(Picture: Tim Graham Photo Library)
Charles told Princess Diana’s brother that he and young Prince William and Harry would ‘forget her soon enough’ in a row over her funeral.
Diana’s brother Earl Spencer claims he told the now King just days after Diana’s car crash death in Paris that she wouldn’t want the boys, then aged 15 and 12, to make the public walk behind her coffin.
In his book serialised in the Daily Mail, Earl Spencer recalls telling one of Queen Elizabeth’s aides that William and Harry walking in the procession at such a young age was ‘not going to happen.’
He claims Prince Charles rang him back to tell him that he had walked in the funeral procession of Lord Mountbatten, his great ‘uncle Dickie’.
When Spencer hit back saying that Charles was 30 at that funeral, there was a pause on the phone.
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Earl Spencer writes: ‘I assumed the pause signalled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death.
“Rest assured,” he hissed, “we’ll forget her soon enough.”‘
A Buckingham Palace spokesman hit back at the claim, saying the King is ‘mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason’.
The statement reads: ‘While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.’
According to the newspaper, Earl Spencer says the book – Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – has been written to correct ‘untruths’ told about his older sister, who died in a Paris car crash in August 1997.