An echo of the past
Charles Spencer has spoken. He used a BBC interview to draw a direct line between the press treatment of his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, and that now faced by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The earl’s intervention is rare. He rarely speaks publicly. He told the national broadcaster he sees ‘echoes’ of the past. A deliberate word. He described how his sister was ‘really brought low by all that criticism’ she received from the media in the years before her death in 1997, and recalled seeing her in what he called ‘tears of despair’. A painful memory.
The date was 20 September 2026. This was not a mistake. The decision to use the platform of the BBC, the United Kingdom’s public service broadcaster, suggests a deliberate strategy to ensure the message was heard widely and with a degree of formality. Spencer is a custodian of his sister's memory, a role he has occupied for nearly three decades, and his words carry a specific historical weight that cannot be replicated by other commentators or royal observers. He is not another voice. He is family.
By speaking now, and in such terms, the earl connects the media environment of the 1990s with the digital age of the 2020s, arguing a fundamental pattern of destructive behaviour remains unchanged. This is his central claim. The suggestion is that the specific individuals and the particular technologies may have evolved, but the underlying mechanism of public criticism and the pressure it places on members of the royal family is the same. He alleges a continuity of harm. It brought his sister low. He sees it happening again.
The memory of a eulogy
His words have weight. They have history. For many, Charles Spencer’s authority on this subject was forged at a lectern in Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997, the day of his sister’s funeral. The world was watching. He delivered a eulogy that was not just a tribute but an indictment, a speech that criticised both the royal family and the press in front of a global television audience estimated at two billion people. His nephews, Princes William and Harry, sat directly in his line of sight. They were fifteen and twelve. This speech established the earl as the self appointed guardian of Diana’s legacy and the primary public critic of the forces he believed had destroyed her.
He did not equivocate. The criticism was direct. He described his sister as ‘the most hunted person of the modern age’, a phrase that immediately entered the public lexicon and defined the narrative of her final years. He accused the media directly, contrasting the ‘sneering’ of editors who had encouraged paparazzi intrusion with the nation’s outpouring of grief. An act of hypocrisy, he suggested. Spencer spoke of a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of the hunt, an irony he found both cruel and ‘absolutely unbearable’ at the end. Applause broke out. The sound came from the crowds listening on speakers outside the abbey. It rippled into the ancient church. A public endorsement.
He also made a promise. This is why his words now resonate. He spoke directly to Diana, pledging that her ‘blood family’, the Spencers, would continue her work of raising her two sons ‘so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned’. A clear challenge. This was widely interpreted at the time as a vow to protect William and Harry from the institution he felt had failed their mother, a declaration that their emotional lives mattered more than their royal roles. He was speaking as an uncle. He was acting as a protector. He was drawing a line between the Spencer family and the House of Windsor.
That speech provides the context for everything he says now. It was a singular moment in recent British history. The eulogy transformed the earl from a private aristocrat into a public figure defined by one defiant act. His authority is not academic. It is personal. It comes from that day. So when he speaks of ‘echoes’, he is not just making an observation. He is calling back to a specific promise made to protect his nephews and a specific accusation levelled at the British press. He is resuming an argument he started almost thirty years ago. He is telling the world he believes the hunt has begun again.
The mechanism of coverage
The dispute centres on access. The royal rota is the formal arrangement that governs how the British media covers the monarchy, a system of pooled access designed to manage the intense press interest in the family’s public duties. It is a closed shop. It provides privileged entry. Rota members include the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, The Sun, The Times and The Telegraph, alongside news agencies like the Press Association and major broadcasters. A single photographer or reporter from one of these organisations attends an engagement, then shares their material with the wider press corps, preventing a chaotic scramble for position at every hospital opening or charity visit.
Harry and Meghan rejected this system. They did so publicly. The break was announced in January 2020. In a statement on their Sussex Royal website, they criticised the arrangement as a cartel which they claimed gave a free pass to outlets that had published distorted, false and invasive stories about them. They withdrew completely. This act ended the established protocol. It was a direct challenge. It rewired their relationship with the publications that had documented every moment of their lives, from first school days to their own wedding at St George’s Chapel.
The rota members were locked out. The tabloids, once guaranteed a front row seat through the official system, were now on the outside, forced to cover the couple through agency pictures, long lens photography and reports from American media organisations. The old deal was broken. The new dynamic became adversarial. The shift from managed access to open conflict explains the bitterness of the coverage that followed, replacing the predictable, palace approved narrative of the rota system with a free for all fought through headlines and court filings.
