Charles Spencer has just announced the publication of a new book in which he will narrate the life of his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, from his perspective. Swan Song: Diana, My Sister (The Swan Song: Diana, My Sister) will be released in the United Kingdom next month, nearly 30 years after her death. “I want to speak on behalf of Diana and do so in an openly positive way,” the Earl Spencer said as he explained his reasons for writing the book. In a statement he noted that he had been “inundated once again” with requests for interviews about Diana as the 30th anniversary of her death approaches in 2027.
These memoirs, which will be published worldwide and translated into twelve languages, are expected to offer an unprecedented account of a tragic and turbulent week for the House of Windsor. “I want to put my own thoughts and memories in writing, once and for all, rather than having to endure the discomfort of rereading other people’s opinions, many of which are based on falsehoods that have been taken as true over time,” the aristocrat said.
“The aim of this book is to tell the truth about Diana from the perspective of her brother, just as I tried to do when I spoke at her funeral,” he added, referring to the eulogy he delivered at Westminster Abbey in 1997. At that moment, Charles Spencer used his eulogy to utter very emotional words, in which he criticized the media and described his sister as the most hunted person of our times.
He also pledged to protect William and Harry and to prevent them from suffering a similar fate. Diana’s children were only fifteen and twelve when their mother died. “I pledge that we, your blood family, will do everything possible to continue with the imaginative way you guided these two exceptional young men, so that their souls are not simply subsumed into duty and tradition, but can express themselves openly just as you had planned,” he said in that speech.
Charles and Diana: The Story of Two Siblings
Diana affectionately called her younger brother Charles Carlos [in Spanish], while he called her Duch, a diminutive of Duchess. Her father, Viscount Edward John Spencer, had served as an equerry to both Queen Elizabeth and her father, George VI, while Diana’s mother, Frances, was the youngest daughter of the Fourth Baron Fermoy. Lady Di was the third daughter of the Spencers and not the long-awaited male heir who would guarantee the continuity of the title. When Charles was born, three years after her, a fireworks display was organized to celebrate him.
Charles and Diana Spencer, in a 1968 image.
Frances left her husband—who would later become the eighth Earl Spencer—for the heir to a wallpaper company, Peter Shand Kydd, in 1967. In a bitter legal battle the following year, she lost custody of Diana, Charles and her two older sisters, Jane and Sarah. At eight years old, Charles was sent to Maidwell Hall boarding school in Northamptonshire, where he suffered terrible abuses that he recounts in his 2024 memoir, A Very Private School.
Earl Spencer was a firsthand witness to Diana and Charles’s marriage and their divorce in 1996. In 2020 he revealed how the BBC reporter Martin Bashir wove an intricate web of deception to obtain the infamous Panorama interview with Lady Di, during which the princess uttered the famous line “there are three of us in this marriage,” referring to Camilla Parker Bowles.
