“Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.” The former Prince Charles reportedly said this to Charles Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, after she died in a tragic car crash in 1997. Spencer is serializing his new book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, in the Daily Mail starting today.

• Last night, Buckingham Palace responded with an unusually blunt statement against Spencer, claiming “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory.”
• The Mail, as the nation’s second-most widely circulated national paper, will amplify Spencer’s message with one of the United Kingdom’s loudest gossip megaphones.

The accusations come at an already sensitive time for the royal family. On August 26, Prince Harry and Meghan, duchess of Sussex, moved back to the UK after a six-year stay in Meghan’s native California.

• The couple left Britain in 2020 and quit their royal duties, blaming the royal family for failing to accommodate them.
• The King has confirmed the couple will not resume royal duties. They will live in a private dwelling.

The royal family was once the binding force that united the UK and the British Commonwealth behind a common purpose. It was the one legacy of the British Empire that was largely above disrepute. These latest events add to a compounding, multifaceted scandal of the royal family’s character, seen perhaps most clearly in the arrest of Prince Andrew.

Many supporters of the monarchy are upset by the royal family’s fall. But as Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes in Chapter 4 of his free book The New Throne of David, this family’s decline corresponds to a transition and elevation of its heritage that should inspire people.