Charles Spencer Remembers Diana: Family Flashpoints, Neurodivergence, and a Brother’s Perspective

As the 30th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death approaches, her brother Charles Spencer is sharing his most personal and reflective account yet. In Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, he speaks with remarkable candour about three occasions when his sister became physically confrontational, incidents rooted in deep family turmoil, and offers a new framework for understanding the intense emotional patterns that have often been misunderstood or mislabelled.

Three Moments, Deeply Felt

Spencer tells PEOPLE he can recall only three instances where Diana acted physically aggressively. The first occurred when their father, John Spencer, announced his intention to marry Raine McCorquodale, a decision that came as a profound shock to the children. Diana slapped him in response. “We felt we had made our feelings really clear,” Spencer explains, “but of course my father had to follow his heart. As children, you don’t understand that. You just think he’s letting us down.”

The second was sudden and unprovoked: Diana pushed him off his bicycle, an act he describes as “bizarre” and “so out of the blue,” though he notes it may also have been a moment of ordinary sibling friction.

The third and best-known incident took place in 1989, when Diana pushed their stepmother Raine down the stairs at Althorp during preparations for Spencer’s first wedding. Spencer places the moment in full context: Raine had allowed Diana and Spencer’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, into the home but isolated her in a separate room, away from the gathering. She also made cutting remarks about Diana, reportedly saying she could not believe Prince Charles had married someone “so stupid.” “I’m not saying it’s a good thing to be physically violent,” Spencer says, “but it was the buildup of an enormous amount of really strong feeling and a flashpoint where I think she thought she was standing up for my mother.”

A New Lens: Neurodivergence and Misunderstanding

Central to Swan Song is Spencer’s belief that Diana’s intense emotional responses may have stemmed not from personality disorders, as some have speculated, but from neurodivergence, specifically ADHD and dyslexia — conditions Diana was never formally diagnosed with. Spencer received his own severe ADHD diagnosis later in life, and he sees the same patterns in his sister: “I know it’s exactly what Diana had. It’s so similar. Diana was as extreme.”

He pushes back against the ease with which labels such as bipolar or borderline personality disorder have been attached to Diana over the years. “I’ve gotten really upset when people have tried to say those things,” he shares. “I think it was more humdrum in a way it was ADHD. And rejection for people with ADHD goes very, very deep.” The distinction matters: it reframes her heightened sensitivities, quickness to feel hurt, and fierce loyalties not as instability, but as the experience of a neurodivergent woman navigating overwhelming public and private pressures without understanding or support.

A Brother’s Truth, Tender and Honest

Spencer is careful not to excuse physical behaviour: “I do not condone it,” he states plainly but he does seek to explain it, grounding these rare moments in the long-standing tensions of their family: a fractured marriage, a contentious stepmother, a mother who was pushed to the margins, and a young woman who felt compelled to defend those she loved.

The memoir arrives as a tribute as much as a reckoning. It acknowledges the complexity of Diana the warmth and the fire, the vulnerability and the fierceness and asks that she be seen whole, not reduced to a saint or a stereotype. “She wasn’t perfect,” Spencer seems to say, “but she was real. And we have never fully understood her.”