Earl Spencer has said he finds it hard when strangers tell him where they were when his sister Princess Diana died.
Charles Spencer discussed his grief on author Gyles Brandreth’s podcast, Rosebud, as he shared how “fundamentally unhappy” he becomes on the anniversary of her death every year.
He said: “I tell you what I do find quite difficult… it probably sounds ungracious but occasionally total strangers come up and feel they must tell me where they were when they heard she died.
“I’m sure that’s helpful to them, it’s not entirely helpful to everyone else.”
The British peer gave an example of an American woman who had expressed that she grew up with Diana in South Dakota.
He said she “clutched me to her ample bosom and said that I may have thought I grew up with Diana, but actually she did in South Dakota”.
He added: “You just have to smile, it doesn’t matter.”
The earl said he and his seven children cut flowers and visited Diana’s grave to mark the day of her passing at the family’s Althorp estate. She was buried on the grounds of the Northamptonshire estate she grew up in.
“I try and be really busy on August 31 because it’s just terribly sad, really,” he told Mr Brandreth.
He reflected on Diana’s “extraordinary” legacy, likening it to picking parts from a horoscope that suit you.
“It’s different things to different people, particularly to women of a similar age. They really invested their lives in hers,” he said. “Maybe they had an unhappy marriage, maybe they battled an eating disorder. There’s plenty of Diana to look into and take your bit out of – almost like a horoscope, you can make it make sense for you.”
Lord Fellowes, a friend of the earl who created Downton Abbey, had told him that Diana’s appeal was in part down to “something unhappy” about her.
He told Mr Brandreth: “Of course, she married into the Royal family, she was beautiful and very charismatic, but he also said ‘like the great film stars, there was something unhappy in there that really triggered an emotional response’.”
Earl Spencer spoke out earlier this year after a building at the former home of the Princess was targeted in a suspected arson attack in May.
Firefighters rushed overnight to the scene of a blaze at one of the farmhouses on Althorp Estate, which houses the Grade I-listed stately home in which the late Princess of Wales grew up.
Sharing photographs of a large fire on social media, the Earl said he was “stunned” to learn that the farmhouse “was apparently burnt down by vandals last night”.
Noting that the building was unoccupied at the time, the late princess’s younger brother said: “So very sad that anyone would think this a fun thing to do.”
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