London, UK – The brother of Princess Diana, Charles Spencer, on Sunday accused King Charles III of “gaslighting” him by querying his explosive account of events around her death in an upcoming memoir.
Spencer, whose book about Diana, Swan Song, comes out Tuesday, told the Mail on Sunday newspaper: “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King.”
The statement is a major escalation of the war of words taking place between Spencer and the royals after Buckingham Palace issued a rare statement on Thursday.
Slapping back, Buckingham Palace said the 77-year-old king “is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss.”
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This came after a sensational claim in memoir excerpts serialized in the Daily Mail that Charles, then Prince of Wales, told Spencer in a phone call shortly after Diana’s death in 1997: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
Spencer claimed Charles “sounded dizzily elated – like a lottery winner.”
The 62-year-old aristocrat told the Mail on Sunday the royal statement “was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the King being able to deny what I’d said.”
He also dubbed it a “rather poor imitation” of the Palace’s response to Prince Harry and his wife Meghan’s claims of royal racism in an interview with Oprah Winfrey five years ago – which was that “recollections may vary.”
After Diana’s death, Spencer accused media of having “blood on their hands” and in a eulogy at her funeral, vowed always to look out for her two sons, William, and Harry.
