In the autumn of 1996, inside Kensington Palace, Princess Diana sat at her desk and wrote a letter by hand. She placed it in an envelope, sealed it, and gave it to her butler with instructions to keep it safe. It was never sent. It had no address, no stamp, and no destination. She asked that it be dated and kept in case of an emergency.
The letter did not surface for another seven years. When it finally did, a single sentence from it dominated the front pages of every British newspaper: "This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous."
Thirty years later, almost to the month, a member of her family sat down to finish a different kind of writing. Her brother, Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, had spent decades giving careful, guarded interviews about his sister. He delivered the eulogy the world still remembers from her funeral. He marked her memory every year. But for the most part, he kept the rest to himself.
This year, he stopped keeping it to himself. He wrote a book, and in it, he did something almost no one in his position had done before. He described in his own words a phone call with the man who is now King of England, made in the days after Diana’s death, and quoted what that man said to him. He also described the exact moment he learned of his sister’s death. He was staying at Balmoral that August, and wrote that Charles stopped him as he crossed an upstairs hallway early in the morning to deliver the news personally.
What Spencer says happened next, in the days between that hallway and the funeral, is the part of his new book that the Palace has now felt compelled to deny publicly. Buckingham Palace does not usually respond to memoirs. Its standing policy, repeated across generations, is that it does not comment on books. This time, it broke that policy. It issued a statement, carefully worded and unambiguously defensive, about grief clouding a man’s judgment.
That is not a small thing. An institution nearly a thousand years old decided that silence was riskier than a response. It means that whatever you think you already know about Diana, about her marriage, about the crash, about the letter, something genuinely new happened this month. It happened because a member of the Spencer family finally spoke.
The story begins with two children growing up in a large, cold house in Norfolk. Diana Frances Spencer was born in 1961 at Park House, a rented property on the grounds of Sandringham, the royal family’s private retreat in Norfolk. The Spencers were not nouveaux riches seeking proximity to the royals. They had been aristocrats for centuries, with a lineage arguably older and more storied than the Windsors themselves. Park House was so close to the royal estate that the children of both families grew up moving between each other’s gardens as a matter of course.
Diana’s parents already had two daughters, Sarah and Jane, several years older, and a son who died hours after birth the year before Diana arrived. Her father, John Spencer, and mother, Frances, wanted a male heir so badly that Diana’s arrival was, by the family’s own later account, closer to a disappointment at the moment it happened. Three years later, they finally got their son, Charles.
A small, telling detail is often overlooked whenever this family’s story is told. Before Charles, Prince of Wales, met Diana, he dated her older sister Sarah. Sarah is the one who eventually introduced her royal boyfriend to her younger sister, without realizing where that step would lead. Diana’s two older sisters have lived their lives entirely out of the public eye. Both are still alive, and both have spent the decades since Diana’s death doing something close to the opposite of what their brother just did.
Jane, the middle sister, married a man named Robert Fellowes, who served as private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II. Sarah, the eldest, married a farmer named Neil McCorquodale and largely withdrew from public life. Neither has given the interviews their brother has given. Neither has written a memoir about their sister. Instead, Sarah has moved closer to the family Diana left behind, appearing beside Queen Camilla at a 2025 anniversary event and quietly supporting her nephew William at a military graduation the year before. Jane went further. In 2020, she accepted a life peerage and became Baroness Fellowes, a title granted by the very institution her sister felt cast out from in her final years.
Any tension that exists today between the Spencer and Windsor families runs through one brother, not three. Charles Spencer has said clearly, on more than one occasion, that Diana was the closest person to him while they were growing up. Their older sisters were at a different stage of childhood by the time he was born. A baby brother had also died before either of them arrived. So for years, the two of them did everything together. He has described a quiet local day school they attended side by side before boarding school separated them. He has said they were allies.
Then their parents divorced, brutally and publicly for that era. The mother ultimately lost custody of the children, partly because the judges of that time had little sympathy for a mother who left her marriage. Diana was sent to boarding school a year before her brother. He has said her absence from the house was one of the most devastating things about that period. That detail matters more than it seems because it explains something people miss about Charles Spencer’s later behavior. He was never a distant relative performing grief on a public stage. He grew up as her closest ally in a house that had already cracked once before.
