Ellie

The second instalment of Earl Spencer's book is out, and the claim has grown. Yesterday, the then Prince of Wales was supposed to have said Diana would be forgotten soon enough. This week he sounded "giddily elated, like a lottery winner" on the telephone the night she died. The book also says unnamed people at Buckingham Palace were pleased she was dead. The Palace has not answered this one. It may not need to. Its reply to the first instalment, that grief can cloud reason and colour memory even decades on, reads less like a rebuke now and more like a forecast. As I said yesterday, nobody has to pretend Charles was a good husband to Diana. He wasn't, and he said so on television in 1994. Judge the night instead, because the night is documented. He was at Balmoral when the call came from Paris in the small hours. He was told she was dead before dawn. He walked out alone onto the moor. He let his sons sleep, then went into their rooms and told them himself. He telephoned her family. He decided, reportedly over the objections of courtiers, to fly to Paris with her sisters and bring her home, and to have her coffin draped in the Royal Standard she was no longer entitled to. Accounts from those who were at Balmoral that night describe a man in shock and in tears. None of them describes a lottery winner. Now look at the evidence for the claim. A voice on a telephone line to Cape Town, in the middle of the night, from a man who had not slept, heard by a man who had just been woken with the worst news of his life, and written down twenty-nine years later. Spencer's own passage says the call sounded strangely matter-of-fact before it says giddily elated. Those are not the same thing. Anyone who has taken a call like that knows what shock does to a voice. It goes flat. It goes practical. It talks about arrangements, because arrangements are the only thing left to hold on to. That is what matter-of-fact sounds like. Elated is the word you reach for later, when you want the reader to feel something. And this is a memory that has been growing. In 1997, in the Abbey, with Charles sitting a few feet away and the whole world listening, the Earl said nothing of the kind. In 2017, on the twentieth anniversary, he told the BBC he had been lied to about whether the boys wanted to walk, and called the decision bizarre and cruel. Strong words, and still no lottery winner. In 2026 there is a book to sell, and now there is one. The same instalment publishes his sister's most private moments of despair, which she cannot consent to, and passes on thirty-year-old gossip about the King's private life, attributed to her, which she cannot confirm. Courtiers who are not named are said to have been pleased she died, so nobody can answer. That is not a brother defending his sister. It is a brother using her. The witness, briefly. In 1993 he offered his sister a home on the family estate and withdrew it. In 1995 he introduced Martin Bashir to her after being shown forged documents; to his credit he later helped expose the fraud, but it was still his introduction. He pledged in the Abbey that her blood family would steer her sons, and was in a Cape Town divorce court three months later with his infidelities aired in public. Three marriages, three divorces, seven children by three women, and a new partner public within weeks of the last marriage ending in 2024. One fact in this chapter is not in dispute: the King rang him. In the hours after losing the mother of his children, Charles picked up the telephone to her brother on another continent, because that is what you do. Twenty-nine years later, that courtesy has become a lottery win. Memory is not evidence. Deeds are. The King's are on the record. So, now, are the Earl's. Thank you Audrey for the video. teapawt.net/audrey_fforbes/status/…