Earl Spencer says media treatment of Harry and Meghan ‘echoes’ Diana’s experience

Earl Spencer has said the relationship between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “echoes” the way the media treated his sister Diana, Princess of Wales.

In an interview with the BBC to be aired on Sunday evening, Spencer described the press’s coverage of Harry and Meghan as having a “cancerous influence”, adding it would be “beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example”.

He said: “If you look at an article in a tabloid about Diana or the couple that you were mentioning, Harry and Meghan, you know, they can be really, really unpleasant. And I think it would be really beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example.

“I’m not here to speak for Harry and Meghan, but for anyone who’s being destroyed in this way daily, it must be such a cancerous influence in their life.”

He said Diana was “really brought low” by criticism she received from the media, adding it was a pity to see “echoes of that” in the press coverage of Harry and Meghan.

Spencer’s latest comments come after he accused King Charles of gaslighting him following Buckingham Palace’s response to explosive claims that Charles said “we’ll forget her soon enough” after Diana’s death.

He has made a series of damning claims about the king in a new memoir chronicling Diana’s life that prompted the palace to push back, saying: “The pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason.”

Spencer said: “It 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. I also thought it was a rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote, which was a much more elegant way of putting things, but in these circumstances entirely out of place.”

He added that “Diana would be cheering from the rafters at this book”.

In response to the claims made in the memoir, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson 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.”

In an extract of the BBC interview released on Friday, Spencer said he was telling the truth and described the king’s comments about his sister as “monstrous”.

Asked whether he had evidence of the king’s comments, he told the BBC: “I told friends and family straight away, close friends and family, about what had been said, because it was so monstrous.”

The Sussexes, who returned to the UK from the US on 26 August, have long been critical of their treatment by the media, with Harry in 2021 telling Oprah Winfrey the tabloid press had created a “toxic environment”.