LONDON, Sept 20 — The brother of princess Diana, Charles Spencer, on Sunday accused King Charles III of “gaslighting” him by querying his explosive account of events around her death in an upcoming memoir.
Spencer, whose book about his older sister, Swan Song, comes out Tuesday, told the Mail on Sunday newspaper: “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King”, escalating a war of words after Buckingham Palace issued a rare statement.
A Palace spokesperson reacted to the memoir’s claims Thursday, saying the 77-year-old king “is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss”.
This came after a sensational claim in memoir excerpts serialised in the Daily Mail that Charles, then Prince of Wales, told Spencer in a phone call shortly after Diana’s death in 1997: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
Spencer claimed Charles “sounded dizzily elated — like a lottery winner”.
The 62-year-old aristocrat told the Mail on Sunday the royal statement “was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the King being able to deny what I’d said”.
He also dubbed it a “rather poor imitation” of the Palace’s response to Prince Harry and his wife Meghan’s claims of royal racism in an interview with Oprah Winfrey five years ago — which was that “recollections may vary”.
Spencer formerly worked as a US television journalist and has written books about history and his school days. He inherited the family estate where Diana is buried.
After her death, he accused media of having “blood on their hands” and in a eulogy at her funeral, vowed always to look out for her two sons, William and Harry. — AFP
