It was another precedent in a day of precedents. Never had the august precincts of Westminster Abbey heard such words as these: ““I don’t think [Diana] ever understood why . . . there appeared to be a permanent quest [in the news media] to bring her down. It is baffling. My own, and only, explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum.’’ Or these: ““She was . . . someone with a natural nobility who was classless, who proved . . . that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.’’ Both sentiments provoked ovations from the crowd outside the Abbey–echoed by the mourners inside. Take that, tabloids, said the applause. Wise up, Windsors.
Spencer had long regarded the press as a ““cancer in British society.’’ From the moment Diana accepted Prince Charles’s proposal, her brother became grist for the gossip columns, though he was only 17 at the time. During his years at Oxford, the tabloids turned every undergraduate flirtation into a torrid romance, every party into a debauch. They called him Champagne Charlie–a nickname he despised. Spencer’s marriage to the model Victoria Lockwood did not end the prying; within months, the tabloids found–and exposed–him in an extramarital affair. When Lockwood sought treatment for psychological problems, that, too, was mercilessly revealed. Their marriage disintegrating, the Spencers moved to South Africa, along with their four children, to escape the spotlight. It hasn’t worked: in a highly publicized lawsuit, a Durban executive has charged Spencer with alienation of his wife’s affections; Spencer, who denies the charge, has countersued for invasion of privacy, charging the executive with eavesdropping on his phone conversations.
The earl defends himself energetically. In 1993 he won damages from two British newspapers for alleging his involvement in the sale of black-market tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet. He lodged a complaint against Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World for a story on his wife’s difficulties and won a public apology. He sued the Daily Express for suggesting that he had helped his Oxford chum Darius Guppy launder money in an insurance fraud, and won $80,000 and a public apology. Last month he accepted undisclosed damages from a contrite Guardian for a story wrongly suggesting racial motivations in his attempt to restrain a black South African photographer. When Diana was killed, it seemed to him a particularly horrifying chapter of an already sordid history. ““I always believed the press would kill her in the end,’’ he said when the news first broke. ““But not even I could imagine they would take such a direct hand.''
Spencer’s rage extends also to the royal family, though Queen Elizabeth is his godmother, and one brother-in-law, Sir Robert Fellowes, is her private secretary. In aiming barbs at the Windsors sitting in the Abbey only yards away–the television cameras, by prearrangement, showed no royal reactions–he broke with protocol even more firmly than in his anti-press remarks. The language was milder; he alluded to the danger that Princes William and Harry would become ““simply immersed by duty and tradition,’’ and promised them that ““we, your blood family’’ would forestall such a fate. But Spencer’s subtext was plain: the House of Windsor must share the blame for cutting Diana loose, leaving her to fend for herself against a carnivorous press. Judging from the response at Westminster Abbey last week, the 9th earl found ready listeners.