Diana married the Prince of Wales in 1981, watched by a global audience estimated in the hundreds of millions. The marriage that followed has been analyzed so many times that it is easy to skip over what actually happened in her final years. Those final years are the source of the letter. Before reaching it, there is an earlier hidden testimony that almost no one covers properly, and it explains exactly why Diana trusted paper and tape more than she trusted the people around her.
In 1991, six years before her death, Diana began secretly recording her own account of her marriage. She did not sit down with a journalist. She used an old friend, a doctor named James Colthurst, as a courier. He cycled to Kensington Palace with a list of questions prepared by the writer Andrew Morton hidden in his bicycle basket, then fitted Diana with a microphone, recorded her answers, and cycled back out with the tape. Morton and Diana never met face to face during the entire process. That was deliberate, so she could deny it if it was ever exposed.
Colthurst has since described a particular afternoon when he literally fell off his bicycle in central London with the tapes. He later said that if the contents of that basket had scattered in the street that day, the world might have known everything years before it actually did. Diana went further than just talking. When Morton’s publisher demanded proof beyond her word that Camilla Parker Bowles and Charles were still involved, Diana provided the evidence herself. She took a collection of Camilla’s private love letters to Charles from his briefcase at Balmoral and allowed the publishing team to read them. That single act convinced them the story was real.
The book, "Diana: Her True Story," was published in 1992. Diana and Morton spent years publicly denying her involvement, even as the book upended the carefully managed image of her marriage. She only confirmed her role after her death, through instructions she left for Morton, who then released a revised edition based on the full transcripts. Morton has since described the first time he sat and listened to those tapes alone in a working-class café in north London, with headphones on, as Diana’s unfiltered voice spoke about eating disorders, suicide attempts, and a marriage she had spent years pretending was sound.
Long before 1996, Diana had already learned that the safest way to tell the truth about her life was to put it somewhere it could not be denied. A tape, a stolen letter, a sealed note delivered through an intermediary to surface later. By the time she sat down to write to her butler, she was not improvising a new strategy. She was repeating one that had already worked for her once.
Diana’s isolation in this period was not just emotional, it was structural. Once her divorce was finalized in 1996, she lost her official title, Her Royal Highness, along with the police protection team that had accompanied her full-time since 1981. She kept a much smaller private security team, largely funded from her own settlement. Friends from that period described her as acutely aware that the safety net built around her since she was nineteen had been quietly dismantled just as her public profile and the risks attached to it reached their highest point.
By late 1995, Diana and Charles had separated. Their divorce was on its way to completion the following year, and Diana had told several people close to her, independently of one another, that she believed something was wrong with her car. She told a friend, Simone Simmons, that the brakes had failed and she suspected tampering. She told Hasnat Khan, a heart surgeon she was involved with at the time, that she had replaced her old car with a BMW because the brakes on the previous one had been tampered with.
On October 30, 1995, Diana went further. She sat with her lawyer, Victor Mischon, and told him that reliable sources, whom she declined to name, had warned her that by the following April, an attempt would be made either to kill her or to injure her so severely that she could be declared mentally unbalanced, possibly through a staged car accident involving brake failure. Mischon did what any careful lawyer would do. He wrote an immediate note of the meeting and kept it in his files. That note still exists and later surfaced as part of an official investigation.
About a year after that meeting, in October 1996, two months after her divorce was finalized, Diana wrote the letter. She addressed it to her butler, Paul Burrell, sealed it, and asked him to date it and keep it, in case anything happened to her. The letter began with her saying she was sitting at her desk, wishing someone would hug her and tell her to hold her head high. Then it moved to the warning itself. The words she used, later published in full, were that this particular phase of her life was the most dangerous, and that a person she named, redacted in the press coverage that followed, was planning a car accident involving brake failure and serious head injury to pave the way for a new marriage.
