It began as the launch of a memoir meant to honor a beloved sister, but it has quickly turned into a public feud, a legal threat, and an embarrassing correction that no author wants to confront on publication day. Earl Spencer, the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, spent months preparing Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, a deeply personal book about the woman the world still mourns. Yet instead of dominating the headlines with revelations about the royal family or intimate memories of the princess, the story on Tuesday was dominated by an apology. Spencer admitted that he had wrongly accused Piers Morgan, the former tabloid editor turned presenter, of being responsible for publishing intrusive photographs of Diana at a gym in the 1990s. Morgan, who had threatened to sue over what he called “fabricated inaccuracies” and “examples of brazen falsity,” wasted no time before firing back. The accusation, he said, was not just wrong but provably, glaringly wrong, and it raised a broader, uncomfortable question: if Spencer could get something so basic so disastrously wrong, then why should anyone trust anything else in the book?
The controversy has to be understood against the backdrop of the book’s explosive claims about the royal family. In Swan Song, Spencer makes a series of allegations that had already ignited a war of words with Buckingham Palace, including the claim that King Charles, after Diana’s death, said “we’ll forget her soon enough.” The palace issued a furious rebuke, and royal commentators lined up to cast doubt on the story. That row was enough to guarantee the memoir a stormy reception. But Morgan’s allegation was different. He was not disputing an interpretation of a private conversation or offering a rival recollection. He was pointing to a factual, documented timeline that made Spencer’s account impossible. The charge concerned a passage in which Spencer claimed that Morgan, as editor of the Daily Mirror, was partly responsible for the publication of images of Diana working out in a leotard at a gym, images taken by a hidden camera and printed in the Sunday Mirror. As Morgan explained to his YouTube audience, those photographs appeared on 7 November 1993. He did not join the Daily Mirror until October 1995. At the time the pictures were published, he was not a tabloid editor at all, but was writing a showbiz column for the Sun, the Mirror’s arch-rival. By his own account, he could not have been further removed from responsibility for the picture story.
Spencer’s apology came later on Tuesday, but it was as much a clarification as a concession. In a statement, he acknowledged that his account of his conversation with Morgan was accurate in one sense: Morgan had been surly and annoyed when Spencer called to say he was not welcome at his sister’s funeral. But Spencer admitted that his assumption about Morgan’s role at the Mirror at the time of the gym photographs was incorrect. He noted that the pictures had been published by the Sunday Mirror on 7 November 1993, and that Morgan had pointed out he did not join the Daily Mirror until two years later. As an historian, Spencer said, accuracy matters to him, and so he wished to clarify the error and apologise to Morgan. It was a carefully worded statement, but it hardly ended the row. Morgan responded by rejecting Spencer’s version of their phone call as “deeply misleading.” He insisted that he had been neither surly nor annoyed, but instead “very respectful” to the earl and his family, and claimed that his own diaries, The Insider, recorded the exchange. Far from backing down, Morgan doubled down, announcing on social media that he was pursuing legal action against Spencer and his publisher, Penguin, to have the lies removed and to secure damages to be paid to the King’s Trust.
Morgan’s broader point, delivered at length on his show Piers Morgan Uncensored, was that Spencer’s credibility was now in tatters. He read extracts from the book, including the passage in which Spencer described how he personally telephoned tabloid newspaper editors to uninvite them from Diana’s funeral, after they had all been invited. Morgan remembered this well because, as he put it, he was one of them. But he claimed that Spencer’s account of the conversation was pure invention. The book suggested that Morgan “snarled with annoyance before he hung up,” a description Morgan rejected with evident fury. He reminded viewers that he had been the editor of the Mirror from 1995 to 2004, and that his relationship with Diana had been more complex and more personal than Spencer’s narrative implied. Morgan revealed that he had lunch with Diana at Kensington Palace, alongside Prince William, and that after that meeting it was not uncommon for her to call his office or for him to send stories to her for her reaction. The irony, he said, was that by the end of her life, he was probably speaking to her more often than her brother was, since Spencer had been estranged from Diana and living in South Africa at the time of her death.
By framing the issue in such personal terms, Morgan was able to turn the story from a simple factual correction into a serious attack on the integrity of the entire memoir. His central argument was devastating in its simplicity: if Earl Spencer could be “so incredibly, defamatorily wrong about such basic facts involving me,” then why should readers believe anything else in the book? It is a question that now hangs over Swan Song as much as any of its revelations about the royal family. Spencer, for his part, has insisted that he is a historian who values accuracy, and his decision to issue an apology within hours of the book’s release suggests that he understood the gravity of the mistake. But the episode also exposes the perils of writing about famous figures from memory, especially when those memories are shaped by grief, anger, or the need to defend a sister’s legacy. Spencer’s recollection of Morgan’s behavior may have been colored by his own feelings at the time, and his assumption about the editor’s role in the gym photographs may have been an honest but careless mistake. Yet in the age of social media and instant rebuttal, an author cannot afford to be careless when making claims about a prominent figure who still commands a massive platform.
As the war of words continued, there was a fittingly undignified backdrop in the bookshops of London. Reports emerged that the release day for Spencer’s memoir was quiet, with the £28 hardback already marked at half price in some stores. In the flagship Waterstones on Piccadilly, dozens of copies sat stacked with red “half price” stickers, and the same discount was visible on the chain’s website. Whether that was a sign of weak demand or simply a standard retail promotion, the image of a royal memoir being discounted on the very first day of publication added a note of bathos to an already messy affair. Morgan, meanwhile, showed no sign of softening. His legal action, he said, was aimed at forcing Penguin to remove the false claims and to pay damages to the King’s Trust, a charity that would presumably benefit from any settlement. The dispute now looks set to drag on, and the book, which Spencer surely hoped would be a dignified tribute to his sister, has become the latest battleground in the long, strange afterlife of Diana’s story. In the end, the episode is a reminder that even the most personal memoirs are subject to scrutiny, and that when the brother of a princess and a former tabloid editor collide, the truth is often the first casualty.