Why Has Earl Spencer Written His Princess Diana Book Now?

3 min read

As Earl Spencer delves into the past, so too have his critics. An interview he gave in 1998 has attracted renewed attention for his remarks that he would “never profit from Diana’s death.”

“Can you imagine anybody making a profit out of their brother or sister’s death? It’s so low, it’s inconceivable. I don’t know anyone who would…I will never profit from Diana’s death,” the Earl said in the historical interview, now doing the rounds in news coverage and online.

As such, Diana’s brother has been branded a “hypocrite” as his book Swan Song hits the shelves this week set to be a runaway commercial success. Billed simply as a brother’s tribute to a sister, it has sent shockwaves through the royal PR machine with damning allegations about the King.

In the almost three decades since Diana died, this is the first time Charles Spencer has revealed so many of the book’s intimate encounters. The author of eight other non-fiction books and a memoir, he has previously steered well clear of his sister’s legacy in his writing. This has led many to ask: Why? And why now?

The Earl addresses this directly in the book’s introduction. “So, why write this now?” he writes. “With the thirtieth anniversary of Diana’s death in view, I was again declining endless, repeated requests to appear in documentaries about her - from, to name a few, a nephew, from Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton, and from Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell - and I thought, You know what? Rather than even contemplate being a talking head in a production that will follow the usual flawed lines, with an agenda set by some TV producer I will never meet, or by a network I will never watch, I am going to tell things how I remember then, lay them down for good, once and for all.”

He added, “As with my eulogy, I want to speak on Diana’s behalf.” Indeed, the book follows the path of the eulogy, with Spencer saying that everything he shares—including damning allegations about then-Prince Charles—was necessary in order to justify why he wrote his eulogy that way.

The Earl described to the BBC that he felt he had a “duty” to record his story. “I was an eyewitness to history and it’s my duty in the final season of my life,” he said. “I wanted to just put things down once and for all that were true.”

In Swan Song’s introduction he also emphasizes the concept of “truth” as being a key driver. “In some ways, the aim of this book is to tell the truth about Diana from her brother’s perspective,” he writes. “She deserves my best efforts, in the face of so much invention and lazy half-truth out there.” There is some irony, therefore that the Earl found himself on the receiving end of a very public complaint about accuracy in Swan Song, with Piers Morgan securing an apology for incorrect claims about him.

“Unlike some journalists…I’m very happy to acknowledge I’ve made a small error,” Earl Spencer told UK TV host Lorraine Kelly, “And I’ve apologised and it will be put right in the second edition.”

He also expanded to Kelly on his reasons for the timing of the memoir, “I’m 62. And I think it’s quite often the case that people judge their own life span by what went before, and both my parents died in their 60s,” he said. “And I just thought I’ve still got my marbles, I hope. Get it down now while I still can.”