Swan Song by Charles Spencer review: Revenge dish is even better aged 30 years

Apart from the bombshells, what’s the book like? The trouble about reading Swan Song: Diana, my sister, Earl Spencer’s account of his sister Princess Diana, is that we all know the best reveals, the one about the then Prince Charles hissing down the phone at Spencer after his sister’s death: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough!”; the other that he seemed “giddily elated” by her death. Oh, and the valet. Everything else is a bit anticlimactic after those three corkers, vigorously disputed by the Palace and counter-asserted by the Earl.

But don’t give up on Swan Song just like that. It’s a plum pudding of revelations, enlivened by the piquant sauce of revenge. For what it’s worth, the book is well written, the Earl being the author of nine previous books.

For my money, the big reveal in the book was the “closely kept family secret” that when his father, John, was a royal equerry, “Queen [Elizabeth] and courtier had a romantic connection, which was ended by Lord Mountbatten”, presumably because he was keeping the then young princess for his nephew Prince Philip. The irony that, a generation on, Charles and Diana brought that blighted romance to fruition isn’t lost on Spencer.

Oh but there are so many reveals in this book: so many scores settled, so many slights remembered. My very favourite was the one about Princess Michael of Kent saying to Diana after the Queen had removed her HRH title, “‘Don’t worry, Diana – you only need to curtsy to me when we are in public”.

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Another good one was about Diana and Charles’s father’s last illness when their detested stepmother, Raine, instructed his nurses to bar his children from visiting: Diana was furious. “Raine suddenly went low: ‘I have always felt so very sorry for the Prince of Wales, marrying somebody quite as stupid as you.’ Diana paused for a second, surprised at the intensity of the spite. She then took a step forward, hooked a long leg round Raine’s calves before shoving her down the carpeted staircase”. My regard for Diana, already considerable, rocketed.

“The aim of this book is to tell the truth about Diana from her brother’s perspective”

But what about Charles Spencer’s motivation? The Palace has hinted, not terribly subtly, that the “much married” Earl Spencer is out to make money… well, possibly. But he makes a perfectly plausible case that with the 30th anniversary of his sister’s death coming up, he was getting fed up being asked to make a contribution to other people’s accounts; instead, he’d tell the story himself, thank you. Added to which, he said, neither of his parents made it to 70; so, now in his sixties, he wanted to put his bit on the record: “the aim of this book is to tell the truth about Diana from her brother’s perspective”.

Earl Spencer, Prince William, Prince Harry and the then-Prince of Wales wait as the hearse carrying the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales prepares to leave Westminster Abbey following her funeral (Fiona Hanson/PA)

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Whatever. What he wants to make clear is that as the youngest of four siblings, he and Diana were close, she three years older than he “in some ways, my primary carer”.

Contrary to most accounts, he is keen to make clear theirs was a happy, loving childhood; admittedly disfigured by their parents’ divorce and blighted by Diana being prematurely being packed off to boarding school for well-connected girls. There, her difficulties with concentrating on anything for long ended up later with her bursting into tears when she opened her O level results to find that she’d got none. But Spencer is also keen to exculpate his late father from the charge of being abusive to his mother, which has been touted for years as the reason for their divorce.

He doesn’t pretend she was always saintly nor that he was

The narrative alternates between his childhood memories of Diana and the unhappy time after her death, especially when he was writing the eulogy he delivered at her funeral. It works. He doesn’t pretend she was always saintly nor that he was – he reflects sombrely on his refusal after her divorce to give her the house on the family estate she wanted and that he hadn’t found a way to be more supportive of her.

Inevitably the story takes off with her engagement to Charles, a love match for her. But after a miserable birthday party for Andrew in which Charles had been aloof, she tried to break it off: “after that evening of escalating heartbreak, Diana went to see my father. She told him she could not go through with marriage to a man who clearly did not love her.” Her father, appalled, said no. That was a mistake.

Earl Spencer (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

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There’s so much of all this. Plainly Spencer detests Charles (it’s mutual); but that isn’t what jars in the book. It’s the attempt to explain Diana’s and his difficulties with guff about mental illness: “I realize now (but had no idea then) that my form of neurodivergence left me subject to Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). This is an intense emotional pain in the face of others’ rejection or criticism… I believe that Diana also suffered from RSD.”

Now that grates. Far more enlivening is his spirited airing of his and Diana’s grudges against various annoying people: Princess Anne, Peter Carter Ruck, the treacherous Martin Bashir, Mohamed al Fayed (“Diana told me with revulsion how, early in her romance with Dodi, Mohamed had come up to her, dropped a hand onto her buttocks and squeezed them while saying in a leery, suggestive tone, ‘And in Egypt, father- in- law gets first go . . .” Eeww) et al.

Forget about revenge being best served cold; turns out it’s even better aged for thirty years.