Earl Spencer felt it was his ‘duty’ to write memoir on life of Diana

Earl Spencer felt it was his “duty… as an eyewitness to history” to write a new memoir chronicling the life of his sister, which has included a series of damning claims about the King.

It comes after the earl accused the King of gaslighting him after Buckingham Palace pushed back against explosive claims that Charles said “we’ll forget her soon enough” after Diana, Princess of Wales, died.

The earl has made a series of claims about the King in a new memoir chronicling the life of his sister Diana that prompted the response from Buckingham Palace, which said “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason”.

On his motivations for writing the book, the earl told the BBC it was his “duty… as an eyewitness to history”.

He said: “I’m aware of mortality and I wanted to just put things down once and for all that were true.

“This is not a threat, it’s a fact, I know lots of things about the King which I chose not to include in the book because they were not relevant.”

The earl accused the King of gaslighting him and called the palace’s response a “rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote” – the late Queen’s response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s allegations in their Oprah Winfrey interview, The Mail on Sunday reports.

He said: “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King.

“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.”

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.”

Charles, Earl Spencer, Harry and William walking behind the funeral cortege of Diana, the Princess of Wales (PA)

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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’.”

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.

In another extract from the interview with the BBC, the earl said the relationship between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “echoes” the way the media treated his sister.