Richard Kay corroborates Earl Spencer’s version of events!!!

Richard Kay's account deserves to be quoted in full, because it does something no other piece of commentary on this dispute has managed, it offers a genuinely independent corroborating source, one operating from the same week, with his own contemporaneous notes, rather than a single memory reported nearly three decades later with nothing to check it against. Here is the exchange in full: Question: Would he have been taking notes because this is a long time ago these things happened? Richard Kay: Well, I knew Charles Spencer a bit at that time, and I also know him as a historian today, but he was a journalist, don't forget, and it was in his nature to take notes. And I can picture him taking these phone calls from courtiers, from members of the royal family and others, and scribbling down, because a lot of what they had to say were instructions for him. I mean, his role at the time in the lead up to the funeral was not just to craft that extraordinary oration, but also he was organising a lot of the nitty gritty of the actual funeral itself. His sisters were taking care of the music, Charles Spencer was doing all the other extraneous stuff, like getting the Prime Minister to read the lesson, and talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury who was going to conduct it, and insisting there should be no sermon. All that stuff was in Spencer's purview, if you like. And so it would be entirely in character, in my view, that when Prince Charles rang him, as he did, we know, on at least two occasions in that terrible week, he had a pen in his hand and he noted down what Charles actually said to him. And I should say at this point that Spencer and I also spoke several times during that week, and he told me certain things about Prince Charles which he told me in confidence, which I too noted down, and they chimed very much with the revelations he has made in the book. Why this matters more than it first appears to This is worth separating carefully from everything else that's been said about the Swan Song dispute, because Kay isn't offering an opinion about Spencer's credibility, and he isn't offering the kind of vague, unverifiable "sources say" language that has defined so much of this month's coverage. He's making three specific, checkable claims. First, that Spencer's professional background as a journalist made note-taking habitual to him, not an unusual practice invented to bolster a later book, but a documented feature of how he operated at the time. Second, that Spencer had a genuinely substantive, hands-on organisational role in the funeral itself, coordinating the Prime Minister's reading, the Archbishop's involvement, the decision against a sermon, which establishes that he was not a peripheral, purely emotional figure receiving occasional phone calls, but someone deeply, functionally embedded in the week's actual logistics, exactly the kind of person courtiers and family members would be calling with specific instructions worth writing down. Third, and most significantly, Kay states that he personally spoke to Spencer multiple times that same week, was told things about Charles in confidence, took his own separate notes at the time, and that those notes "chimed very much" with what Spencer has now published nearly thirty years later. That third point is the one worth sitting with longest, because it changes the entire evidentiary picture. This is no longer a single man's memory of a private phone call, tested only against the Palace's suggestion that grief may have distorted it. This is two separate people, from two different vantage points, one placing notes on paper in real time in 1997, describing a consistent underlying account of Charles's conduct and words that week, arriving independently at the same substance decades apart. That is a meaningfully different evidentiary category than anything else in this dispute has offered so far. Bringing in Spencer's own words from the eulogy itself It's worth setting this alongside the promise Spencer made publicly, in Westminster Abbey, in September 1997, delivered directly to Diana's sons and to the world watching, that his sister would never be forgotten, and that he and her blood family would ensure her spirit and memory endured. Read Kay's account of the phone call now against that public vow. If the words Spencer says Charles used in private that same week were some version of the dismissive sentiment reported, that Diana would be forgotten soon enough, then Spencer's eulogy wasn't simply grief finding its most eloquent expression. It was, quite possibly, a direct, public rebuttal to something he had just been told in private, a promise made specifically because he had reason to fear it might not otherwise be kept.