The new few weeks are going to bring so much 1990s nostalgia in royal commentary. We will be transported back to the ‘90s because of Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, his memoir about his sister, Princess Diana. King Charles has already activated his old surrogates, the same ones he used to disparage and smear Diana when she was alive, and the same surrogates who tried to rewrite Diana’s story in death. It would not surprise me at all if the sidechick queen was also reactivating her old media contacts and spreading certain stories about the Spencer family too. To be fair, I haven’t seen that – yet. But King Charles’ people are noticeably distressed. The king’s former comms guy Julian Payne was sent out to massage the Swan Song narratives to Tom Sykes. From Sykes’ Royalist Substack: “Public Opinion Turns Against Grasping Earl Spencer as He Sells the Secrets of His Sister’s Death to Stoke a War With King Charles.” The palace practically wrote that headline themselves.

My sense is that revulsion is building at Earl Spencer’s decision to sit like a dragon on the egg of his most explosive allegation about King Charles for 29 years, and then sell it to the Daily Mail in the run-up to the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death.

The claim, in his new book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, is that in the days after the Paris crash the then Prince of Wales “hissed” down the phone at him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”

While my own experience of grief makes me quite certain that regrettably sharp words may well have been exchanged in the aftermath of Diana’s death, the Palace’s response, that “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss,” was a carefully worded recollections-may-vary-2 way of saying the King believes a bitter and twisted Spencer has made it up.

Now Julian Payne, who ran the King’s communications for five years from 2016 and worked alongside the prince during the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, has told BBC Radio 4’s Today program he did not recognize “the way the King is being characterized in those remarks.”

“Naturally, we ended up discussing her several times during that summer because the media interest was so intense,” Payne said. “What I remember was he was very clear that there was never to be any criticism, never to be any pushback on the narratives that were usually highly critical of him. He was absolutely emphatic that we were to respect her memory and not undermine it in any way. When he was telling us there was never to be any criticism or pushback, that wasn’t about him. That was absolutely about the late princess and her memory.”

He added: “So it seems to me very odd that in the moment itself, with the grief of his family and his own shock, that he would choose that moment to use those words. It’s just not language that I recognise.”

Payne also explained why the Palace broke its no-commenting on books rule, saying: “This is a much more personal situation, given its author, and therefore has a greater ability to do harm.”

Courtiers have briefed British media that the alleged remark was “just not in his nature and it certainly wasn’t in his nature at that time, when he was a man absolutely grief-stricken,” adding that the Prince of Wales was “paralysed with grief” and defied protocol by insisting Diana be given a full state-style ceremonial funeral, with her coffin draped in the royal standard on its return from Paris.

Some recollections may vary here too. A great deal of reporting over three decades has concluded that it was Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell who pushed a reluctant Balmoral toward a big public funeral, a flag at half mast over Buckingham Palace and a walkabout among the flowers. Charles did fly to Paris to bring the body home, and the Royal Standard draped over the coffin was his call. But the picture of a lone prince fighting the system for Diana is, well, his truth.

[From The Royalist Substack]

Something unspoken (so far) is that while then-Prince Charles was bitching out Diana’s brother, the rest of the Windsor clan was jubilant about Diana’s death. Charles’ behavior was horrible – the rest of the Windsors’ behavior was despicable. Especially QEII’s behavior, which has been purposefully rewritten and reimagined for decades. They ALL had to be dragged kicking and screaming to show respect to Diana in death, after they had done everything to destroy her in life. Basically, King Charles can send out all of his former PR gurus to massage Charles Spencer’s revelations, but for those of us alive in the 1990s, we absolutely believe that the Windsors’ behavior towards Diana was as Spencer writes.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.