Burrell, describing the moment she handed him the letter, said she told him she wanted him to date it and keep it "for emergencies." He kept that envelope, unopened by anyone else, for the rest of her life, through her death, and through his own headline-making trial three years later on charges of illegally keeping her possessions. That case collapsed suddenly in 2002 after the late Queen recalled a private conversation in which Burrell had told her he was keeping those items safe, not stealing them.
Once the legal danger passed and a publisher came calling, Burrell held onto the letter for seven years. It only became public in 2003 when he published his own memoirs and the Daily Mirror printed excerpts, with a picture of part of the handwritten page, the specific name redacted. The revelation caused exactly the kind of uproar you would expect. A princess who died six years earlier in a car crash had apparently predicted, in her own handwriting, that someone close to her was planning a car crash to kill her.
This is where the story is usually hijacked by people with an agenda. A formal police investigation, code-named Operation Paget, led by former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens, examined this very letter as part of a years-long inquiry into whether Diana’s death was murder rather than an accident. The inquiry had access to the letter, Mischon’s note, witness statements from Simmons and Khan, and the French forensic evidence from the crash site itself.
The inquiry, published in 2006, concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy to kill her. The cause of the crash was her driver, Henri Paul, who was over the legal alcohol limit and driving at high speed while being chased by paparazzi. Diana’s fear was real and well documented. The conspiracy she feared was not. Operation Paget was not a quick review. It lasted nearly three years, cost British taxpayers millions of pounds, and involved investigators matching phone records, medical reports, and forensic evidence from the tunnel itself, alongside a parallel French judicial inquiry led by Judge Hervé Stéphan, which had already concluded years earlier that the crash was a tragic road accident with no third-party involvement.
Lord Stevens’ report ran to hundreds of pages and addressed conspiracy theories point by point, including claims about a mysterious white Fiat Uno at the tunnel entrance and allegations that British or French intelligence agencies had a hand in the crash. Every thread was examined and dismissed. The investigators treated the letter to Burrell and Mischon’s earlier note as evidence of Diana’s state of mind in her final years, not as evidence pointing to an actual killer. That distinction is the heart of including any of this. Diana genuinely believed, in her final years, that her safety could not be guaranteed, that people close to the institution she married into wanted to get rid of her, and she was frightened enough to leave written proof in case of an emergency. An official murder investigation examined every scrap of that evidence and concluded her fear did not match reality. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels out the other.
On August 31, 1997, the car carrying Diana and Dodi Fayed crashed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, killing them and their driver. The French judicial inquiry reached the same conclusion Operation Paget would later reach. Six days after her death, her brother stood in Westminster Abbey to deliver her eulogy. Spencer had worked in broadcasting before entering the House of Lords, so he was not inexperienced in public speaking. But by his own admission, given in 2017 and again this year, the final paragraphs nearly broke him physically. He said he was gasping at the final lines, forcing out every syllable from what felt like the bottom of his stomach.
In that speech, he described his sister as the most hunted person of the modern age, a direct rebuke to the press that had pursued her for sixteen years. Then he turned to address her two sons directly, aged fifteen and twelve, standing on the other side of her coffin, and pledged that her family by blood would raise them so their souls could sing freely rather than be suffocated by duty and tradition. Consider what that sentence meant inside Westminster Abbey, with the Queen a few feet away. He was telling two future kings, in front of their grandmother and father, that their mother’s family intended to protect them from the very institution they were born into.
The crowds outside the abbey heard it through loudspeakers and applauded. The applause seeped inside through the open doors until people inside the abbey began clapping too, an unprecedented breach of formal funeral protocol. Spencer later revealed that the speech the world remembers was almost not the one he delivered. He had written something completely different before flying back overnight from Cape Town, where he was then living, and rewriting it into the version he actually read. He has also spoken separately about the half hour immediately before that, watching his two young nephews walk behind their mother’s coffin through central London. He described it as the most horrifying half hour of his life, worse than the eulogy itself, and said in the years since that he opposed the boys’ participation in that procession entirely.
