Buckingham Palace Rejects Claim About Diana’s Legacy

Buckingham Palace has pushed back against a claim in Charles Spencer’s forthcoming memoir that King Charles III said the public would soon forget Princess Diana after her death. The allegation concerns a private phone call said to have taken place in the tense days following the August 1997 crash that killed Diana.

A rare response from the palace

The palace usually avoids commenting on books about the royal family, making its response unusually direct. In a statement reported by multiple outlets, it said the King believes the pain of losing a sibling can cloud reason, affect judgment and shape memory long after a bereavement. The wording did not dispute that a difficult conversation occurred, but it clearly challenged Spencer’s account of what was said.

Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, alleges that the then-Prince Charles became angry during a conversation about the funeral arrangements. Spencer writes that the disagreement included the decision for Diana’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, to walk behind her coffin. He claims Charles then said the family and the wider world would forget Diana.

The disputed exchange returns to public view

The memoir is scheduled for publication next week, but excerpts began circulating before its official release. That early attention has turned a decades-old family dispute into a fresh royal story, while the palace’s carefully phrased answer places the reliability of memory at the center of the disagreement.

William was 15 and Harry was 12 when they joined the funeral procession. Both princes later discussed the moment publicly, describing the decision as one made collectively by the family. Their recollections have kept the procession among the most examined images from the days after Diana’s death.

The new claim remains Spencer’s account of a private exchange, not an independently documented transcript. The palace response provides the King’s position without offering a line-by-line version of the call. That leaves readers with two sharply different interpretations of a conversation shaped by grief, family tension and an extraordinary moment of public mourning.