3 hours ago
7
Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, a memoir of his relationship with his sister, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, is a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer – perhaps more than we needed to know. If that sounds snarky, after 400 pages of score settling, chest thumping, wild indiscretion and some truly touching passages about his late sister, the reader is left with a head-spinning story of the world that created Diana and a certain sourness at the manner in which it is told.
Let’s start with the headlines in last week’s Daily Mail, the newspaper to whom Spencer sold serialisation of a book which includes a line describing tabloid journalists as “those who inhabit the murky swamps of malevolence, and who need to suck their victims dry of their souls”. Perhaps he meant a different set of hacks. Anyway the top line in the Mail was that, shortly after Diana’s death, King Charles insulted her in a phone call to Spencer: “‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough.’” Your take on this quote will likely dictate how you receive the book, and here’s mine: I’m willing to believe the king behaved badly, but “hissed” is a red flag, one of those embellishments, like “snarled” or “flounced”, that writers tend to use to make those they’re writing about appear worse. Spencer, always the injured party, has so many axes grinding away in this book that at times it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying.
Before we get to that, the question on everyone’s lips is: why write this book now? Spencer maintains it’s because, as the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death drew near, he kept being asked to contribute to other people’s projects. Rather than allow the narrative to be guided by “some TV producer” from a network “I will never watch” he promptly got on with his own. Likely that’s not the sole reason; elsewhere in the book he writes about how, back in the day, his father was always at risk of running out of cash to run Althorp, the family’s Northamptonshire estate, and one wonders if the present earl is having similar difficulties.
Never mind. For fans of petty grievances, among whom I count myself, the book is an absolute corker of resentment, and in Spencer we have a hero who, decades after the fact, is still harping on about a great many things involving a large cast of characters who he has absolutely not forgiven for any of it. While telling the story of his and Diana’s relationship, there are drive-bys on Peter Carter-Ruck, Princess Michael of Kent, Princess Margaret, his three ex-wives, whom he describes in an amazing parenthetical take down as “all double divorcees”, and members of a police protection squad who, in 1986, let sniffer dogs jump all over his furniture.
If too many words are spent on, for example, the perfidiousness of Martin Bashir, I could read an entire book on the subject of Spencer’s horror at what his stepmother, Raine, did to the interiors at Althorp, including installing “exceptionally ugly double glazing”, “shiny velveteen” upholstery, and “unsightly wall-to-wall carpeting”. (This is before we get to the scene in which Raine, standing at the top of the staircase in search of breakfast, bellows to staff below, “where’s my fucking egg?”)
Interspersed with these delights is a portrait of Diana that is affectionate, sad, and lovely in places. Spencer suffers the pain of the less famous sibling who doesn’t want to give up his own version of their childhood and there’s a stiffness to some passages as Spencer insists it was all less unhappy than the record implies. His portrait of their mother, Frances, feels like a useful corrective to a figure who has been publicly maligned, and who comes across in the book as the parent most responsible for Diana’s gifts: spirited, mildly eccentric, a more interesting character than the plodding males in the Spencer line. (Charles, winningly, allows that this is the case, pointing out that the men in his family have always been outclassed by the women.)
And of course there is the devastating account of the coldness and aggression of the then Prince of Wales. Spencer tells us that Charles’s poor behaviour towards his sister began from the very start of their courtship, during which he commented on her weight, ignored her at parties and told her he didn’t love her, to the extent that, Spencer writes, Diana tried to get out of the engagement. Their father told her it was too late. This all chimes with other accounts of the doomed marriage, albeit in gorier detail, and explains the fury of Spencer’s finest hour, the speech he gave at Diana’s funeral in which he lambasted not only the press but the royals, reclaiming the young princes William and Harry for their mother’s “blood family”.
At his best, in these passages, Spencer acts as a proxy for the rest of us by registering the absolute lunacy of those days after Diana’s death – by which I mean not the public outpouring, but the behaviour of the royal family, who remained deaf to the nation’s needs until they were forced to change course.
“What was Prince Charles actually doing there?” writes Spencer, incredulously, in relation to his former brother-in-law’s prominent role at the funeral, pointing out to some comic effect that no one wants their “ex” at their funeral? Diana’s former husband was there because the young princes were there, walking for two miles behind their mother’s coffin while mourners wailed and shouted out at them, an outcome Spencer had vigorously argued against. Now, he writes flatly, “It all seemed mad to me – the more so as I began to appreciate the extent of the ordeal we had embarked on.”
To be honest, at times in this book, they all seem quite mad. “That’s it ... it’s curtains ... Duch is dead,” Spencer reports his sister Jane as saying to him on the phone when news of Diana’s death was confirmed. Before the funeral, per Spencer’s account, Prince Charles wanted to walk behind the coffin in the middle, centre stage, until brought up short by his father, Prince Philip, who said words to the effect of don’t be so bloody silly, and put Charles Spencer in the centre, with the boys either side and Diana’s ex-husband and ex-father in law on the outside. There was a split second, writes Spencer, when it seemed as if the pall-bearers might buckle under the weight of Diana’s reinforced, lead-lined coffin. All of this is fascinating and Spencer tells it well.
Still, the book suffers from problems of self pity and self regard (I won’t get into the passages about Spencer’s ADHD or the weasily justifications he gives for telling Diana, in her hour of need, that she couldn’t move into a property on the Althorp estate; the main house has 90 rooms). Every few chapters we return to the unfolding play-by-play of how he wrote his speech – the decision he made to substitute the word “power” for the word “strength”; how his oratory gathered, his greatness formed, and look, it was a fantastic speech, but at some point in the book you start to think, alright Alexander Hamilton, give it a rest. Before the funeral, Spencer visits Diana lying in her casket and reads out his speech to her, sensing that his dead sister is “applauding my words, with soft insistence”. Even here, Spencer manages to take centre stage.
After the book’s litany of bitter grievances I came away wondering whether Spencer has been in the ear of his nephew Prince Harry these last few years. Mostly, however, I felt sadness for the insurmountable difficulties his sister faced marrying into that family. The king is peevish all the way through and Spencer is peevish right back at him. You come away feeling the pair thoroughly deserved each other. And in the middle Diana, 30 years dead, frozen in time and – as she ever was – at the mercy of other people’s interpretations.
