The Real Loser of Diana's Brother's Book isn't The King

Ninety minutes. That is how long Buckingham Palace, an institution that prizes silence above almost everything, took to answer the first excerpt from Earl Charles Spencer's Swan Song: Diana, My Sister. When the Palace stops saying nothing, you know something landed.

It's been about a week since the Daily Mail began rolling out the excerpts, and the book itself published on Sept. 22. I predicted it would be explosive. No psychic prize for me there, of course it was going to be. We knew it would be bad for King Charles, the man who betrayed Diana (by his own admission, in a 1994 documentary interview). But is the damage lasting, how has the rest of the family fared, and who has come out ahead?

Before the book, King Charles had pulled a blinder. YouGov's July tracker had 68% of Britons saying he was doing a good job, the highest since he took the throne. Sympathy after his cancer diagnosis and affection for how he handled the Trump state visit had done him no harm. But has the past come home to haunt him, and does it dent his legacy?

Let's start with the most damaging claim. Spencer alleges that during a furious call about the funeral arrangements, Charles told him "we'll forget her soon enough", and Spencer says he relayed the words to friends and family at the time because they struck him as monstrous. He also says Charles sounded elated on the morning Diana died, as though he had won the lottery. In a later CBS interview, Spencer added that Charles once told him he was lucky to have inherited so young, days after Spencer's father died. Spencer floated the theory that Charles was elated because he was now free to marry Camilla, but when the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg pressed him, he conceded he could not be certain and was going on the tone of the call.

Buckingham Palace chose to reply, within 90 minutes. An aide told The Sunday Times a line had been crossed and that silence could not stand against such injustice. That first looked bold, but on reflection most people have noticed it was no denial, and Spencer himself says the Palace smudged its response.

Keep reading with a CI subscription to unlock the rest of this story, including whether King Charles's popularity actually took a hit, the credibility problem Charles Spencer didn't see coming, how the book accidentally became Prince Harry's best week in years, and the full winners-and-losers scoreboard.