A disagreement, according to his new memoir, is exactly what led to the phone call with Charles that ended with a remark about forgetting her soon enough. Among the small details of that day that have stuck in public memory for nearly thirty years is one card placed among the flowers on top of the coffin as it passed through the streets. Harry, aged twelve, had written a single word on it: "Mummy."
For most of the following two decades, Charles Spencer maintained a largely consistent public line. He gave interviews at major anniversaries, spoke about missing his sister, and occasionally criticized decisions made about her funeral, most notably the decision to have William and Harry, aged fifteen and twelve, walk behind her coffin in the procession. In 2024, he published a memoir about his childhood, describing sexual abuse he suffered at boarding school. It was a personal, non-royal book, but it added real context for why he might be the family member most willing to say difficult things publicly.
The clearest look at how William and Harry processed all of this came in 2017, when the two sons sat for an ITV documentary marking the twentieth anniversary of her death, titled "Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy." It was the most candid both had been on camera about their mother up to that point. Watching it now, with Spencer’s new book in shops, it feels less like a tribute and more like the opening chapter of the controversy playing out in public today.
The one place Spencer’s grief took permanent physical form was Althorp, the Spencer family estate in Northamptonshire, where he and Diana grew up together. He buried her there, rather than in the traditional Spencer family vault, on an island in the middle of an ornamental lake, accessible only by boat, specifically so the crowds and photographers who had pursued her in life could not easily reach her grave. Shortly after, he opened parts of the estate to the public each summer with an exhibition dedicated to her life, with entry fees funding a memorial charity in her name. He has run the place, in effect, as a counter-archive to the version of Diana kept by the royal palaces.
There is also a detail from 1995 whose full meaning Spencer himself only realized decades later. BBC journalist Martin Bashir wanted access to Diana for what became the "Panorama" interview that reshaped public perception of her marriage. To get that access, Bashir first went to her brother. He showed Charles Spencer forged bank statements, designed by a graphic artist, suggesting that two people close to Diana, one of them her private secretary, were secretly receiving money from security services to spy on her and report back. Deceived by this, Spencer arranged the introduction Bashir needed.
A judicial inquiry led by Lord Dyson in 2021 concluded that Bashir had deceived Spencer and induced him using those documents in serious breach of BBC guidelines, and that the corporation’s internal investigation at the time was, in the inquiry’s words, woefully ineffective. Bashir himself admitted commissioning the fake documents, calling it a stupid thing to do, while insisting it had no bearing on Diana’s decision to agree to the interview. William did not find that distinction sufficient. In a statement issued through Kensington Palace immediately after the Dyson report, he said that knowing the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to the fear, paranoia, and isolation he remembered from his mother’s final years caused him indescribable sadness. He went further, saying that if the corporation had conducted a proper investigation in 1995, she would have known she was being deceived rather than building a public narrative about her marriage on a lie she never knew existed. He demanded the interview be withdrawn permanently, telling the BBC directly that the program had no legitimacy and should never be broadcast again.
The BBC responded with a full and unconditional apology and later confirmed it would not license or rebroadcast the footage in the future. Harry issued his own statement that same week, describing what happened to his mother as one episode in a longer chain of exploitation that, in his words, ultimately contributed to her death. The man who unknowingly opened the door for a deceptive interview to reach his sister, feeding the paranoia that appears in her sealed letter, is the same man who has now, three decades later, committed his own version of events to writing. He was manipulated once through documents that were fake. This time, the documents are entirely his own.
Another name belongs in this picture before moving to the present. Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi’s father, has faced separate and independent allegations since 2024 of sexual assault from more than 80 women, most of them former employees of Harrods, the London department store he owned for over two decades. A BBC investigation initially revealed more than 20 testimonies, five involving allegations of rape, with dozens more women later coming forward with claims dating back to the late 1970s. Harrods itself apologized, admitting it had failed the women involved and helped enable the culture that protected Al Fayed. Spencer’s new memoir includes a claim that Diana described unwanted physical advances from Al Fayed at the start of her relationship with Dodi, telling her brother about it with disgust. That claim is not the only one of its kind. It falls within a larger, independently documented pattern of behavior that has nothing to do with Diana at all.
