The Daily Mail dropped the first major part of their Swan Song serialization on Thursday – I covered some highlights yesterday afternoon. Charles Spencer (aka the Earl Spencer) writes in Swan Song about the night Princess Diana died, and the days that followed. He writes about his recollections of Diana’s marriage to then-Prince Charles, and how toxic the union was from the beginning. And in the Mail’s serialization, Charles Spencer dropped one of many major bombshells. Here’s that section:

One day Diana asked me at very short notice to join her for lunch at San Lorenzo, her favourite London restaurant. She looked down at the table and said, ‘Carlos, I’m going to get divorced.’

I was silent for a moment. I had known things were bad, but not this bad.

‘Well, Duch,’ I carefully replied, ‘you of course have my full support… I know you’ll have thought this through. But my main worry is the public. I fear they won’t forgive you. They’ve bought into a fairytale, and I reckon they may ­well – wrongly – blame you for destroying their fantasy.’

She looked up at me, nodded, and said quietly: ‘But, Carlos, my husband is in love with his valet.’

I gulped. ‘Well, I guess, in that case, you really don’t have a choice.’

She did not name the member of staff, and I never asked her who it was, or why she would believe such an improbable thing.

It was not important: the end of her marriage, and of her dreams, was.

[From Swan Song, via The Daily Mail]

My first instinct was that Charles Spencer is tugging King Charles’ three hairs. My second instinct was that Diana was unquestionably hilarious, and this absolutely sounds like something she would say to her brother, halfway in jest. But… yeah. I’ve given it more thought. Everyone has given it some thought. And they came up with a name: Michael Fawcett, King Charles’ valet-turned-foundation-executive. Fawcett has been thrown under the bus so many times, he’s made of rubber at this point. The same Fawcett who was reportedly jealous of Diana when she married Charles? Well, Tom Sykes has a good memory for this kind of stuff, so enjoy his take:

Spencer does not name the valet, and he does not need to. Anyone who followed the collapse of the Paul Burrell trial in 2002, will know exactly which door Spencer is kicking down here: Michael Fawcett’s.

The rumor that Charles had a sexual relationship with Fawcett was the great rumor of the early 2000s. It originated with George Smith, a former Welsh Guardsman and valet in the prince’s household, who alleged in 1996, while in the throes of a mental breakdown, that he had been raped by a senior aide to the prince and, separately, that he had witnessed an incident involving a member of the royal family and a servant. Diana, Smith said, taped his account. That tape was said to have been kept in the locked “mahogany box” that Burrell told the Old Bailey he had seen in her apartment, and the contents of which vanished after her death. What was in it became a central mystery of the Burrell affair.

In November 2003, Smith’s allegation of a sexual relationship between the Prince of Wales and Michael Fawcett was repeated in a legal statement given to the Mail on Sunday. Fawcett took out a High Court injunction to stop its publication, and The Guardian went to court to win the right to name him as the man behind it. The prince’s private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, then issued a statement denying the allegations and questioning the trustworthiness of the unnamed Smith as a source.

Fawcett was Charles’s valet. He famously squeezed the toothpaste when his master’s arm was broken playing polo, but when bullying complaints in 1998 forced him to resign, he was reinstated and actually promoted.

Peat’s inquiry, published in 2003, found no evidence to support the rape claim or a cover-up, and Fawcett was cleared of the most serious accusations, though the report faulted how the complaints had been handled in the 1990s. Clarence House stated publicly that the allegations were entirely without foundation.

Fawcett went on to run the Prince’s Foundation before resigning in 2021 over a cash-for-honors scandal. Smith died in 2005. Nothing was ever proven, but now Diana’s brother has now put her alleged own words on the record: the reason she wanted out was that her husband was in love with his valet.

[From The Royalist Substack]

The mention of Paul Burrell’s account is big too, because that’s another massive conspiracy. Before Diana died in 1997, she told her lawyer, her butler Paul Burrell and several other people that she basically kept several highly sensitive and highly damaging pieces of evidence against high-ranking royals. When Burrell returned to Diana’s Kensington Palace apartment, her papers were in disarray (and many were burned by Frances Shand Kidd) and there were several items missing from the apartment, including that mahogany box. No one has ever “found” that tape or any of the kompromat compiled by Diana. My question: how much does Charles Spencer know, and is he about to solve a few of the enduring mysteries around Diana? Incidentally, I don’t think Charles is gay – he legitimately had torrid affairs with multiple women throughout his first marriage. So if the Fawcett stuff is true, then that makes him a Bisexual Scorpio King. What a world.

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