Afua Hagan is a contributor to CTVNews.ca, focusing on the Royal Family. Based in London and Accra, Hagan is a regular commentator on the royals across a variety of international outlets, and is a leading voice on diversity in Britain. Here’s something that hasn’t changed in almost three decades: nobody can agree on what really happened to Diana, Princess of Wales – who failed her, who’s to blame, and who gets to decide how she’s remembered. Charles Spencer’s new memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, is billed as a book about his sister. But read between the lines and it’s really about something messier; grief memory, blame, and the tug-of-war between two families over who owns her legacy. A lot of what’s in there, we already knew. Diana was miserable for stretches of her marriage. She battled bulimia and self-harm. The press hounded her mercilessly. She had serious cold feet before marrying the then-Prince Charles, and Camilla Parker Bowles was a ghost at that wedding long before anyone said her name out loud. None of that is new. What is new, and perhaps more importantly what’s making the Royal Family distinctly uncomfortable, is what Spencer says was happening behind closed doors, especially in the days right after Diana died. The biggest bombshell: a conversation with the man who’s now King Charles III. Spencer says that during a heated row over whether then-15-year-old William and 12-year-old Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin, Charles told him, “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.” The Palace response Buckingham Palace didn’t stay quiet on that one. Its response was unusually pointed. Grief, the Palace said, can “cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory.” Notice what that statement actually does. It doesn’t just offer a different memory. It quietly questions whether Spencer’s memory can be trusted at all. Earl Spencer isn’t backing down, though. He says he knows what he heard. And that’s really the problem sitting underneath this entire book. These were private conversations between grieving people, nearly 30 years ago. No recordings. No transcripts. No one else in the room to confirm either version. Just memory, and right now, two very different versions of the same moments. Spencer also describes Charles sounding “giddily elated” on the phone shortly after Diana died, like a man who’d won the lottery. That’s a startling image, and I’ll be honest, it’s hard to read it without wincing. But there’s a difference between what Spencer heard and what he’s decided it meant. He can tell us how King Charles sounded. He can’t tell us what King Charles was actually feeling inside. And we shouldn’t forget the rest of what happened during this time either. Charles flew to Paris to bring Diana home, and he was heavily involved in planning her funeral. Both things can be true at once: an unsettling phone call, and a father publicly grieving the mother of his children. Queen Elizabeth II’s surprising offer Where the book gets genuinely surprising is when it moves past King Charles. Spencer claims Queen Elizabeth II offered, after the funeral, to restore Diana’s HRH title, the one she lost in the 1996 divorce. The offer reportedly came through her private secretary, Robert Fellowes. Spencer turned it down. At the time, he didn’t see the point in restoring something in death that had been stripped away in life. Now, he says, he wonders whether William and Harry might have valued the gesture. That detail alone complicates the tired old story of an icy, unfeeling Palace. If Spencer’s remembering it right, the Queen was weighing a genuinely symbolic gesture toward Diana at the exact moment the monarchy was under the most public pressure of her reign. Behind the scenes, it seems, there may have been far more conflict and emotion than the public ever saw. Then there’s the funeral itself, still one of the most painful chapters anyone can write about. We all remember the image: William and Harry, walking behind their mother’s coffin. Spencer says he hated the idea from the start. He didn’t believe Diana would have wanted her sons put through it. And in this book, he goes further into how that decision was actually made, crediting Prince Philip with stepping in and insisting that Spencer walk at the centre, alongside the boys. What strikes me is that even now, decades later, there’s still no single agreed-upon version of that decision. William has called it a collective family choice. Harry has said no child should ever have been asked to do it, while also saying he’s glad, in hindsight, that he did. Spencer remembers it as something imposed on two grieving boys, not chosen by them. That disagreement isn’t small. It gets right to the heart of one of the biggest unanswered questions about how this family handled Diana’s death: were William and Harry protected, or were they put on display? Spencer’s description of Harry in the aftermath is hard to read. “Tiny, and slight, and bereft,” he writes, with what he felt was little emotional care shown to him. Does Swan Song rewrite history? I want to be careful here, because that’s Spencer’s judgment looking back, not an established fact. William, for his part, has spoken warmly about the Queen shielding them both from the public storm while they were at Balmoral. Both things can be true, you can protect a child from cameras and headlines while still leaving an emotional gap nobody filled. And given everything Harry has said publicly since about the toll his mother’s death took on him, Spencer’s account carries extra weight. There’s more in here that’s genuinely new. Spencer writes that Diana drove to Beachy Head during her darkest moments, contemplating suicide, and pulled back because of her sons. Diana’s struggles with suicidal thoughts weren’t news, we’ve known that since Andrew Morton’s biography and Diana’s own recorded words. But the Beachy Head detail hasn’t been told before. Then there’s the claim that will get people talking for all the wrong reasons: Spencer says Diana once told him Charles was “in love with his valet.” Even Spencer admits he found it hard to believe. There’s zero independent corroboration here, and I think it would be careless to treat this as any kind of evidence about Charles’s private life. All we can honestly say is that Spencer says Diana told him that. Nothing more, nothing less. He also pushes back on the idea that Diana and Dodi Fayed were headed for marriage, suggesting Dodi wasn’t the great love of her life and that someone else mattered far more to her. That actually lines up with testimony from the 2008 inquest, where witnesses spoke about how attached Diana was to surgeon Hasnat Khan, and cast real doubt on the marriage narrative. So, does Swan Song rewrite history? Not really. Most of the big themes here were already part of the public record. What Spencer adds is new conversations, new specifics, and a far less forgiving take on how parts of the Royal Family behaved. And that distinction matters. This isn’t the definitive account of Diana’s life – it’s Charles Spencer’s account. That carries real weight, obviously. He was her brother. He knew her before the crown ever touched her. He stood beside William and Harry at her funeral. He was in the room for the arguments about what came next. But being close to someone doesn’t make you objective about them. Spencer was grieving. He was angry. And he’s had thirty years to sit with all of it. The Palace has its version. Spencer has his. And Diana – the one person who could settle any of this – isn’t here to give us hers. Maybe that’s exactly why we’re still talking about her. Almost 30 years later, we’re still arguing over what she wanted, who really understood her, and who let her down. Swan Song isn’t going to end that argument. If anything, it’s proof we’re nowhere near the last word. If you or someone you know is in crisis or struggling with mental illness, here are some resources that are available.
