“It is to my eternal regret that what I saw as my clear warnings to Diana about Bashir failed to see him off,” the Earl wrote.
Diana’s personal driver had been sacked because Bashir had falsely claimed that he was working as an informant.
She was instead being driven by Henri Paul, who worked for Mohamed Fayed, and who was more than three times the drink-drive limit at the time of the fatal crash.
“My immediate suspicion, at this time of intense anger and grief, was that this was all too convenient,” he writes.
“I felt strongly that somebody high up in the media world – maybe a newspaper owner – must have had agents tamper with driver Henri Paul’s blood analysis to ensure a reading that might partially exonerate their camera-wielding goons.”
The Earl described how Bashir visited Althorp, the Spencer family estate in Northamptonshire, a few days after their initial contact, revealing that he was a devout Christian, which the Earl believed added to his trustworthiness.
Having convinced the Earl that his sister was being spied upon by British government agents, he produced his evidence – bank statements that were later found to have been forged – “with a flourish”.
At a subsequent meeting, attended by Diana, Bashir made a string of claims so ludicrous that the Earl realised he could not be trusted.
“I could not wait to escort Bashir out of my friend’s flat and get him as far away from Diana as possible,” he writes, adding that he apologised to her for wasting her time.
But unbeknown to him, Bashir re-established contact with Diana and conducted the notorious interview in which she declared that there were three people in her marriage.
“It is to my eternal regret that what I saw as my clear warnings to Diana about Bashir failed to see him off,” the Earl writes.
“I thought I had said enough after he left the secret meeting in my friend’s flat. But, clearly, I had not. He managed to slide back into Diana’s life, ensnaring her with lies and manipulation.”
His only consolation, he added, was that his meticulously written notes of their meeting helped prove his dishonesty.
In July 2022, the BBC apologised to the King, then the Prince of Wales, Prince William, Prince Harry and their former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, for the interview and promised never to show or license the programme again.
The apology followed a scathing report by Lord Dyson, the former master of the rolls, who concluded that the BBC had covered up “deceitful behaviour” used by Bashir to secure the interview, criticising his methods.
Harry left without nurture
The Earl also claimed that a “lack of obvious care” for Prince Harry, then aged 12, following his mother’s death, left him without nurture, which “allowed him to spin out of control”.
He wrote that at the time, Prince William, then 15, was his “secondary” concern on the day of the funeral because of his maturity and apparent composure.
Detailing Diana as a doting mother to her two young sons, the Earl said: “William and Harry’s future had not been a worry when Diana was alive because her positive, modern, maternal touch was always so obvious.”
“I have never, in my life, come across a better mother,” he added. “She wanted them to become the best versions of themselves, despite all the royal trappings, and in the face of the sycophancy their position so often prompted in others.”
However, he also suggested that raising emotionally supported children within royal life had been a challenge, and that his concern about how they were raised after her death had stemmed from the “archaic ways of the monarchy”.
The Earl writes: “However out of touch many in the Royal family seemed, there had always been the reassurance for the public that their mother was going to give William and Harry values, insight and the emotional security that British princes had previously been denied.
“But now what would happen to them? They were still young enough to be easily influenced, and perhaps even to forget their mother’s guidance and example.
“Would they, at such a formative stage, be dragged back into the archaic ways of the monarchy, just as they seemed set on the enlightened path picked out by their mother?”
In his eulogy at Diana’s funeral, the Earl said he would “protect her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate”.
The Earl also warned in a BBC interview on Sunday that the relationship between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “echoes” the way the media treated his sister.
He described the press coverage of the Sussexes as having a “cancerous influence”, adding that it would be “beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example”.
The Earl told the BBC: “If you look at an article in a tabloid about Diana or the couple that you were mentioning, Harry and Meghan, you know, they can be really, really unpleasant.
“And I think it would be really beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example.
“I’m not here to speak for Harry and Meghan, but for anyone who’s being destroyed in this way daily, it must be such a cancerous influence in their life.”
