Princess Diana’s brother is reopening one of the most sensational chapters of the royal family’s past with a startling claim about something Diana allegedly told him during the collapse of her marriage.
Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, writes in his upcoming memoir “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister” that Diana once told him her husband, then-Prince Charles, was “in love with his valet.”
The claim appears in excerpts from Spencer’s book ahead of its September 22 release and represents Diana’s alleged words as remembered by her brother nearly three decades later.
It is not an established fact about King Charles, and Buckingham Palace has previously strongly rejected similar allegations concerning the monarch.
According to Spencer’s account, Diana made the comment while telling him over lunch that she intended to seek a divorce from Charles.
Spencer recalled warning his sister about the consequences of ending the marriage before Diana allegedly responded, “But, Carlos, my husband is in love with his valet.”
Spencer does not identify the valet in the passage.
However, the allegation inevitably echoes a notorious royal controversy from the early 2000s involving Charles’s longtime aide Michael Fawcett and former royal valet George Smith.
Smith claimed he had witnessed a separate sexual incident involving a senior member of the royal family and a servant. Those allegations triggered intense media coverage in Britain but were never verified.
In November 2003, Charles’s office issued an unusually explicit denial after speculation became widespread.
A statement from the then-Prince of Wales said the alleged incident “did not take place,” while his private secretary Sir Michael Peat called the allegation completely untrue. Contemporary reporting also noted there was no evidence supporting Smith’s account.
Fawcett had meanwhile obtained a court injunction preventing the Mail on Sunday from publishing details of Smith’s allegations. The injunction itself became part of the story, with British newspapers reporting around the claim while being legally restricted from printing its specifics.
Smith had previously made a separate allegation that he was raped by another member of the royal household.
That accusation was examined as part of an internal inquiry commissioned by Prince Charles and led by Peat and barrister Edmund Lawson QC.
The resulting 2003 report did not determine whether the alleged assault had occurred. Instead, it investigated whether palace officials had improperly covered up Smith’s complaint.
The inquiry found no evidence of a deliberate cover-up, although it concluded that procedures used to handle the allegation had been inadequate and required improvement.
The new memoir therefore does not establish the decades-old rumor as true. What it adds is Spencer’s claim that Diana herself privately expressed a belief about her husband to him while their marriage was unraveling.
The revelation is only one of several explosive recollections in “Swan Song.”
Spencer also alleges that Charles told Diana shortly before their 1981 wedding that he was happy to marry her but was not in love with her.
He further writes that Charles once commented critically on Diana’s weight and that his sister became so distressed during the marriage that she drove to Beachy Head in England while contemplating suicide, stopping herself because of her sons.
Those accounts are Spencer’s recollections of what Diana told him and have not been independently verified.
The memoir also revisits the extraordinary days surrounding Diana’s death in Paris on August 31, 1997.
Spencer claims that during a bitter disagreement over funeral arrangements, Charles told him, “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
Buckingham Palace has taken the unusual step of publicly pushing back against that account.
“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,” a palace spokesperson said in response to the memoir.
Spencer has also written that Charles sounded strangely upbeat when the two men spoke following Diana’s death, an interpretation Spencer says led him to believe Charles was considering how the tragedy could affect his future with Camilla Parker Bowles.
Again, that is Spencer’s interpretation of the conversation rather than an independently established account of Charles’s state of mind.
The clash is particularly notable because Buckingham Palace usually avoids responding directly to books about the royal family.
Sky News described the palace’s response as an unusually forceful intervention, while Reuters reported that the statement amounted to a rare public challenge to Spencer’s version of events.
“Swan Song: Diana, My Sister” is due to be published in the United States on September 22.
Penguin Random House says the 384-page memoir is the first time Spencer has written at length about Diana’s life, their childhood together and the week surrounding her death.
Spencer says he decided to write the book because, with the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death approaching in 2027, he wanted to put his own memories on record rather than continue seeing what he considers inaccurate versions of his sister’s story repeated publicly.
Nearly 30 years after Diana’s death, the memoir is once again placing the bitter collapse of one of the world’s most famous marriages under a microscope — but its most sensational assertions remain personal recollections and disputed allegations, not proven facts.
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