Spencer, Diane's Brother Says Diane Told Him The King Was In Love With His Valet
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.
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Princess Diana's brother has dropped a series of bombshell allegations involving King Charles.
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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.”
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Michael Fawcett, left, accompanies Prince Charles, Prince of Wales as he attends The Prince's Countryside Fund Raceday at Ascot Racecourse on November 23, 2018 in Ascot, England.
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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.
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Buckingham Palace released a scathing statement this week from the king appearing to question the mental state of his former brother-in-law.
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He later ran the Prince’s Foundation charity before resigning in 2021 over a scandal. Smith died in 2005.
Smith claimed that Diana taped his account of the affair but that it vanished after her death.
In the memoir, Spencer describes Diana asking him to lunch at a fancy London restaurant and telling him she was going to seek a divorce. He warned her against it, and she replied: “But, Carlos, my husband is in love with his valet.”
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Princess Diana's brother has infuriated King Charles with claims made in his new book.
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Spencer had already forced an extraordinary response from Buckingham Palace this week, when it emerged that his book claims Charles said to him days after Diana’s death that “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough!” In response, Buckingham Palace said, “His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss.”
Elsewhere, Spencer says he learned that Diana was dead while on the phone to their sister Jane, whose brother-in-law, Sir Robert Fellowes, was the Queen’s private secretary. Down the line he heard Fellowes cry, “Oh no!” and Jane told him, “That’s it, it’s curtains, Duch is dead.” “Duch” was the Spencers’ nickname for Diana.
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Prince Charles and Princess Diana return to England with Sarah, Duchess of York, after a skiing tragedy, the death of Major Hugh Lindsay.
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When Charles rang him later that morning, Spencer writes, he was unlike the other callers, who were stunned and barely able to articulate their condolences: “He sounded giggly, elated, like a lottery winner, I remember thinking at the time.”
Spencer’s interpretation is that the prince’s “first reaction” was to consider “how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not.”
The extract also winds back to the marriage. Spencer says Charles told Diana the day before the wedding that “she needed to know he was very happy to marry her, but he was not actually in love with her.” He says the prince at one point squeezed her waist and remarked, “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?” And he writes that more than once Diana drove herself to Beachy Head, “the highest chalk sea cliff in England, while contemplating ending it all. Her love for her sons stopped her from going further.”
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