King Charles appeared “giddily elated — like a lottery winner” after the death of his former wife Diana, Princess of Wales, her brother has claimed in a forthcoming book.
Charles Spencer says the then Prince of Wales sounded unusually upbeat following Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997, when she was 36 and the nation was in mourning.
Speaking ahead of the publication of Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, Spencer said the reaction may have reflected Charles’s belief that he was finally free to pursue Camilla, whom he later married and who is now Queen Camilla.
“Obviously I’m not justifying or criticizing,” Spencer said. “I’m just reporting that’s the fact.”
Asked whether Charles’s apparent elation could have been connected to Camilla, Spencer replied: “I said in the book that that might have been it, yeah.”
The allegation is the latest in a series of claims from the book, which is due to be published next week. Spencer has also alleged that Charles told him, days before Diana’s funeral, “we’ll forget her soon enough”.
Buckingham Palace issued an unusually forceful response to that earlier claim, saying the King would not comment directly on a book but was “mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory, even many years after such a loss.”
There has been no further response from the Palace to Spencer’s latest allegations. Excerpts from the book are being published in Britain in the days before its release.
Spencer also claims that Charles told Diana he did not love her before their wedding in 1981, and that she contemplated suicide more than once.
Royal commentator Royya Nikkhah said the claims could leave the royal family facing a difficult decision over whether to answer each allegation or rely on the Palace’s initial statement as its definitive response.
She said the latest allegation would be “just the beginning of a serialization that will go on” and predicted that further “pretty sensational claims” would emerge.
The allegations have reopened scrutiny of the breakdown of Charles and Diana’s marriage and the events surrounding her death, with further extracts expected before the book becomes available.