Now to the part of this story that has not yet become history. This is not the first time a member of this family has broken decades of institutional silence through a book. Prince Harry’s memoir, "Spare," was published in January 2023 and sold more than a million copies in the UK, US, and Canada on its first day alone, becoming, according to Guinness World Records, the fastest-selling non-fiction book ever. Publishers have clearly noticed that first-person accounts from inside this family sell at a completely different level than external biographies assembled from old clippings.
Spencer’s book is titled "A Very Private School" in the US and "The Spencers" in the UK, and it was published in September of this year, ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Diana’s death next August. It will be released later in 12 languages. Spencer has said he was finally persuaded to write down his own memories rather than continue to watch other people’s versions circulate without his input. Copies were reportedly stolen from a warehouse in the Netherlands before release, which tells you how much anticipation surrounded the book before a single review appeared.
The Daily Mail secured exclusive serialization rights, and what it published in the days before release did exactly what rare institutional statements usually signal. It forced Buckingham Palace to move. According to those excerpts, Spencer described a phone call with the then-Prince of Wales in the days after Diana’s death, where the argument centered on whether William and Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin. Spencer says he told Charles he did not believe Diana would have wanted that. What followed in his account was a pause he thought at the time was an attempt at self-control, then what he described as a smothered contempt from the Prince that crackled down the phone line. The words he attributed to him, quoted directly across multiple media outlets covering the excerpt, consist of five words: "We will forget her soon enough."
Spencer says he told him he could not believe what he had just said and then hung up. Elsewhere in the excerpts, Spencer describes the earlier call in which he first learned of the crash, saying Charles seemed strangely matter-of-fact given the news, and compared to everyone else who called that night, who were stunned and barely able to speak, Charles seemed, in Spencer’s words, blithely cheerful, like a lottery winner.
Buckingham Palace’s response came within days, and this is the part that makes this story live rather than another round of recycled royal gossip. As a rule, the Palace does not respond to books, memoirs, or biographies about the family, regardless of content, as a matter of principle. This time it responded anyway, saying that while it does not comment on books as a matter of principle, the King is aware that the pain of brotherly grief may cloud judgment.
Read that sentence again slowly. It is not a denial. It does not claim the phone call never happened. It is a statement about Spencer’s state of mind, issued by the institution he just accused one of its senior members of behaving coldly in the days after his sister’s death. When asked on the BBC how his nephews reacted to these comments resurfacing, Spencer only said it would not be a surprise to them. A line that hints, without explicit confirmation, that William and Harry already know their father’s version of that period and that it does not match their uncle’s.
Julian Payne, who worked for years as the King’s communications secretary before leaving his post, was asked by the BBC about the alleged quote and said plainly it was not language he recognized from the man he worked for. He added that the Palace’s choice to respond at all showed the strength of feeling behind it, describing the decision to come out publicly and correct the record as highly unusual for an institution built on not doing exactly that. Royal biographer Ingrid Seward went further, telling journalists she could not remember the Palace issuing a statement like this before, and that whoever approved it must have judged that the alternative, staying silent while claims spread without response, posed a greater risk.
If that combination sounds familiar, it should. Royal watchers immediately compared the wording to the late Queen’s statement in 2021, responding to Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which she said: "Recollections may vary." That phrase became one of the most quoted sentences of her entire reign, precisely because of what it did not say. It never accused anyone of lying. It simply reminded the public, gently and directly, that memory is not synonymous with truth. The 2026 statement about Spencer follows the exact same approach a generation later, but this time targeting a member of the Spencer family rather than the Sussexes.
There is another layer worth mentioning before pulling the full picture together, because it explains why the Palace could not let Spencer’s account go unanswered the way it has let many other books about Diana go unanswered for 30 years. Andrew Morton’s 1992 book was denied by the Palace but never formally rebutted. Burrell’s 2003 letter drew no Palace statement at all. Even Harry’s own 2023 memoir, containing direct and highly personal accusations against his father and stepmother, received only a brief and general comment about painful memories rather than a specific line-by-line rebuttal of any quoted sentence.
