Diana Inc.: New Book, New Netflix Film, and a King Bracing for Impact
Thirty years on, Princess Diana remains the family’s most reliable income stream, and nobody in Buckingham Palace can figure out how to unionise against it
There is a very specific look that crosses a monarch’s face when he learns a member of his own former in-law network is publishing a memoir called Swan Song, and it is not the look of a man who has just been handed a lovely bouquet. According to reports from royal insiders, King Charles III is “bracing for the worst” as Earl Spencer’s memoir about his late sister approaches its release date, which is a sentence that could honestly describe Charles’s relationship with the entire month of September for the last three decades.
The Spencer Strikes Back
Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, arrives with the subtlety of a wrecking ball wearing a signet ring. Royal biographer Tom Bower has already told GB News that Earl Spencer has “masses of scores to be settled,” which is aristocrat-speak for “I have a spreadsheet.” Bower also noted that Spencer is reportedly furious with the King and firmly Team Harry, a stance that in modern royal politics is roughly equivalent to bringing a flamethrower to a garden party. Spencer insists the book is simply him speaking “on Diana’s behalf,” which is a lovely sentiment right up until the marketing department starts printing dust jackets with words like “unfiltered” on them.
Meanwhile, the BBC Gets Dragged Back to the Scene of the Crime
As if one book wasn’t enough humiliation to distribute among the Windsors and their associated broadcasters, a second title has landed: Dianarama: The Betrayal of Princess Diana, by former BBC journalist Andy Webb. The book, as documented in detail, digs through more than ten thousand pages of internal correspondence to reconstruct how reporter Martin Bashir allegedly forged documents to secure Diana’s explosive 1995 Panorama interview. The BBC has already apologised once, in 2021, after an independent inquiry confirmed the deception, but nothing says “we’ve truly moved on” like a fresh 300-page paperback reminding everyone what happened, complete with a foreword’s worth of new receipts from Earl Spencer himself, who has finally handed over his private notes on the whole sorry affair.
Enter Harry, Stage Netflix
Just to round out the trilogy, Prince Harry is reportedly developing his own Diana project, a documentary said to be built around previously unheard audio tapes. According to experts speaking to Fox News Digital, the film “might feel like another betrayal” to Prince William, who apparently regards new Diana content the way most people regard a smoke alarm going off at 3am. Author Christopher Andersen pointed out that William and Harry actually collaborated on a Diana documentary together back in 2017, a detail that now reads less like royal history and more like a “remember when we used to get along” group chat nobody replies to anymore. Commentators have also floated the idea that Meghan Markle could narrate, a prospect one expert predicted would leave William’s patience “completely exhausted,” which is a very polite way of describing what happens when your brother turns your dead mother into a limited series.
Three Books, One Marriage, Zero Peace
What makes this current wave remarkable is not that people are still writing about Diana and Charles nearly thirty years after her death, it’s that the family keeps managing to generate new material simply by continuing to exist. The 1995 interview alone, watched by 22.8 million people in Britain, remains the gift that keeps on giving royalty correspondents a mortgage. Every anniversary produces a new documentary, every documentary produces a new denial, and every denial produces a new book about the denial. At this point the Firm could save everyone considerable trouble by simply issuing quarterly earnings calls.
The King’s Dilemma
Charles, for his part, appears to be adopting the classic royal strategy of saying absolutely nothing and hoping the news cycle chews itself up before anyone asks him a direct question at a public engagement. It has worked before. It worked through the Panorama scandal fallout, it worked through Spare, and it will presumably keep working right up until the moment a journalist gets close enough with a microphone that dodging becomes physically impossible. In the meantime, palace aides are said to be watching the September 22 release date the way meteorologists watch a hurricane forming off the coast, hoping it downgrades before landfall and knowing, deep down, that it almost certainly will not.
Why This Keeps Happening
The uncomfortable truth buried under all the marketing copy is that Diana remains the single most bankable royal in modern history, alive or dead, and every generation of her family has now taken a turn monetising the mythology, whether through interviews, memoirs, documentaries, or increasingly baroque combinations of all three. Charles built a second marriage in her shadow. Harry built an entire post-royal career partly out of relitigating her treatment. And now her own brother is stepping up to remind everyone, in hardback, exactly who behaved badly and when. If nothing else, the Spencer and Windsor families have accidentally created the most emotionally exhausting content franchise in British publishing, with a release cadence most studios would envy.
20 Humorous Observations on Charles and Diana’s History and Relationship
- Their engagement interview featured Charles saying “whatever love means,” a phrase that has since been used in more breakup group chats than any other sentence in the English language.
- Diana wore a wedding dress with a 25-foot train, which in hindsight was less a fashion statement and more foreshadowing about the distance this marriage was going to travel from happy.
- Charles’s stated ideal wife qualifications reportedly included good health and being willing to live in the countryside, criteria more commonly associated with hiring a farmhand.
- The couple’s honeymoon included a stop where Charles brought along photographs of Camilla, an early and extremely on-brand red flag.
- Diana’s 1995 Panorama interview drew 22.8 million viewers, more people than have ever agreed on anything else in British history, including the weather.
- Charles once described his marriage as being watched by “millions of people,” apparently unaware that being the least sympathetic party in a nationally televised divorce is not a flex.
- Camilla was famously described as “the third person” in the marriage, technically making her the only mistress in royal history to also be a math problem.
- Diana referred to Charles privately as “the Boy Wonder,” which is objectively the least threatening nickname ever given to a future head of state.
- Buckingham Palace’s official statements throughout the separation achieved a tone so neutral it could double as elevator music.
- Diana’s wardrobe budget alone probably outperformed several small national economies, and yet the marriage itself remained catastrophically under-invested.
- Charles wrote letters to Camilla throughout his marriage to Diana, proving that even royalty cannot resist the urge to text an ex.
- The couple’s joint engagements grew so frosty that palace photographers reportedly had to work like wildlife documentarians, capturing brief proximity without triggering visible hostility.
- Diana called the marriage “crowded,” a description so restrained it deserves its own diplomatic honour.
- Their divorce settlement reportedly ran into the tens of millions, making it possibly the most expensive “it’s not you, it’s me” in recorded history.
- Charles’s wedding to Camilla in 2005 was a civil ceremony, presumably because a full cathedral service felt tonally optimistic given the history.
- Diana once said she would like to be “a queen of people’s hearts,” a title with considerably better polling numbers than most actual monarchs achieve.
- The couple’s sons have spent the better part of three decades being asked to comment on their parents’ marriage, a chore no job description should include.
- Charles’s own mother reportedly urged the couple to divorce, which is a fairly strong review from someone whose entire job was keeping the family together.
- Every royal documentary since 1997 has featured the phrase “never-before-seen footage,” suggesting the vault of Diana material is somehow both bottomless and eternally unreleased.
- Nearly thirty years on, the marriage remains more profitable in death and memoir form than it ever was in real time, which may be the most honest verdict on the whole affair.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
