Princess Diana’s brother reveals secret suitor and tensions with royal family in memoir

Princess Diana’s younger brother Charles Spencer this week released his memoir “Swan Song,” about the beloved royal, revealing new details about the late royal’s life behind palace walls.

From claims about then-Prince Charles’ treatment of Diana to an American politician who allegedly courted her after her divorce, here are some of the biggest revelations from the memoir.

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“Swan Song” is available now. (Steinway)

Charles’ reaction to Diana’s death

Spencer wrote that on the morning of Diana’s death, then-Prince Charles looked “astonished with joy — like a lottery winner,” he recalled thinking at the time.

He wrote that Charles was “strangely neutral, given the enormity of the disaster.”

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Charles Spencer wrote a memoir about his sister Princess Diana called “Swan Song.” (© The Spencer Family; Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)

Looking back, Spencer wrote that he thought Charles’s first reaction to her death had been that it probably liberated him “to marry the woman he loved, rather than relishing the loss of a woman he did not love”.

He also wrote that while they were arguing over funeral arrangements, Charles told him, “Don’t worry…we’ll forget about him soon enough!”

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Spencer said he was stunned for a few seconds before responding, “I can’t believe you just said that,” before hanging up.

Earlier in their conversation, Spencer wrote that Charles accused the Spencer family of having no sense of duty because Spener objected to Princes Harry and William walking behind their mother’s coffin.

A photo of Princess Diana and Charles Spencer smiling together as children. (Central Press/Getty Images)

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Spencer wrote that he believed the rant was the result of Charles’s “repressed contempt for Diana and his horror that the world was so upset by her death.”

After an extract from the book was published last week, Buckingham Palace released a rare statement.

“While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, Her Majesty is aware that the pain of brotherly grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways that others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss,” the statement said.

Diana considered moving to South Africa with heart surgeon boyfriend

Prince Charles and Princess Diana ride a horse-drawn carriage on their wedding day. (Wireframe)

Spencer wrote that after falling in love with heart surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan following her divorce, Diana had a “naive but impossible” dream of moving to South Africa – where Spencer was living at the time – with her boyfriend because England had become “intolerable” to her.

“Could they,” she hoped, “settle there together and make a life for themselves?” he wrote.

He said she dreamed that Khan could work in a Cape Town hospital and that they could live “happily – normally – in close proximity” to her brother.

“The other side of the world seemed to offer the possibility of asylum,” he wrote.

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One of Diana’s suitors after divorce was an American politician

Spencer said Diana once asked him if he thought she would make a good American first lady, explaining that one of her “many powerful aging American suitors, eager to make her the ultimate trophy wife, told her he was sure to win the presidency if she married him.”

Princess Diana and Prince Charles seen together in 1991. (Getty Images)

He said Diana was more “titillated” by the idea of ​​living in the White House than the prospect of marrying the “elderly future husband”.

Diana, he said, had “a mischievous attraction to reinventing herself in a role that would make her enemies in the British royal family sick with jealousy, while ushering in an era of White House glamor that would surely have surpassed even that of the Jackie Kennedy years.”

Diana almost canceled the “Panorama” interview

Although “Panorama” reporter Martin Bashir allegedly told Diana a series of lies, including that she was being monitored by MI6, that Prince William was unwittingly bugging her through a device on his watch and that her children’s nanny aborted Prince Charles’ child after an affair, Diana almost canceled the interview, Spencer said.

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He wrote that the princess had pulled out a few days before the interview was scheduled.

But Bashir and the show’s executive producer persisted, Spencer wrote. He said they held a clandestine meeting in a parking lot, where Spencer believed he persuaded Diana that her life was in “imminent” danger and that doing the interview was the best way to protect herself.

A view of Spencer’s handwritten eulogy notes for Diana’s funeral. (© The Spencer Family)

Spencer portrays then-Prince Charles as angered by his position

Spencer said he had a conversation with Charles after his own father’s funeral, during which Charles told him he was “lucky” that his father had died because he had been able to inherit when he was “so young”.

Charles reportedly said that while Spencer was inheriting his ancestral home of Althorp in his twenties, the prince complained that he was 43 years old and employed 50 people, “but my parents insist on treating me like – like a child!”

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He also wrote that when a senior courtier told Queen Elizabeth that Charles did not like a reprimand she had delivered through the courtier, the queen dismissed the concern by telling him: “He was even unhappy when I taught him the alphabet.” »

Spencer also wrote that Diana told him early in her relationship with the prince that the queen had once considered having Charles’ ears pinned back because their “protrusion” led to him being teased at school and mocked by the media. Prince Philip, however, put a stop to it, according to Spencer.

Spencer added that he didn’t know if the story was true, but said Diana believed it.

The book “Swan Song” by Earl Charles Spencer was released this week. (Getty Images)

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Diana claimed then-Prince Charles was ‘in love with his valet’

Later in the book, Spencer wrote that when Diana first told him she was considering divorcing Charles, she claimed the prince was “in love with his valet.”

Spencer said he found the claim improbable, but did not ask her for more information because he was focused on realizing she was ending his marriage and his “dreams.”

Princess Diana sits on the steps of Highgrove House. (Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)

Diana’s interests were ‘traditionally feminine’

Spencer wrote that her sister had “traditionally feminine” interests, which included collecting many stuffed animals as a child. She loved flowers, especially forget-me-nots, listened to the Beatles and David Bowie, and loved the soap opera “Crossroads.”

As he grew older, Spencer wrote that she “devoured” the romance novels of Barbara Cartland, which he said wrote primarily about aristocratic men pursuing virginal women and ultimately living happily ever after.

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She also once told Spencer that she had watched the equally romantic series “The Sound of Music” 16 times.

Spencer’s book was released almost a year before the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death. Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris on August 31, 1997.

Buckingham Palace told Fox News Digital: “We will make no further comment.”