Why I'm on team Charles Spencer, not Charles Rex, writes Shelagh Fogarty

I wasn’t in the room when the conversation took place. I cannot vouch for the tone or the precise words that were said. So ultimately, it comes down to which version of events chimes most closely with what you already understand about that family, the relationship between Charles and Diana, and the horrific period surrounding her death.

And, with all those caveats, I find myself leaning towards Charles Spencer.

There’s a scene in The Crown where Charles and Diana have a huge row over Camilla and Charles describes their marriage as a “grotesque misalliance”. It is important to distinguish drama from reality, but I wouldn’t use the word grotesque. That seems extraordinarily harsh. It was, however, certainly a misalliance.

The Spencers and the Windsors had been connected for centuries. Diana’s father was an equerry to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, while both her grandmothers were ladies-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. Her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was particularly close to her.

The two families were effectively in cahoots to get the marriage of the young, beautiful, virginal 19-year-old Diana to the 31-year-old future king off the ground.

They had it all plotted out. What could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, that is not how human hearts work. It is not how human personalities work. And most of us who have paid any attention over the years know what happened next.

It was tragic, not least for their two sons, who are now adult men with marriages of their own.

That is why I can believe there may be some truth in Earl Spencer’s account of his brother-in-law saying, “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”, or words to that effect.

I do not know whether the conversation happened. But I can understand why, as Prince Charles, he might have wanted the public’s connection to Diana to diminish. She had been a millstone around his neck during the marriage, and arguably an even greater one in the weeks and months after her death.

The Panorama interview has since been clouded by the deceit Martin Bashir used to secure it. But much of what Diana said about the world around her turned out to be true. People’s phones really were being hacked. Charles’s side and Diana’s side really were engaged in a battle royal over how they would be viewed by the public.

She was not simply a woman in the advanced stages of paranoia, as Nicholas Soames suggested after the interview. She had legitimate reasons to feel that the world around her was not as it appeared.

Of course Charles Spencer has enmity towards the Windsors. I would, too, if my sister’s husband had cheated on her throughout their marriage and she had died so young. I am not blaming Charles for Diana’s death, nor am I suggesting Diana had no agency of her own. She was an adult woman who made her own decisions.

But we must remember what that marriage was forged in: misogynistic, old-fashioned, outdated aristocratic nonsense.

From the moment Diana burst onto the scene, when I was about 15, to the moment she died, when I was working as a journalist, what we saw was a misalliance that made both parties deeply unhappy.

Look at the wedding footage. Charles looks like he is about to be taken to the gallows. Diana looks like a lost lamb, not really knowing what is going on. She was already suspicious of Camilla, and she was not stupid. She could see how close they were.

So yes, I think it is entirely plausible that Charles wanted the heat around Diana to fade after her death.

But the British public was never going to let that happen.

There was no chance in hell that Diana was going to be forgotten, soon or late.

She was extraordinary. She lit up the Royal Family, and she was only in it for around 10 or 12 years as a full-time working Princess of Wales. She did the job with extraordinary panache, humour and, yes, beauty.

It does not harm, does it, to be beautiful? And she very much was.

The palace’s statement about Earl Spencer’s grief clouding his reason and colouring his memory was, to my mind, a nuclear version of “recollections may vary”. It was insulting.

It suggests that, among all the people involved in this grand drama, only Charles Spencer is uniquely incapable of remembering things clearly because he is bereaved.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy that.

Grief and shock can make details more acute. That has certainly been my own experience. Perhaps that is subjective, but I do not accept that bereavement automatically makes someone’s recollections worthless.

I believe Charles Spencer has reason to feel aggrieved. I believe Charles, as Prince of Wales, would have wanted that chapter of his life to fade away. And I believe the public was never going to forget Diana.

If you ask someone to name Henry VIII’s wives, they may only remember one: Anne Boleyn.

In 100 or 200 years, Diana, Princess of Wales, will be remembered in much the same way. She will be central to the historical assessment of the monarchy, the country and the extraordinary period in which she lived.

For those reasons, I go Charles Spencer, not Charles Rex.

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Listen to Shelagh Fogarty from 1-4pm Monday to Friday on the LBC app.

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