16 September 2026 | 22.09

READING: 2 minutes

“Be assured, we will forget her soon.” That is the phrase King Charles III is reported to have said after Princess Diana’s death during a conversation with her brother, Charles Spencer, who has compiled his recollections in a book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister. Excerpts of the book will be published serially by the Daily Mail starting tomorrow. According to previews, the book also documents disputes over the organisation of Diana’s funeral after she died on 31 August 1997 in a car crash in Paris. In particular, Spencer opposed the decision to have Princes William and Harry, then 15 and 12, take part in the funeral procession.

Spencer says he pressed the issue in talks with the then-Prince of Wales, arguing that Diana would not have wanted her children exposed to such an ordeal. Charles is said to have questioned the Spencers’ judgement and reportedly remarked that Diana would soon be forgotten. Spencer interprets the remark as an expression of the “long-repressed contempt for Diana and his horror that the world was so deeply moved by her death.” The Daily Mail reports the book contains further previously unpublished material about Diana’s marriage to Charles and the turbulent events following her death.

In the book, Spencer recounts that when one of Queen Elizabeth’s closest aides told him in the days before the funeral that William and Harry would be part of the cortege, his response was firm: “That will not happen.” Shortly afterwards he received an angry phone call from Charles. “The Prince of Wales continued to vent his anger, and I did not interrupt him. Then he paused. I thought he was trying to collect himself, but what followed sounded to me like long-repressed contempt for Diana and a horror that the world had been so shaken by her death. ‘Be assured,’ he hissed, ‘we will forget her soon.'”