harry, who said nothing at all. Asked about the book at his own Invictus Spirit Awards, he declined to comment. And you can see why. Backing his uncle drops him straight back into the war over his parents' marriage, while contradicting him risks one of his last close family relationships in Britain. Spencer says Harry is completely fine with it. Sources close to the Sussexes went further, claiming Harry feels vindicated. That Diana's own brother is now describing the same Windsor world Harry described, which they say is exactly what we've been talking about. Tom Bower put it more darkly, alleging Spencer has formed an alliance with Harry and Meghan to damage the King. And it matters because Harry is, we learned again this week, developing his own Diana documentary. So this is the shape of it.

7:27 The brother opens the vault in print. The son prepares to open it on camera. And the institution insists both of them are misremembering. Everyone, all at once, reaching for the same ghost. More Palisades in just a moment. And while all that raged, the living monarchy staged its now familiar split screen. On Tuesday, William and Kate walked the red carpet for the Royal Film Performance alongside Tom Cruise, who greeted Kate with a kiss on each cheek, took her hand to help her down the steps, told William, great jacket, and generally supplied the tabloids with precisely the images they wanted. Earlier that same day, in the least starry engagement imaginable, William had stood behind the till of a community cinema serving popcorn and Completely failing to work the payment system, it's not my first till, he apologized to the queue, but it is my first time on this system. It was, frankly, adorable. And it did the job. Meanwhile, 3,000 miles away, Harry addressed the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on artificial intelligence and child safety with a genuinely sharp line. Social media learned how to capture our attention.

8:38 AI is learning how to enter our relationships. It doesn't just want your attention, it wants your attachment. A message promptly upstaged when his teleprompter failed and he had to leave the stage and return 40 minutes later, quipping, AI got into my speech. Deep Crown, back with the analysis of the week, named exactly what the contest revealed. The royal diary he wrote was always managed with a seriousness outsiders found faintly comic. Households comparing notes months ahead so that one royal wasn't opening a hospital wing while another did something the cameras preferred. The point was spacing. The press can photograph only one thing at a time with any enthusiasm, so you give each engagement its own day.

9:22 Harry left that machinery behind and with it the ability to set his own calendar. He now works on other people's platforms, Invictus, Wellchild, the Clintons, each with its own timetable and no reason to care whether the Princess of Wales is standing next to Tom Cruise that evening. A man who left, Deep Crown observed, in order to set his own terms now has less command of his diary than a junior minister. But Harry earned his due this week too, and it's only fair to say so. At the Wellchild Awards, a charity he served for 18 years, he broke down paying tribute to the parents of seriously ill children, telling them most of us will never truly know the emotional ups and downs of their days. He asked the room's specialist nurses to stand and led a standing ovation. He told his own children over breakfast exactly where he was going and why, because he said, whatever you can do to instill that awareness matters. That is the Harry people actually miss. Warm, present, undeniably good at this.

10:19 and it surfaced the same week as all the grievance, which is the whole maddening paradox of the man. The other quiet reminder of what the job can be came from Zambia, where the Duchess of Edinburgh spent five days doing the unglamorous, effective version of royal work. A ten-minute courtesy call on the president that ran over an hour, gifts of honey from bees she keeps herself, a visit to a workshop training women to cut Zambian emeralds, and a genuinely heartfelt appeal on eye care. If a child can't see, they drop out of school. She began it gamely in her airplane clothes, her luggage having gone missing. No teleprompter, no Tom Cruise, no headlines, just the work.

11:00 And the rest, lighter and stranger. Harry and Meghan are apparently discovering that the Cotswolds has a social hierarchy no security detail can breach. A divide between the old Glostocracy, who make their own jam and would find Meghan's a bit of a joke, And the celebrity set now aligned with the Beckhams who had firmly joined Team Wales. Their new neighbour, Michael Whitehall, asked about their arrival, pronounced them non-people, not worth getting upset about. Then conceded he'd had a bigger rant about the milk carton. A viral AI-generated conspiracy invented an entirely fictional fourth Wales child, a teenage princess, Arielle, who happens to resemble a young Brooke Shields. Nonsense, but nonsense designed, experts warned, to erode trust rather than to convince.

11:45 and removed a step closer to losing the freedom of the City of London, the machinery grinding on, and Princess Anne, gloriously indifferent to all of it, turned up to a state banquet in a coat she first wore in 1968, when she was 18, 57 years of service from one garment which may be the single most royal act of the entire week. So where does it leave us, with a woman 29 years gone, and everyone who loved her holding a slightly different version of her, and every one of those versions now for sale, in a memoir, in a documentary, in a palace statement, in a sketch. The palace is probably right that grief is an unreliable narrator. What it cannot admit is that grief is the only narrator any of them have, because the one person who could tell us which Charles was real and which Diana has been unable to speak since the last night of August 1997. They are all telling the truth, most likely their truth. The tragedy was never that they remember her differently.

12:41 It's that they can't seem to stop publishing it. And there you have it. If you'd like to email us, our address is thepalaceintrigue at gmail.com. If you're on Spotify, leave us a comment. If you're on Apple, hit that button up there that says listen uninterrupted and get the show commercial free for just five bucks a month. I'm Mark Francis. My thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Weekly. Good times.