Earl Charles Spencer, younger brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, originally planned a “very different” eulogy than the controversial speech he ended up delivering at her funeral nearly 30 years ago, he told a British podcaster.
Spencer jumped onto a redeye to the U.K. from his then-home in South Africa after receiving the devastating news of Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in August 1997, he told Gyles Brandreth in a Friday edition of the host’s “Rosebud” podcast. “I was in bits,” he said.
Seeking someone fit to eulogize his sister, Spencer was stumped after rummaging through his “big thick address book” and called his mother from Heathrow Airport to admit defeat, saying, “I’ve got an awful feeling it’s going to have to be me.”
He said his mother noted the hunch was correct, and that he’d been chosen in absentia. Spencer set to work on a “very traditional eulogy,” struggling with bland descriptions like what Diana had been good at as a child.
“And then I thought, well this is ridiculous. This is not who she was… I realized that my job actually wasn’t to do that,” he said.
Once he realized he needed to “speak for her” rather than about her, “I wrote it in an hour and a half.”
Spencer celebrated Diana’s life and loves at her September 6, 1997, funeral at Westminster Abbey and excoriated the paparazzi for their role in the crash that took her life when she was just 36. He called the tabloids’ fixation on her life “baffling” in its ferocity, especially when it came to Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street flock.
“My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum,” Spencer said. “It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this — a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.”
Murdoch eventually apologized and agreed to pay substantial damages earlier this year for the grief and harm his newspapers’ intrusion into the princess’s life had caused, after a lawsuit brought by Diana’s son Prince Harry.
“I did take one bit out, actually,” Spencer told Brandreth, “because I did give a rather unnecessary name check to Rupert Murdoch and I thought, ‘why bother?’ Why give him the publicity?”
With News Wire Services