Charles Spencer is unsurprisingly on the cover of this week’s People Magazine, although they used a lovely photo of Princess Diana as the main cover image. Spencer spoke at length to People Magazine, and they have a video of him saying everything in this interview. At the start of it, he makes it clear that he sort of feels like it was now or never to write his own book about Diana: “Without wanting to sound melodramatic, both of my parents died in their 60s, and I think we measure our lives against those markers.” I think it’s probably about King Charles’ mortality as well – it’s much better for Spencer to write this while the king is still alive, as opposed to metaphorically pissing on KC3’s grave. That being said, it’s also clear that Spencer has held back a lot, and maybe a second book is coming once King Charles passes. Anyway, some highlights from the cover story:

On then-Prince Charles’ reaction to Diana’s death: “I’d known Diana had died for a few hours, and I was sort of rushing around the house. I had four young children. It was just me and them under the roof and I was trying to work out everything, really, what to do, how to get back to England, et cetera, because I was living in South Africa. And then he called, and yeah, I’m sorry to say, he just sounded really giddy. And I know it’s unfortunate, but that’s how it struck me, and it seemed to me so incredibly bizarre at the time. And I can only speculate why. Maybe he felt that now he could eventually marry the woman who he was in love with [Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he later wed in 2005], but that’s me speculating. I’ve heard, I don’t watch The Crown, but I’ve heard that in The Crown, for instance, [Charles] is sort of knocked sideways by the news of Diana’s death, and that’s just not true.

Whether he fears writing about King Charles: “Not really, no. I respect the institution of the Crown, and I know that most people in Britain do, especially the older generation, but when I’m writing this book, I’m not interested in who people are in terms of status. I’m looking at them as people. And the central person, the only one that really matters, is Diana.”

The phone call from then-Prince Charles: “[Then] my telephone rang again, and I thought, “Oh, I don’t know what that is.” Picked it up, it’s a dedicated line, which nobody has the number of, and it was Prince Charles, and he said, “I gather you’ve got a problem with the funeral.” And I was thinking, “Not really.” And I said, “No, I think it’s all going okay.” Then he said, “But you don’t want William and Harry to walk behind the coffin?” And I said, “But of course not, sir. Diana wouldn’t have wanted it.” And then he said, “Well, I walked behind [my uncle] Lord Mountbatten’s coffin.” And I said, “Yes, but you were 30 and he wasn’t your mother.” Well, then he went nuts, really, and so had a good rant, and I just held the phone like that and let it go on. Then he stopped, and then I thought, “Oh, he’s going to pull himself together.” And then he said, “We’ll forget her soon enough.” And I found that really astonishing and so awful, and I just said to him, “I cannot believe you said that,” and hung up on him. So that sets the scene really for why I wrote the eulogy as I did, because there’s a line in there where I didn’t want William and Harry immersed in royal tradition to lose their souls, really, which Diana was nurturing. So I thought it was important to include that interchange with the then-Prince Charles, now King, because it sets the tone of really why I spoke like that, and also why I’m writing this book.

The walk behind Diana’s casket: “I was told that [William and Harry] had decided that they wanted to. I remember saying, “Well, as long as they haven’t been dragooned into it.” Obviously they shouldn’t have walked. Nobody now can possibly think that was the right thing to do. I just remember Harry was so small, this tiny dot of a boy walking in public behind his mother’s coffin. It’s monstrous. It was awful at the time, and there was so little I could do. And I remember there was one bit where I thought, “Right, we’re halfway through or something through this terrible, long walk.” And we went under one of those magnificent arches in London, and I gave Harry a hug, and I said, “You’re doing so well.” And we carried on.

On Prince Philip: “Prince Philip took charge, quite rightly. He was brilliant that day. I mean, he’s a controversial figure, but he did really well that day. He was a military man and he said, “Just look straight ahead. You must not look left and right.” And we did, but that made for a very bizarre experience, actually, because you could feel this tsunami of grief coming in from both sides and the crowd reacting differently as we walked along. So you’d walk through maybe 100 steps and you’d just hear sobbing. And then another stretch where people would be shouting out really lovely but sad things to William and Harry, or about Diana. And it’s very hard to feel that amount of emotion and not to look at it. So I used to have lots of nightmares about that, because it was just too much, too overwhelming for a brain to take that in. So goodness knows what it was like for two young boys.

