David Levenson / Getty Images

“It’s important for your viewers to know, the British Royal Family is extremely powerful. They’re not just these people who put on fancy clothes for state occasions. They have serious power, a lot of control over sections of the media. If you dare to stand up against them as Diana did, forget me, as Diana did, they will try and obliterate you.”

—Charles, Earl Spencer

Charles Spencer says the warning in that quote is about his own sister. Promoting his memoir “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister,” published September 22, the 9th Earl Spencer argues the royal family tries to crush anyone who stands up to it the way Diana did.

Diana’s younger brother Spencer, 62, is the maternal uncle of William and Harry. On CBS he said the British establishment tried to “suppress” his sister, invoking Diana’s own phrase about the “men in gray suits.”

A young Charles Spencer — then Viscount Althorp — at the London premiere of ‘Absolute Beginners’ on April 4, 1986, years before he would deliver his famous eulogy for his sister Diana. Photo by Fox Photos / Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

The sharpest claim in the book is about a row over whether William, then 15, and Harry, then 12, should walk behind their mother’s coffin. Spencer says he objected, and that then-Prince Charles hissed, “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.” He has told the BBC those were “exactly the words” the King used, and that he does not hear the King saying he did not say them.

Buckingham Palace answered the Daily Mail’s serialization with a rare statement that “fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory.” It stopped short of a word-for-word denial of the five words “we’ll forget her soon enough.”

Queen Elizabeth II laughs alongside Prince Philip and Prince Charles on the Buckingham Palace balcony during the Trooping the Colour ceremony, as Princess Diana stands to the right, on June 11, 1983. Photo by David Levenson / Getty Images.

Diana made a version of the same case herself. In her 1995 Panorama interview she said the establishment she married into had decided she was a “non-starter” and saw her “as a threat of some kind.”

Diana, Princess of Wales, married Charles in 1981 and divorced him in 1996, losing the style Her Royal Highness. She died in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, aged 36.

At Buckingham Palace on July 29, 1981, the Royal Family gathered for a formal portrait following the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.

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