Diana’s Brother Drops Eye-Popping Gay Love Claim About King

Chris J.

Ratcliffe / REUTERS Princess Diana’s brother has dropped a bombshell allegation about King Charles’s sexuality in an explosive new memoir—dredging up a decades-old sex claim long denied by the royal.

Charles Spencer says that Diana told him “my husband is in love with his valet,” a term for a royal’s personal manservant, after revealing her plan to divorce Charles.

The aide is not named in the Daily Mail’s serialization of Swan Song: Diana, My Sister , but rumors have swirled for decades about a relationship between the king and his closest aide, Michael Fawcett.

It originated with George Smith, another former valet in the prince’s household, who alleged in 1996 that, while in the throes of a mental breakdown, he had been raped by an aide to the prince and, separately, that he had witnessed an incident involving a member of the royal family and a senior royal servant .

Fawcett won a court order in 2003 banning a British newspaper from publishing the allegation that he was the man caught with the royal.

The UK press later named him as the man behind the injunction , but the claim itself remained a mystery.

The prince’s private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, then issued a statement denying the claims without detailing them, and questioned the trustworthiness of the unnamed Smith as a source, saying he “unfortunately has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and has previously suffered from alcoholism.” It was revealed days later that Peat had asked his press spokesman if he thought Charles was gay or bisexual.

The spokesman said it was “emphatically not the case.” Clarence House, Charles’s office, stated publicly that the allegation was entirely without foundation.

Peat’s inquiry, published in 2003, found no evidence of a deliberate cover-up of the separate rape claim, though the report faulted how the complaints had first been handled in the 1990s.

Fawcett is best known in Britain for squeezing toothpaste onto Charles’s brush after his master broke his arm playing polo.

When bullying complaints in 1998 forced him to resign, he was soon reinstated and promoted.

He later ran the Prince’s Foundation charity before resigning in 2021 over a scandal.

Smith died in 2005.