'Gaslit by the King': Spencer's Broadside Meets 'Hypocrite' From the Palace's Friends
The memoir war reached open combat on the Sunday fronts: “It’s not every day you get gaslit by the King,” Earl Spencer said of the Palace’s memory-clouding statement — “a rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote” — while the King’s friends returned fire through the Sunday Times: a “hypocrite… peddling Diana’s privacy”. His full interview aired with its rawest line: “The thing with sibling loss? You never get over it.” The book lands Tuesday.
The row has found its true register — grief against institution, with both sides now borrowing the other’s weapons: Mr Spencer deploys the Sussexes’ vocabulary (“gaslit”, the “recollections” barb) against the Crown that coined it, while the Palace runs the friends-brief-the-Sundays playbook it always denies running. His claim to know more than he has told is the escalation mechanism left visibly armed. Beneath the theatre, an institutional problem compounds: the monarchy’s Diana settlement rested on time doing the forgetting, and her brother has re-opened the account with documents, witnesses and three decades of banked sympathy. Tuesday’s publication moves this from serialisation to citation. Watch the sales figures and the Palace’s silence-versus-statement calculus — each new response has so far cost more than the last.