“We’ll forget her soon enough”: Diana’s brother reveals Charles’s shocking words after her death

Charles Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother, claims that just days after her death, the then-Prince Charles angrily told him: “Don’t doubt it, we’ll forget her soon enough.” The sensational revelation appears in the Earl Spencer’s new memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, excerpts of which the Daily Mail has begun publishing.

According to Spencer, the words were spoken during a bitter argument on the eve of Diana’s funeral. At the center of the dispute was the decision that her sons — 15-year-old Prince William and 12-year-old Prince Harry — should walk behind their mother’s coffin during the funeral procession.

The Earl was vehemently opposed to the decision. He claims he told Charles that Diana would never have wanted her young sons to be subjected to such a public ordeal.

According to Spencer, Charles responded by questioning the Spencer family’s sense of duty. The conversation then, he claims, descended into an even more heated exchange.

In his memoir, the Earl writes that Charles “lost his temper” when Spencer reminded him that, when the Prince had taken part in the funeral of his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten in 1979, he was already 30 years old.

“Prince Charles continued to pour out his anger, not allowing me to get a word in. Then he fell silent.

“I assumed that the pause meant he was trying to compose himself. But then he spat down the phone what I had always perceived as his buried contempt for Diana, and his horror at just how profoundly the world had been shaken by her death.

“‘Don’t doubt it,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough!’”

Spencer claims he was so stunned by what he had heard that he was unable to respond for several seconds.

“I can’t believe you’ve just said that,” he told him before hanging up.

Against the backdrop of these sensational claims, Buckingham Palace issued an unusually pointed statement. Although members of the royal family do not generally comment on the contents of books, on this occasion palace officials felt it necessary to respond to the Earl’s account.

“While we do not, as a matter of principle, comment on books, His Majesty recognizes that the pain of losing a close relative can cloud the mind, affect the ability to make decisions and alter memories in ways that remain unnoticed by others — even many years after such a loss,” the palace said in a statement.

The palace therefore does not directly call Spencer’s claims false, but suggests that the grief he experienced may have affected his perception of events and his memories of them.

In the book, the 62-year-old Earl Spencer also recounts other dramatic events that followed Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris in 1997. He writes that he decided to publish the memoir in order to correct what he believes were “untruths” told about his elder sister.

On September 6, 1997, six days after Diana’s death, Spencer delivered the now-famous eulogy at her funeral in Westminster Abbey. It was later hailed as one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century. Before the service, he walked behind Diana’s coffin through central London alongside William and Harry, as well as Charles and Prince Philip.