A different duchess, a different decade
The comparison has its limits. The two women occupied very different positions within the architecture of the monarchy. Diana was the Princess of Wales, the wife of the direct heir to the throne and the mother of the man who will one day be king. Her life was a state matter. Her children were central to the succession. This defined the nature and the intensity of the interest in her. She was inescapable. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is married to the King's second son. Her children's lives will be led outside the royal centre. Their places in the line of succession are distant, their constitutional relevance minor compared to that of their cousins in Wales. One was the mother of a future sovereign. The other is not.
The decade was different too. The media that pursued Diana was an analogue machine, a world of paper and ink centred on London's Fleet Street that has since vanished almost completely. Great power was held by a few editors. They decided what was news. Their papers, like the Daily Mirror and The Sun, sold millions of copies every day, their front pages setting the national agenda from breakfast tables across Britain. Information was gathered by reporters with notebooks or by paparazzi who would spend days waiting for a single photograph, a tangible object to be sold for thousands of pounds to a picture desk. The news cycle turned once a day. A story would break in the morning paper. That was it. There was a rhythm.
Today's environment is unrecognisable. It is digital. It is global. It is brutally fast. There is no off switch. News breaks not in print but in an endless cascade on screens, the information flowing constantly through social media sites and international news portals before arriving on millions of individual phones. An opinion expressed on X in California can become part of an online pile on in the United Kingdom within seconds. There is no single editor to hold accountable, only algorithms that are programmed to amplify the most extreme and engaging content, which is often the most abusive. This new reality changes the very character of the pressure. It is no longer a case of avoiding a photographer in a Kensington street. It is an ambient roar of digital judgment, anonymous and permanent. The fight is everywhere.
The turn to the courts
This is a different kind of war. It is a war fought not in interviews but in courtrooms. Princess Diana complained about the press, sometimes bitterly, but she never mounted a systematic legal campaign to defeat it. Her son has. He is fighting on multiple fronts. The scale is unprecedented for a royal. His targets are the three largest publishers of tabloid newspapers in Britain, a coordinated assault on the very foundations of the industry he holds responsible for a generation of pain. It is a total confrontation.
The first victory came against Mirror Group Newspapers. He sued. The company, which publishes the Daily Mirror, faced allegations of unlawful information gathering that stretched from the 1990s into the 2010s. The claim culminated in the extraordinary spectacle of the Duke of Sussex giving evidence in the High Court for two days in June 2023, the first senior royal to do so in 130 years. It worked. In December, Mr Justice Fancourt ruled that phone hacking had been ‘extensive and habitual’ and that the prince had been a target. The judge awarded him damages of £140,600. It was a clear result.
Another battle is being waged against News Group Newspapers. This is the publisher of The Sun. The claim again centres on historical phone hacking and illegal news gathering. The fight is complex. It involves an alleged ‘secret agreement’ between the palace and the publisher which Harry claims delayed his ability to bring a case. The case continues. So does his action against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. He brought a libel claim over a Mail on Sunday article about his security arrangements. That specific claim was lost. The wider strategy remains. He will keep suing. This is the fundamental difference. Diana felt she was a victim of the press. Her son has decided to become its adversary in court, armed with lawyers and funded for a long fight. He will not stop.
What happens next
What changes now? Perhaps not much. Earl Spencer's intervention gives the Sussexes' version of events a credibility that resonates powerfully with anyone who remembers his eulogy for his sister in Westminster Abbey in 1997. He adds weight. He adds history. His words remind a British public of a painful and unresolved national memory, directly linking the press criticism of Meghan to the treatment that he believes destroyed Diana. This makes the Sussexes' complaints harder for some to dismiss as simple celebrity grievance. It reframes them in history.
The intervention also places the royal family in an impossible position. The palace is caught. It says nothing. A public statement from Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace would require them either to contradict Diana's brother or to validate the Sussexes' narrative and by extension condemn the very media outlets with which they maintain a careful, symbiotic relationship. They need the press. The press needs them. So there is silence. Charles Spencer is not a marginal figure they can ignore, he is the uncle of the future king, and his accusation hangs in the air, unanswered by the institution he implicitly criticises.
But newspapers sell. Websites need clicks. The commercial logic that drove the intense coverage of Diana in the 1990s has not disappeared, it has simply metastasised into a global, digital, and perpetually hungry news environment where the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are a reliable source of revenue. They are a product. Conflict is profitable. Spencer’s words will themselves be reported, analysed, and used to generate headlines, but they will not fundamentally alter the economic incentives for publications to cover the couple. The story is too valuable. The business continues.
Sources. BBC News UK: Harry and Meghan's media treatment echoes what happened to Diana, Earl Spencer tells BBC. Evening Standard: Earl Spencer says press treatment of the Sussexes ‘echoes’ Diana.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
