Charles Spencer's Diana memoir hits shelves as King issues rare rebuttal

EARL SPENCER's memoir about his late sister, Princess Diana, goes on sale today — and the claims inside have already forced a rare, furious response from the king himself.

"Swan Song: Diana, My Sister," published by Penguin and translated into 12 languages, alleges that shortly after Diana's death in 1997, Charles told her brother by phone: "Rest assured, we'll forget her soon enough."

Spencer says Charles sounded "giddily elated, like a lottery winner" — and later "went ballistic" when Spencer objected to princes William and Harry, then just 15 and 12, walking behind their mother's coffin.

Buckingham Palace's reply was extraordinary in itself: a statement suggesting Spencer's grief had "cloud[ed] reason, affect[ed] judgement and colour[ed] memory" — language BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg said proved "the king is plainly furious," noting palaces "almost never" issue statements like it.

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Spencer's response was blunt: "It is not every day you wake up to find you've been gaslit by the king."

The book's other revelations are just as striking. Spencer writes that Diana contemplated suicide, driving to the clifftop at Beachy Head, and was stopped only by thoughts of her sons. He also describes her telling him she believed Charles was "in love with his valet" — a claim Spencer says he never questioned, however improbable.

Perhaps most jarring: Spencer alleges Diana felt "revulsion" toward Mohamed Al-Fayed after he squeezed her buttocks and remarked, "in a leery, suggestive tone," that "in Egypt, father-in-law gets first go" — a claim that sits uneasily alongside Spencer's praise elsewhere in the book for Al-Fayed's son Dodi, who died alongside Diana.

Buckingham Palace challenges Earl Spencer's claims ...

Not everyone is convinced. Royal biographer Robert Hardman says he witnessed Charles "distraught and in tears" at the funeral, not elated.

Author Andrew Morton called the phone-call claim "incendiary and disputed," and commentator Jennie Bond dismissed the memoir outright as "a vindictive account."

Twenty-eight years on, one family phone call is still making headlines.