The complaining and explaining is super-loud these days. The Windsors have their own “magical thinking,” where they believe that if they send their minions out to furiously brief lies and smears to the British press, that does not “count” as complaining or explaining. I mentioned this previously, but this current gossip-cycle with King Charles throwing lies and recriminations at the Earl Spencer reminds me of another cycle about Netflix’s The Crown. Whenever anyone tries to talk about or dramatize what Diana actually went through, King Charles wages a wall-to-wall pressure campaign. That campaign worked on Peter Morgan, who soft-pedaled the f–k out what then-Prince Charles did to Diana. It will not work on Charles Spencer. That’s why the pressure campaign is so plain to the naked eye in the past week – the Earl Spencer doesn’t need the king’s permission, blessing or patronage. Please read some of these hysterical quotes, all of which are from “sources close to the king” or “the king’s friends.”

Earl Spencer has been accused of ‘picking at the scars of the past’ with his tell-all memoir about Princess Diana and ‘can’t bear’ Charles and Camilla’s popularity, friends of the King have claimed. Buckingham Palace has been left reeling by a series of jaw-dropping extracts exclusively published by the Mail last week from the earl’s hotly anticipated book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister. Chief among the allegations is the eyebrow-raising claim that the then Prince Charles told Diana’s grieving sibling days after her death in 1997: ‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough’.

It sparked an unprecedented rebuttal by the Palace, with a spokesperson questioning the veracity of Earl Spencer’s explosive account and saying that fraternal grief can ‘cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory’.

Now, friends of the cancer-stricken 77-year-old monarch have hit back at the earl’s ‘unkind claims’ and described him as ‘one man picking at the scars of the past’.

Charles was hosting an AI summit in Scotland when his former brother-in-law’s continuous barbs were flowing. And although he was said to be ‘saddened’ by ‘sorrows of old being dragged up again’, it was the ‘future of mankind’ that His Majesty was said to be more concerned with.

The earl’s reasoning behind the memoir ‘to tell the truth about Diana’ has also been scoffed at by a friend of the King.

‘That’s like an arsonist trying to sell you a fire hose and about as convincing as all those others close to Diana who’ve cashed in on her confidences over the years,’ they told The Sunday Times. ‘Why couldn’t they all have just let her rest in peace? That would have been the decent thing to have done.’

Those at the Palace appear to believe his motivation has been driven by his dislike of Charles and Camilla’s popularity. One aide suggested to The Sunday Times that the earl has brought out ‘the crested carving knives’ as he ‘can’t bear’ the ‘fondness’ towards the King and Queen from the British public and globally.

‘If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s more that, contrary to some public expectations and perhaps a few private hopes, the King and Queen have proved rather adept and popular in their new roles,’ they said.

[From The Daily Mail]

I can tell that these are genuinely the talking points being issued by King Charles’ camp. The king has a deep reserve of both self-pity and self-regard – he is absolutely arguing that Diana’s brother is ganging up on the poor, pitiful king with cancer, all because the king and queen are so marvelously popular. You cannot make this up. It’s all so Shakespearean as well – Diana has been the specter at the banquet since 1997. Charles and Camilla have been haunted by what they did to her this whole time. That’s why Charles freaks out like this every single time anyone tries to tell Diana’s actual story.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.