Intro for September 21, 2026

Dear Gossips,

Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song, about his sister Princess Diana, releases tomorrow and as you may have seen, he’s been doing a series of interviews to promote it. Much of what’s been shared so far in the book has not been flattering towards King Charles and, by extension, Consort Camilla, especially the part where Charles Spencer describes then-Prince Charles as seeming “giddy” after Diana’s death. Which prompted an unprecedented statement from Buckingham Palace that suggested that Charles Spencer’s grief over losing a sibling could affect his ability to remember things correctly. Does that mean that only people who aren’t grieving can be truthful?

In response to that statement Charles Spencer told The Mail on Sunday that he felt “gaslit” by the king. And then proceeded to compare that statement to the one the palace issued, when Queen Elizabeth was still alive, about Prince Harry and Meghan Sussex after their Oprah interview: “recollections may vary”, giving Charles Spencer an open door to compare the criticism and tabloid harassment that Harry and Meghan have had to endure to what Diana experienced when she was alive.

The king, of course, can’t give interviews … but what the British royal institution has always done is allow their representatives to speak – or leak – to the media so that his position is known. That position was shared this weekend in the Sunday Times with one of his aides saying that:

“The king was rather more concerned about the future of mankind than the unkind claims of one man picking at the scars of the past.”

King Charles is too busy worrying about the “future of mankind” to be bothered by Charles Spencer’s book, OK? The king only thinks about the people, didn’t you know?

It’s an asinine quote to give that reads like the king and all his people are stuck at basic level PR with no hope of graduation. And they keep doubling down on it because the same aide decided to then speculate on the record about Charles Spencer’s motives – and it amounts to “because he’s jealous that everyone loves the king”:

“If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s more that, contrary to some public expectations and perhaps a few private hopes, the king and queen [Camilla] have proved rather adept and popular in their new roles. God knows they have not had their troubles to seek these past years. But partly through the way they have dealt with it all, Britain and the wider world has come to have a good deal of fondness and respect for them both. I suspect that’s what Spencer can’t bear. So out have come the crested carving knives.”

Charles and Camilla are “adept and popular”? IN WHAT WORLD?!

It’s a win when they show up somewhere and no one talks about tampons – if that’s the new definition of “adept and popular”, sure. But this is a man, and a monarch, who has been in a popularity contest with his own children for years, and before that his first wife, so let’s not pretend that he doesn’t know that he’s never been the main character in the room in the presence of the people’s princess and the two princes they made.

This has always been King Charles chief preoccupation and it has haunted him for decades: that he would never be as beloved as his mother, his bride, and his children, in that order. And that even though he and the institution have clung to the motto that “this too shall pass”, it never has and it never will. Diana has now been dead for almost double the amount of time that she and Charles were together. But there will never be a day that King Charles is mentioned without Diana. And every time he and his people try to deny it, it only makes it more obvious.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey