Earl Spencer launched an
astonishing attack on Prince Charles now king, for not visiting Princess
Diana’s grave since her burial four years ago.
He implied that he believed
the Prince had relegated his former wife to memory and wanted to draw a line
under his marriage.
Diana, who died in a Paris car
crash almost four years ago, is buried on an island on the grounds of Althorp
House, her childhood home.
The Earl, Diana’s brother,
said: ‘Prince Charles has an open invitation, as he knows, to come to the
memorial but he has yet to take up that invitation.’
Asked by presenter Simon Mayo
in a Radio Five interview why he thought that was, the Earl replied: ‘Look at
it from his point of view. It’s an ex-wife at the end of the day and maybe
that’s how he views it.
‘He recently said he wanted to
draw a line under the whole episode and let Diana rest in peace and maybe he
views him not going there as helping that process.’
When Mayo suggested Charles
was being ‘extremely callous’, the Earl replied: ‘You probably think I sit at
home and think about Prince Charles and his life quite a lot, but I don’t to be
honest, so I think you’d have to ask him or his representatives why that might
be …
‘He’s the father of my nephews
and he’s very welcome to come. If he came here he’d be welcomed sincerely and
with due hospitality.’
In his interview, Earl Spencer
said he did not have a single friend or confidante within the Royal Family,
apart from William and Harry.
And he suggested the real
future of the monarchy lay with William, throwing doubt on Charles’s potential
as a future monarch.
He said: ‘People obviously
approve of the Queen, and we’ll see how the Prince of Wales does when it comes
to his turn, but you can look down the line and see William waiting for however
long it is and there is a future for the monarchy there.’
Asked if he felt he had
succeeded, he replied: ‘Yes . . . I think when I wrote that I underestimated
how much groundwork their mother had put in, and they were already strong
enough personalities in their own right to make sure that they would find their
own way in life.’
A spokesman for St James’s
Palace said: ‘The matter of whether Prince Charles has visited the late
Princess of Wales’s grave is a personal and private matter for him.’
