Piers Morgan Will Take Legal Action Against Earl Spencer Over Diana Book

Piers Morgan has claimed he intends to take legal action against Earl Charles Spencer over his new book about his late sister, Princess Diana.

Speaking on his YouTube channel Piers Morgan Uncensored on Monday, the former Good Morning Britain host revealed that he had been name-checked numerous times in Earl Spencer’s memoir, Swan Song.

He told his viewers that the book “contains fabricated inaccuracies which will strike to the heart of [Earl Spencer’s] credibility”.

“Spencer recounts how he personally called round the tabloid newspaper editors to uninvite them from Princess Diana’s funeral after they had all been invited,” Piers said. “I remember this well because I was one of them.

“He says in the book, ‘they realised they were unable to be rude to the brother of the much-mourned princess […] the only one who sounded surly, as opposed to merely confused or embarrassed, was Piers Morgan of The Mirror, who snarled with annoyance before he hung up’.

“Well, Spencer then explained why I may have been surly with him. [Spencer wrote:] ‘I assumed Morgan must be feeling particular guilt because, for years earlier, he and his Sunday Mirror counterpart had published photographs taken with hidden cameras by a gym owner. They were of Diana working out in a leotard. This was such an intolerable invasion of her privacy that Diana instructed lawyers to sue the Mirror Group and to block further use of these images’.

“‘Meanwhile’, he says, ‘a Dutch newspaper splashed one of the pictures on its front page, and an American tabloid bought a selection of them with which to titivate its readers. The gym owner eventually made £300,000 from his salacious, stolen images’.

“Well, Spencer continues, ’for a while it looked as though the Mirror Group would be brazen enough to allow the case to go to court, calculating that whatever their newspapers lost financially at trial would be more than recouped through global publicity.

“Despite significant public outrage at the pictures, and loss of revenue when some major companies withdrew their advertising from the Mirror Group, Morgan’s triumphant spokesman boasted that sales of his paper and of the Sunday Mirror had each risen by more than a hundred thousand copies since splashing the intrusive shots.

“But after that, public curiosity turned into general revulsion, and both papers’ circulation dropped significantly. This commercial setback persuaded the Mirror Group to fold. It agreed to pay Diana’s legal costs, of around £1 million, and it was obliged to further acknowledge its guilt by making donations of £200,000 to her chosen charities.”

Piers continued: “It then says, ’in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death, Morgan was one of four tabloid editors named, shamed and photographed in an article looking at who might be held responsible for the paparazzi’s role […] it must have been an extraordinary sensation for this powerful quartet [who] were used to dishing out such treatment, without ever receiving it in return.”

“Well, this is all pretty extraordinary stuff, isn’t it?” he remarked. “And very damning, particularly about me.

“I come across in the most despicable manner imaginable. And there’s just one problem – it’s all bullshit, and very, very easy bullshit for me to prove it.”

He pointed out: “The photographs that he says that I published were published by The Sunday Mirror on 7 November 1993. I joined the Daily Mirror in October 1995. In fact, at the time of the gym pictures, I was doing a showbiz column for The Mirror’s arch rival, The Sun. About as far removed from responsibility for The Mirror’s scoop as I could possibly have been.”

“My question, though, is if Earl Spencer can be so incredibly defamatorily wrong about such basic facts involving me, why should we believe anything else that he puts in this book?” Piers then stated.

He added: “The book is out tomorrow, I expect that there’ll be many more examples of brazen falsity after what I’ve uncovered purely [in an] entry about myself.

“In the meantime, Earl Spencer, you’ll be hearing, and your publishers [will be hearing], from my lawyers, because I would like the complete lie that you’ve published about me and those photographed to be removed from your book, and I would like a donation to be made to the King’s Trust for the damage that you’ve caused with your lie. After all, to quote somebody, you can’t dish it out without getting it in return, right?”

HuffPost UK has contacted reps for Earl Charles Spencer and the publisher Penguin Michael Joseph for comment.

Ahead of Swan Song’s publication, excerpts were serialised in the Daily Mail, with one in particular – in which Earl Spencer alleged that King Charles told him in the wake of Diana’s death that “we’ll forget her soon enough” – prompting a rare response from the Palace.

“While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss,” a spokesperson said.

“I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said,” Earl Spencer subsequently told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

“Well, is he furious? Is he furious, or is he embarrassed?” he responded, adding: “They’ve sort of smudged that one, haven’t they? They’ve said that recollections may vary.”

Doubling down in a subsequent interview with ABC’s Maggie Rulli, Earl Spencer quipped that it’s “not every day you’re gaslit by a king”.

“I was really upset with that because I thought it was very, not only condescending, but not straight,” he noted.