The Earl Spencer Diana Interview
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Paddy, as promised, what follows now in this episode of Newscast is our full conversation with Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's brother, who has very harsh words for the palace.
And I should say there are two Newscast episodes today. There's Laura's full interview with Earl Spencer and then there's our analysis with the BBC senior royal correspondent, Daniela Ralph.
So in your feed, the full interview and the episode discussing what it means is there too. You dedicate this book to everyone who, like you, has lost a brother or a sister. The difference for you is everyone knows how your sister died. But you've never really talked about those awful hours when the news came through, when the horror of what happened became clear. So let's go back in time. How did you find out?
Well, I was living in South Africa at the time, in Cape Town, and I got a call in the middle of the night, and it was my sister, Jane, and she said, don't worry, Diana's been in a car crash, but it's not too serious. And I thought, okay, well, even if it's not serious, I can probably find out what's happening on the news. And then through the night, I watched the TV news unfurling, and then I kept getting more and more distressing calls from home from my sister. And then it escalated after a few hours to, I heard my brother-in-law in the background, who Robert Fellows used to work for the Queen as her private secretary. And I heard him go, oh no. And then my sister Jane said, I'm afraid she's died.
So that's how. So it started in my life in that night as a little prang. And then it became a broken leg, perhaps a head injury, and then death.
And in your book, you recount how your little girl, Eliza, said, she's not dead in real life, is she?
Yeah.
It was really heartbreaking. I was alone in the house with my four children, who were very small at the time, and my three little girls came tumbling through into the kitchen. And Diana had just been staying with us a few months earlier in Cape Town. So when I said, I'm afraid I've got this terrible news, and they just looked up at me, and I said, yes, I'm afraid Aunt Diana's died. And that's what Eliza said, not in real life, Daddy. Utterly heartbreaking.
But as you were making preparations to get back here to the family ancestral home, Althorp, you had another call, a call from Prince Charles. Of course, now the king. What did he say and how did he sound?
Well, I was rushing around the house, preparing the children and all of that sort of thing for the day ahead. And I remember picking up the telephone, I was upstairs in my house in Cape Town, and he was telling me how he had told the boys, William and Harry, at Balmoral and broken the news to them. And I felt, as I say in the book actually, I felt there was a sort of giddy tone. I'd had a lot of calls that day from people who cared, who were stunned like we all were. And I just felt there was a lightness in his tone about Diana's death that really jarred with me.
You write that he was giddily elated, like a lottery winner. I mean, you're suggesting he was somehow pleased that his former wife was dead.
I, well, I'm reporting every word in this book. I report exactly as I saw it and felt it at the time. And I was surprised at the giddiness of his tone. That's what I'm recording there.
It's an incredibly damning thing to say, though, about his reaction to the death of the mother of his children. And you go on to write, I suspect the prince's reaction must have been to think more of how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved rather than appreciating the loss of the one he did not. You're suggesting they're in black and white.
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