His relationship with King Charles today: “Yeah, that’s a point. I am [uncle to his sons]. I see him as an ex-brother-in-law, and I’m sure anyone who has had divorce in the family will understand that people who were closer in your life when the parties were married are less close. I have really nothing to do with him at all now. Both his sons are middle-aged. They may not like that description, but they are. And I don’t have anything to do with him. I mean, I’ve seen him at family weddings or whatever. That sounds very dismissive, but he’s just not part of my life and I’m not part of his . . . At the end of the day, family is family, and families have all sorts of energies, tensions, happinesses, and problems. It’s just normal.

He told his nephews & his sisters about the book at the same time: “I told them at the same time, and all I would say is one was… So all four of them [William and Harry and Sarah and Jane], I told them exactly the same time. And I can say that Harry is completely fine about it. He said, I hope there’s nothing embarrassing about him in it. I said, “There isn’t.” I think they were actually worried where I was going up to with the book. It pretty much ends in 1997 with Diana’s death, and there’s a tiny postscript by the grave. So I think there was this, “Gosh, what’s he written about?” And I think it’s natural that people so in the public eye are concerned how they will come across in the book. But I could reassure both of them that they’re of course in the book, but really as examples of two little boys who had the most exceptional mother, I’m not in any way compromising their privacy at all.

Whether Harry & William were worried about what Spencer would say about their dad: “Yeah, that was a concern. I mean, I don’t want this to sound loaded, but there was an awful lot I could have put in and I didn’t. If I wanted to write a scandalous book about Prince Charles or King Charles as he is now, it would really be a jaw-dropper, but I’m not here to do that.

The conversation between Diana & Charles Spencer about the divorce: “I said, “I’ve got to warn you, I don’t think the public are going to necessarily understand this, and they may resent you for ending their fairy tale.” Then she said, “Well, my husband’s in love with his valet,” which is a member of staff, household staff. To be honest, at the time I thought, well, that’s another reason. That was all it meant right then. I remember thinking, wow, I didn’t know about that. I actually don’t know who she was referring to, individually, but it just sounded like another nail in the coffin of the marriage, really.

Regrets about his relationship with Diana: “Could I have done more to help her with her public life? I probably could. Towards the end of her life, I did help her a bit. I had had some run-ins with the media. I helped her win a big libel case against a British newspaper. I would fight some battles for her quietly. One of the things people are throwing at me totally wrongly is that I wouldn’t give her a home. When she was divorced, she did ask me for the Garden House at the back of the park . . . Diana had loved it because our sister Jane lived there with her children, and that was perfect for them. But then the local police went around there with me and they said, they just couldn’t protect William and Harry . . . She could not have lived at the garden house. It was not a viable option.

On the conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death in the Paris tunnel: “I’ve never believed in the conspiracy theory, because if somebody was conspiring to kill somebody very high profile like that, I don’t think that would be the manner that it would happen in. First of all, nobody planned for Diana to go through that tunnel that night . . . The fact that it ended up tragically being a car crash, I think, is purely a coincidence. By the way, if I thought otherwise, I would say so. I just don’t see it.

[From People]

When and where did Spencer tell Harry, William, Jane and Sarah about the book at the same time? Was it at Robert Fellowes’ funeral last December? That timeline would make sense, actually. It would also indicate that William and Harry were in the same room post-funeral. The tabloids never really followed up on that. As for what Spencer says about the conspiracies about Diana’s death… I feel like people talk at cross purposes about the conspiracies. One conspiracy subset is that someone organized Diana to die in a specific way, through a car accident. The other conspiracy subset – the subset I subscribe to – is that multiple people were watching and tracking Diana, looking for an opening to disrupt her life and put her in mortal danger. We know she was being monitored all summer, and we know that there are still huge questions surrounding Diana’s death (Henri Paul’s blood-alcohol level, the missing Fiat, reports of a blinding flash). I don’t blame Spencer for not entertaining those theories or getting into those weeds, but I’m still a Diana Truther.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images. Screencaps courtesy of BBC News. Cover courtesy of People.