Richard Kay
Role at the time: Daily Mail senior editor-at-large and former royal reporter who was a confidant of Diana, Princess of Wales, writing in the Daily Mail
Statement summary
In a Daily Mail column, senior editor-at-large Richard Kay wrote that he spoke with Charles Spencer several times in the week between Diana’s death and her funeral, and that Spencer said everyone he had dealt with over the funeral had been helpful except Prince Charles, with whom he had had a “furious row” “about the boys.” Spencer added of Charles, “He has been utterly pathetic.” Kay says this chimes with Spencer’s memoir. He does not claim to have witnessed the telephone call Spencer describes.
“He and I spoke several times during that frightful week between Diana’s death and her funeral. … Then, pointedly and without further explanation, he said everyone he had been dealing with over the funeral – courtiers, officials, Downing Street – had been helpful, with one exception. Who, I asked? ‘Prince Charles,’ came the reply. He said they’d had a ‘furious row’. It was ‘about the boys’, but he was reluctant to go further. Cuttingly he added: ‘He has been utterly pathetic.’”
Why we used this label
On whether Spencer’s account of Charles’s words and demeanour after Diana’s death is accurate, Kay supports the accuracy of Spencer’s account in outline: what Spencer told him at the time about a hostile exchange with Charles is consistent with the memoir’s picture. His evidence is contemporaneous provenance, not first-hand knowledge of the call in which Spencer says Charles said “we’ll forget her soon enough,” and he does not claim otherwise. It is labelled condemns for consistency with how this case treats other corroborating accounts, and the rationale records that the evidence concerns a row over the funeral rather than the quoted remark.