Earl Spencer has insisted he is “telling the truth” over the explosive allegation the King said “we’ll forget her soon enough” following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Charles Spencer has made a series of damning claims about the King in a new memoir chronicling his sister Diana that prompted an “unprecedented” response from Buckingham Palace who said “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason”.
But in an extract of an interview with the BBC, Earl Spencer questioned whether the official response showed if the King was furious or embarrassed by the claim.
Speaking about an alleged row over Diana’s funeral arrangements involving her sons, the earl said: “(The King) went ballistic, would be the right term, and started really going for my family as a whole, about their sense of duty, not being adequate enough, and ranted for a while, I have no idea how long, but it was a significant period, and I just listened.
“And then he stopped, and I thought, ‘Oh now he’s going to pull himself together and say something more appropriate’.
“And then he said, ‘We’ll forget her soon enough’.”
Earl Spencer was questioned by broadcaster Laura Kuenssberg, who asked what he was thinking at that moment.
Diana’s brother replied: “I really was so stunned, and I just, after a stunned silence, I said, ‘I cannot believe you just said that’, and I hung up on him.”
Charles is said to have made the comments about his ex-wife in a row with the earl over whether the then Prince William and Prince Harry should follow Diana’s funeral cortege.
The earl says in his book – Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – he insisted to the then Prince of Wales that his sister would not have wanted her boys to make the difficult public walk behind her coffin, it is claimed.
The memoir is being serialised in the Daily Mail which says the book has been written to correct “untruths” told about his older sister, who died in a Paris car crash in August 1997.
During the telephone conversation, Charles told the earl he had walked in the funeral procession of his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, it is claimed.
But the King “went nuts” when the earl pointed out that Charles had been 30 at the time of Lord Mountbatten’s funeral in 1979, it is alleged.
In response to the claims made in the memoir a Buckingham Palace spokesman said on Wednesday: “While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.”
Asked about Buckingham Palace’s response to his claims, Earl Spencer told the BBC: “Is he (the King) furious, or is he embarrassed? Because I can tell you, here and now, those are exactly the words he said.
“I’ve only ever had two calls on the line with Prince Charles at any stage of my life.
“I was hyper-alert to what he was saying, and those are precisely the words he said, and I promise that to you now, genuinely, that is what he said.”
Asked whether he has “evidence” of the King’s comments, the earl told the BBC: “I told friends and family straight away, close friends and family, about what had been said, because it was so monstrous.”
He added: “I’m telling the truth.”
In the latest serialisation extract of the book Diana’s brother describes the day of her funeral, writing: “I could not get over how tiny, and slight, and bereft, Harry looked.
“Too small to be doing this, I thought, and wondered how on earth this heartbroken child could bear the ordeal of that moment, or how he could possibly be expected to deal with the agony that the day ahead would insist upon.”
In a 2017 interview with Newsweek Harry said about Diana’s funeral: “My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television.
“I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances. I don’t think it would happen today.”
The memoir also claims the King sounded “giddily elated… like a lottery winner” when he rang the earl following Diana’s death.
In other passages of the book, the earl spoke of how his sister drove “more than once” to the cliffs at Beachy Head in East Sussex and was “contemplating ending it all”, adding that “her love for her sons stopped her from going further”.
The excerpt later goes on to claim that Diana told her brother “my husband is in love with his valet” after telling him she was going to get divorced.
The full interview with Laura Kuenssberg will be on BBC iPlayer on Sunday from 4pm and on BBC One at 6.30pm.
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