Charles Spencer’s new book is not even out yet, and some of its most gruesome details have already been hashed out in the British press for several days. Such is the enduring legacy of its subject, his sister, Princess Diana, that she is still making front pages 29 years after her death.
Yet while Swan Song, Spencer’s attempt to eulogise his beloved sister’s life, is ostensibly an antidote to the tabloid sensationalism that he claims to loathe, questions of reliability and ethics remain. His claim that the then-Prince Charles “hissed” down the phone at him after Diana’s death that “we’ll forget her soon enough” has already been extrapolated into a thousand meanings, denied by the Palace, and made out as fabrication, and Diana, the story that never ends, is once again at the centre of the conversation.
This specific story about Charles – and there are many more shocking claims in the book, each more wince-inducing than the last – can be used to denigrate either Spencer or the now King, depending on who you ask. In Swan Song, Spencer points out that after he delivered his famous eulogy at Diana’s funeral, which, like the book, excoriated the role of the press in her death, it was interpreted with bias from all sides, used to prove whatever point needed to be proved. The story of Diana and the Royal Family is such an emotive, divisive one that this will always be the case, whatever it is that’s written about her.
And so the question of the book becomes more thorny. The timing of its publication has drawn scepticism. Is it a money-grab for the Earl, who previously swore he would never make money from her death? Are the details of Diana’s eating disorders and mental health – he claims that he believes she had ADHD (or, in the words of her primary school teacher, a “flibbertigibbet mind”), and with it Rejection Sensitivity Disorder (RSD) – necessary? Should she just be left in peace?
Charles Spencer’s new book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister (Photo: Ben Montgomery/Getty Images)These are fair questions without easy answers. But for the most part, the book feels honest. Early on, he claims that she never got to write her own swan song, so here he is, doing it for her.
What is clear is that Spencer is a good, gripping writer. He weaves the tale, particularly the nostalgic memories of their very English upper-class childhood, with novelistic flair (chapters frequently end with something close to a cliffhanger – sometimes even ellipsis). Park House, their original home in Norfolk, was “composed of a rough, rusty sandstone that looked, up close, like the crust on scorched gingerbread”, he writes. “To one side of the fireplace stood a coal bucket, with logs, kindling and Zip firelighters, to fight against the cold Norfolk winters, whose wind blew in from the Ural Mountains, bearing skeins of high-flying geese in its teeth.”
His writing about Diana can sometimes veer from genuinely heartfelt into dewy-eyed sycophancy – “I have never, in my life, come across a better mother”; “she tended her extensive menagerie of stuffed toys lovingly”; as a baby she was “an exquisite little blonde poppet”. These forays might imply the book is written solely for its audience: within the first few pages we are reminded Diana was non-judgemental, honest, fierce, brave, and had natural star power.
But he does acknowledge her flaws, too, and their disagreements in both adulthood and childhood: like when she unkindly pushed him and his bike off a wall into some gorse bushes, or when she “played to the gallery” by pretending to be chummy with their loathed stepmother, Raine. It becomes increasingly clear that, rather than solely for her or for us, he has really written this for himself – a person whose life has been defined by the “fraternal grief” that the Palace has claimed clouded his judgement and who has endured, often alongside his sister, tragedy of his own.
Though the first half of the book, focused on the Spencers’ childhood and adolescence at Park House and later Althorp, following their parents’ divorce, is the most compelling, it is also a little unclear what he wants us to believe. He describes “a household divided by divorce and darkly punctuated by the death of a sibling”, and then on the same page “an extremely happy childhood home”.
He says “Diana tended to present our childhood as less happy than I believe it truly was” – but then he talks of nannies smashing their heads against concrete walls when they misbehaved, and a grandmother who sided with their father rather than her own daughter in the divorce for reasons of social status, and his father’s depression following the divorce, not diagnosed but palpable by the household, and how, when their mother was leaving the family home, she told Diana she would be back soon, never to return: Diana would sit on the front step waiting for her.
Princess Diana at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, November 1989. (Photo: Jayne Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images)He tells, most shockingly, of how his parents’ first child, John, was born with significant deformities and disabilities – and how his father and the doctor took him away from Diana and Charles’s mother before she could even hold him, to spare her the trauma of laying eyes on him. He died in a separate room a few hours later, and in the years that followed, his mother claimed, his father raked through her family history to try to ascertain the cause of John’s problems (it was, he now believes, the morning sickness medication she was prescribed).
Amid these upsetting episodes there is joyful nostalgia: images of piles of children perched on antique chairs at Sandringham House (their first royal visit) to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or sliding down the bannisters, or trips to the beach, or stacks of tennis racquets and croquet sets stored ready for summer. This delectable upper-class voyeurism does often veer into dark comedy, too, like an errant cook running around the kitchen table with a carving knife, or the evil stepmother shouting “Where is my fucking egg?” to her servants, first thing in the morning, from the top of the staircase.
Of course, his exorcisms also take form through jabs at Charles, who, unsurprisingly, does not come off well. Tales veer from tactlessness – Charles told him, when his father died, that he was “lucky to be inheriting so young” – to pettiness – in the same interaction, he stamped his foot like a child, aged 43 – to the downright cruelty of that already infamous quote.
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