What changed this time is the source. Spencer is not an estranged son who left the country and renounced his royal role. He is the brother of the late princess, still holding his title, still resident in England, and still on friendly enough terms with the family that he was photographed with them last year. He is relaying a conversation from inside the family, rather than describing feelings from outside it. A Palace that can ignore an angry outsider cannot easily ignore someone from the inside who simply decided, after 29 years, to stop protecting a version of events he no longer believes protects anyone.
When the physical objects at the heart of this story are laid out, a pattern emerges that no one in the coverage seems to name explicitly. Diana’s private tapes, secretly recorded and smuggled out of the royal residence in a bicycle basket. Camilla’s stolen love letters, used as evidence to convince a skeptical publisher. Victor Mischon’s contemporaneous note of a private legal meeting. The sealed letter left with her butler, dated and kept in case of emergency. And now, three decades later, a memoir written by the only relative who was present in the room or on the phone for almost all of it. Diana spent the second half of her life not trusting anything important to be said verbally without also being written down on paper in a safe place. Her brother appears to have absorbed the same instinct.
Before closing, it is worth remembering what all this controversy is actually protecting. Diana’s personal record in her final years was not limited to fear and secrecy. In January 1997, seven months before her death, she walked through an active minefield in Huambo, Angola, wearing body armor and a visor to highlight demining efforts, a campaign she continued in June of that year in Bosnia, contributing directly to the international landmine ban treaty signed later that same year. A decade earlier, in 1987, at a time when public fear of HIV and AIDS was so intense that patients were routinely shunned even by medical staff, she opened one of Britain’s first specialized AIDS units and was photographed shaking hands, without gloves, with a man dying of the disease. That single image did more to change public attitudes toward AIDS patients in Britain than a decade of public health messaging alone.
Those two moments were not separate photo opportunities within a Palace schedule. They were the substantive course of her final years, the part of her public life she continued to build even as her private life collapsed. She visited landmine survivors in hospital wards across three continents, sat with children who had lost limbs to ordnance buried years before they were born, and used her fame deliberately and unapologetically to embarrass governments that resisted the ban until they finally signed it. She did it without the HRH title attached to her name, without the office and staff that accompany full royal status, and on her own initiative with a diminished security budget.
So where does this leave the actual factual answer to the question this story began with? Diana wrote a real letter, never sent, mentioning a specific fear about a car crash, years after building the same kind of hidden evidence quietly through smuggled tapes and stolen love letters, because she had already learned that paper outlasts denial. A formal police investigation, with full access to that letter, concluded there was no murder conspiracy behind her death. Only a drunk driver, a high-speed chase by photographers, and a woman who had real reason to feel unsafe inside her marriage, regardless of how she actually died.
Her brother delivered a eulogy in 1997 that audibly split the congregation between grief for her and anger at the institution that had cast her out. He was himself deceived, unknowingly, just two years earlier by the journalist whose interview deepened that very fear. This September, 29 years later, he completed the thought he began in that speech within a memoir the Palace felt it had no real choice but to answer, in language that answered nothing while confirming everything about how seriously it was being taken.
This is not embellished folklore for views. It is a documented, ongoing, evolving story about a family that has never fully agreed on its own history, and a woman who made sure, more than once, that her version of events would survive her. None of this is finished. The book reached shelves only days ago. The Daily Mail has indicated further excerpts are coming. No personal response from William or Harry to the specific claim about their father’s phone call has been issued, beyond Spencer’s own comment that whatever they think will not be a surprise to them. The thirtieth anniversary of Diana’s death falls next August, and if this month is any indication of what the run-up to that anniversary will look like, this will not be the last time a member of this family says something in print that the Palace feels it cannot leave unanswered.
Diana’s record was never really closed. It has kept being rewritten, letter by letter, tape by tape, memoir by memoir, by the people who were actually in the room.