Critics question reliability of Earl Spencer's memoir

“Can you imagine anybody making a profit out of their brother or sister’s death? I mean, it’s so low, it’s inconceivable … I’ll never profit from Diana’s death.”

So vowed Earl Charles Spencer in the 1998 documentary Diana: My Sister, the Princess, broadcast weeks before he would open the area near the former Princess of Wales’ grave at Althorp Estate to the public for £9.50 ($35.80 today) a ticket.

At the time, Spencer’s spokeswoman said any profit would be donated to the now-defunct Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. No such promises have been made regarding the proceeds from Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, the controversial memoir, released this week. Promoting the book on Instagram, Spencer wrote: “At heart, this is a brother’s simple tribute to an extraordinary sister.”

The dissonance between Spencer’s “I’ll never profit from Diana’s death” declaration less than a year after the 36-year-old princess’s tragic death in a Paris car crash, and his reported £750,000 to £1 million ($1.4 to $1.9 million) book deal advance – plus potential £10 million ($18.8 million) earnings should the memoir be popular in the United States – almost 30 years on, is one reason critics have suggested Spencer’s new venture is a tawdry cash grab.

Another is that in his book, Spencer offers up unflattering anecdotes – such as Diana slapping their father after his secret marriage to Raine, former Countess of Dartmouth, and later shoving her stepmother down a carpeted staircase.

These brotherly memories have been republished by the same media he denounced in the searing eulogy delivered to those inside Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997, and the approximately 2.5 billion people watching Diana’s funeral across the globe.

(In the book, Spencer recalls an incident where paparazzi “converged on her like hyenas closing in on a gazelle” when a then-19-year-old Diana came to visit him for lunch at Eton. Diana spoke openly about media intrusion throughout her life, and when she did speak to journalists, including Martin Bashir for Panorama or Andrew Morton for Diana, Her True Story, she ended up regretting it).

“If we’re looking to the cynics, they would say that the upkeep of a 16th-century ancestral home and three divorces does require a significant income,” says Victoria Arbiter, a royal commentator who spent parts of her youth living in Kensington Palace with her father, Dickie Arbiter, who was Queen Elizabeth II’s press secretary.

“But I don’t know that that is the sole motivation here. Only Earl Spencer can really know why it is that he wrote this book.”

Spencer told the BBC he felt it was his duty to write it “as an eyewitness to history” and someone in the “final season of my life”. Both his parents died in their 60s, and Spencer turned 62 in May.

“I’m aware of mortality and I wanted to just put things down once and for all that were true,” he said.

But how much of this history was Spencer an eyewitness to?

In a letter sent by Spencer to Diana in April 1996, which was published in Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell’s 2003 memoir, A Royal Duty, Spencer referenced his strained relationship with his older sister due to neglect on both sides.

He accused Diana of being a “fickle friend”, manipulative and deceitful. Reports differ on whether Spencer and Diana fully reconciled in the subsequent 16 months before her death.

“The astonishing pressures of her life, and her reactive nature, saw her fall out with each of us regularly,” Spencer writes in his new book.

“She was on non-speaks with two of our closest relatives for months before her death, over not very much at all.”

It’s in this context that Arbiter finds Spencer’s branding as the “champion of Diana” to be “quite startling”.

“[He’s] really trying to speak on behalf of her and to share what she would have wanted him to say,” says Arbiter. “And yet, how much of that was he really privy to? We can’t be certain.”

One person privy to events alleged by Spencer in the memoir is King Charles III, who Spencer claimed said Diana would be forgotten “soon enough” in the lead-up to her funeral.

That nugget, aired the week before the book’s release as part of a Daily Mail serialisation, prompted Buckingham Palace to break its “never complain, never explain” mantra and issue, by that standard, an extraordinary statement.

“While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful 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,” the statement read. (Spencer later called the statement “classic gaslighting”).

There was less subtlety in broadcaster Piers Morgan’s reaction to Spencer falsely describing him as an editor of The Daily Mirror when the Mirror Group published photographs of Diana at the gym in November 1993 (Morgan became an editor in 1995).

Morgan has called on publisher Penguin Random House to stop selling the book, though Spencer apologised for the mistake and said it will be corrected in the book’s second edition. Whether further corrections will be made remains to be seen.

“Because Earl Spencer is Diana’s brother, a historian and a journalist, his account is going to be viewed as an authority. But in the serialisation alone, there are claims that simply do not hold up to scrutiny,” says Arbiter.

Arbiter notes Spencer’s claim that Diana was not eligible for burial at the royal ground because she had lost the “Her Royal Highness” styling is incorrect. Wallis Simpson, who was never styled HRH, is buried there alongside her husband, the former King Edward VIII.

“The late Queen Elizabeth II had asked that Diana be buried at Frogmore, believing that it would be a place that her sons could visit her easily, where she could be protected, where she could truly rest in peace in a private setting,” says Arbiter. “Earl Spencer wanted to take her home.”

“If a historian cannot get these right, it does call into question the validity of the rest of the book,” says Arbiter. “A person’s feelings are perfectly valid, but they do not equate to substantiated fact.”

Reviews have not been kind. The Telegraph’s Anita Singh argued Spencer’s book was more of “a loving tribute to himself” than one to Diana, and The Guardian’s Emma Brockes said it is “a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer.”

A day after its release, Spencer – who told his sisters and Princes William and Harry he was writing the book late in the process – hit back.

“This is about Diana. It was impossible to give the full story of Diana’s life without putting in context certain things,” Spencer said on ITV’s Lorraine on Wednesday, saying he had “every right” to write about his sister.

“My job in this book was to celebrate Diana − it’s exactly the same as with the eulogy. By doing that, other people are going to come off not as well as they might want to.”

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