Diana’s brother is right to be furious with Charles over Harry and William

Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana but still it makes headlines. The latest furore is about her brother Charles Spencer – he of the Westminster Abbey eulogy – who has written a new book called Swan Song: Diana, My Sister . It has inevitably been leaked and the big reveal is a heated conversation (actually it sounds more like a full-blown row) between Spencer and the then-Prince Charles over whether or not the young princes, William and Harry, should walk behind their mother’s funeral cortege.

The book says that, during the row, Spencer said the idea was “barbaric” while the King said he had walked behind the gun carriage at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral and that it was tradition. Spencer apparently riposted that Charles had been 30 when Mountbatten died (in 1979) and it wasn’t the same. And the King “went nuts”. Touché.

I have to say I agree with Spencer. Whatever you think of Princess Diana’s brother (and he’s certainly a colourful piece of work with many alleging he has written this book to raise cash for his latest divorce) he was right about the boys. What empathy-free monsters ever thought it was appropriate for children of 15 and 12 to have to walk so publicly, so far, in the glare of the entire global media, when their beloved mother had just died unexpectedly in a car accident?

The death of a parent in early adolescence is traumatic enough anyway, without that deep personal grief having to be performed (and contained) in front of hundreds of millions of people. Prince Harry says in his memoir Spare how traumatic it was. He told Newsweek in 2017: “I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances. I don’t think that would happen today”.

Prince William is much more stiff upper lip, but he has said that he felt completely numb and disorientated and described Diana’s death as “an earthquake which split my mind and life”. Of the walk behind the coffin specifically, he said: “It wasn’t an easy decision” – an oblique reference to the rows that surrounded it, perhaps – “and it was sort of a collective family decision to do that. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but there was this element of duty and responsibility that you have to do things you don’t want to do”.

Ouch. Both boys have also talked of the overwhelming pressure they felt not to cry in public. Spencer was right to call it “barbaric”.

We shouldn’t be surprised that those tumultuous events continue to reverberate down the decades; I expect that they will echo down the centuries. The tragedy of Diana’s hounding by the paparazzi, our collective insatiable curiosity about her life and the tawdriness of her death at 36 in a Mercedes driven by a drunk chauffeur in the employ of a sex-criminal (Mohamed Fayed), is a saga for the ages.

But even if it hadn’t been so public, losing a parent so young is the kind of blow that defines your life, whether you are prince or pauper. William has spoken about the pain of not having his mother around to see his own children grow up.