Truth and Lies: Diana's Brother Chose Too Late

There is a particular kind of love that only reveals itself in absence. Not the absence of death — though that too — but the absence of voice. The silencing kind. The kind where someone who loves you watches you be misread, misrepresented, mishandled by an institution and a marriage and a global audience, and says very little, because the cost of saying something is too high, and the architecture of family loyalty is built from silence.

Charles Spencer is writing a book about his sister. Almost thirty years after Diana died in that Paris tunnel, her brother says he wants to speak on her behalf, in an openly positive way, to tell the truth as he understands it. I read that and I felt something complicated move through me — the way I feel when a client arrives at my clinic having finally decided to say the thing they have been rehearsing for years. The arrival is real. The intention is real. But I always find myself wondering: what took so long, and who did the delay cost?

I am not being cruel. Grief is not linear, and family loyalty — especially inside structures as pressurised as aristocratic ones — is its own particular cage. Psychological research on grief and family systems shows consistently that the people closest to someone in life are often the last to speak publicly, not because they don't feel, but because proximity makes everything harder to organise into language. You know too much. You know the contradictions. You know her the way the cameras never did, and turning that into a book feels like a betrayal of the private version even as you try to honour it.

And yet. Thirty years.

In my clinical work I have sat with people who spent decades protecting a version of someone they loved — a parent, a partner, a sibling — from public misunderstanding, only to find that the protection had cost them something essential. The unexpressed truth does not disappear. It metabolises. It becomes a kind of internal pressure, a grief that cannot complete itself because the story was never finished out loud. Attachment theory calls this ambiguous loss — the mourning that cannot close because something essential remains unresolved. Diana's story, the real one, the one her brother carries — has never been told by someone who was actually in the room. And so it remains, for him, unfinished.

What interests me most is not the book. It is the timing of it. Spencer says he wants to speak positively, to defend rather than expose. That instinct — to protect even posthumously — is one I recognise. It is the same instinct that keeps people in the wrong relationships too long, the belief that loyalty means absorbing rather than naming. That love means softening the truth rather than offering it cleanly.

The most loving thing you can do for someone — alive or dead — is tell the true story. Not the comfortable version. Not the version that makes everyone look dignified. The one that is actually true.

I wonder if Spencer knows yet which version he is writing.

Diana herself understood something that took most people around her decades to learn: that being loved for a performance is its own form of abandonment. She said it herself, in that 1995 Panorama interview, in ways that made the establishment visibly uncomfortable. She named her experience with a precision that felt almost clinical — the loneliness inside the spectacle, the hunger for something real inside a life built entirely from image. That kind of self-awareness is rare. It is also, in my experience, what emerges in people who have spent years feeling unseen by the people who were supposed to see them most clearly.

A book written almost thirty years later, by a brother who loved her and was largely absent from her public defence when she was alive — I do not know what it will contain. I know what I hope it contains: not the positive version, not the diplomatic version, but the human one. The one with contradictions and failures and love that didn't know how to show itself in time.

Because here is the thing about truth and love, and the thing no one tells you about grief: speaking well of the dead is easy. The harder, more honest act is to speak truly — even when truly is complicated, even when it costs you something, even when it comes thirty years after the moment it was most needed.

The sentence that begins the next chapter is almost never the comfortable one.