The Earl alleged that during a phone call before his sister’s funeral, the then-Prince of Wales remarked: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
The allegation prompted a response from Buckingham Palace, which said “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason”.
Responding to the statement, the Earl said: “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King.
“It was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the King being able to deny what I’d said.”
Meanwhile, in contrast to his criticism of the King, the Earl wrote warmly about Elizabeth II, defending her delayed public reaction to Diana’s death, by insisting she was simply trying to protect Prince William and Harry.
He described her eventual televised address to the nation as “gracious” and an “affectionate salute” to his sister, who would have been proud to have been praised so generously and “had always looked up to her former mother in law”.
Diana had ‘loving’ childhood
The Earl writes that Diana’s childhood was, in his memory, happier than she portrayed it.
“Elsewhere you will read how unhappy Diana was as a child,” he writes. “That was not the sister I knew. She was the secure recipient of strong parental love, mainly in a warm and loving paternal home.
“Our parents might not have actually said they loved us, because that was the way of their class and of that time, but we knew they did.”
He writes about how for Diana’s seventh birthday, their father secretly arranged for a camel to arrive at their childhood home of Park House.
The camel, who was “decidedly nonchalant” and called Bert, took pairs of children on rides around the garden.
The young Diana and Charles Spencer would occasionally spend time with the royal children at their own house or Sandringham.
Spencer recalls one unnamed royal child breaking his pop gun, and a teenage Prince Andrew smirking in church at a mention of the “Virgin’s womb”.
Among other pleasant scenes are descriptions of Ruth Fermoy, their maternal grandmother, trying and failing to teach them Mahjong, the board game now played by the Duchess of Sussex.
Diana’s favourite television shows as a child were Follyfoot, about a home of rest for horses, and the soap Crossroads.
The Earl also recalls unhappier moments: a nanny who smacked their heads together violently, and an episode where Diana pushes him off his bicycle into gorse, and later kicks him “hard below the belt”.
The young Diana, he said, was popular at school “despite labouring under the horrible burden of undiagnosed learning difficulties that rendered academia a harsh landscape devoid of helpful signposts”.
As a teenager, she was “worried about her weight”, “not helped by the catering packs of Mars bars and chocolate biscuits that my mother stocked”.
She would go for runs in a raincoat and boots, he said, as well as swimming in the extremely cold sea to “as she would say, ‘burn off some fat’”.
The Earl also tackles rumours that their father was physically abusive to their mother, calling it an “appalling lie”.
Fayed ‘sexually assaulted Diana’
Mohamed Fayed sexually assaulted Diana early in her relationship with his son, the Earl also alleged.
He claimed that early in Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed, she had told him “in revulsion” that Mohamed “had come up to her, dropped a hand on to her buttocks and squeezed them while saying in a leery, suggestive tone, ‘And in Egypt, father-in-law gets first go’.”
He added: “She laughed when recounting the ghastliness of the episode, but she had been alerted to who Dodi’s father really was.”
The fresh claims come after hundreds of women have alleged that they were sexually abused by Fayed, who owned the Harrods department store between 1985 and 2010, after a BBC documentary aired detailed allegations in 2024. Fayed had died a year earlier.
More than 400 claims of sexual misconduct have been made against Fayed. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has been urged to champion the alleged victims’ campaign for justice, being spearheaded through the Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors campaign.
Diana started a relationship with Dodi after being invited on holiday with his retail billionaire father in July 1997. That month, the pair shared their first trip to his St Tropez estate, as well as a Mediterranean cruise aboard Fayed’s yacht, where Princes William and Harry were also guests.
On August 31 that year, the couple died in a fatal car crash in Paris.
Diana was being driven at high speed in a Mercedes S-280 after she left the Ritz Hotel, when the vehicle crashed into a pillar in a tunnel under the Alma bridge.
Diana, Dodi and the driver all died in the crash. Her bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones survived the incident.
Investigations carried out by both French and British authorities concluded that the driver of Diana’s car was responsible for the crash.
He was drunk and on anti-depressants when he lost control of the Mercedes as it sped through the tunnel that lies next to the River Seine, trying to shake off paparazzi.
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