September 18 2026 - 8:00am
Did the then-Prince Charles really say “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough” about Princess Diana after her death in 1997, and to — of all people — her brother, Earl Spencer? However frosty and bizarre the Windsors can be, it’s a scene that’s hard to imagine. And yet it’s a scene that Spencer is adamant took place, as he’s written in his upcoming biography of his sister.
The Palace issued a statement that deftly combined sympathy with denial: “His Majesty 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.” Diana was, despite everything, the mother of Charles’s two sons, including a future king.
More importantly, there was little in those febrile days after her death to suggest that she would ever be forgotten. An anguished, chest-beating mood took over the nation as flowers banked up against the walls of Buckingham Palace and the Royal Family hunkered down out of view. Diana’s warmth, the view went, was a reproach to their emotional constipation.
It was a perception that Spencer leaned into for his eulogy at his sister’s funeral, during which he pledged that the young princes’ “blood family” would raise them to be more than just royals, ensuring that “their souls are not simply immersed in duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.” He also attacked the press, accusing them of hunting Diana to her death. It was a vivid image, though only partly true.
Now we know that Martin Bashir used doctored documents to pressure the princess into giving her bombshell 1995 interview, it’s easy to think of her as a pure victim of journalism. But that interview, however unethical its origins, was a triumph for her in the war of the Waleses. Put simply, Diana was good at using the media.
There is even speculation, albeit contested, that she tipped off the paparazzo who took a picture of her on a yacht with Dodi Fayed and revealed their relationship to the world. The extraordinary price tag those images demanded would incite the feverish attention that led to the couple being pursued by photographers on the night they died, several weeks later.
Even before her death, Diana haunted the Royals, refusing to fade into dignified obscurity. Afterwards, she grew to gigantic proportions, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. There were dark mutterings that the monarchy might not survive this challenge: the Windsors’ uncomfortable display of feeling at her funeral was an effort at self-preservation born from crisis. So when Spencer revives his sister’s memory to attack King Charles, it feels like an existential attack on the monarchy itself.
Is it, though? The truth is that Diana matters because she was royal. The reaction to her death, painful though it was for the Windsors, was a spasm of deference, not of revolution. It wasn’t republicans laying bouquets and berating the Queen in 1997: it was monarchists.
The most remarkable thing about the Royal Family’s popularity is its steadiness. Yes, it has slid somewhat since the heights of the 2012 Diamond Jubilee, but it should by rights be in the gutter given everything we know about Prince Andrew and the late Queen’s protection of him.
If Spencer is trying to hurt the Windsors, he should know by now that his sister was never a weapon to be turned against them. The passionate feelings she continues to inspire are evidence of just how deeply — some would say bafflingly — monarchist Britons as a whole tend to be. The Royal Family has little to fear from Diana’s ghost, but they would surely start to worry if she ever faded from view completely.
