King Charles ‘made heartless remark’ about future with Camilla just hours after Diana gave birth to Prince Harry, according to bombshell new book from the princess’s friend
King Charles III allegedly left Princess Diana in tears in her hospital bed just hours after she gave birth to Prince Harry, the Mirror can reveal today.
The then Prince of Wales was apparently visiting his newborn son for the first time, when he turned to Diana and said the words which she later claimed were the death knell for their marriage. She later relayed the story to her one-time ‘rock’ and butler Paul Burrell, who has gone public with it today, as the world speculates about the future for Prince Harry and King Charles’s relationship following their 55-minute reunion meeting.
“[Diana told me] Charles came into the hospital, looked in the cot and said ‘Oh, red hair’,” recalls Paul, in his new book The Royal Insider, out now. “Diana replied, ‘But, Charles, you know that’s the Spencer gene. We’ve all got red hair’.” Paul adds: “Then [according to Diana] came the damning blow. He said, ‘Well at least I’ve got my heir and spare now and…. I can return to Camilla’.”
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Paul remembers Diana describing her shock. While she wasn’t surprised about her husband’s affections for the then-married Camilla Parker-Bowles, she was apparently stunned that her husband would say such a thing as she lay in the bed having just given birth.
Of course, as we’ve learned from the late Queen Elizabeth II, recollections do vary. There are only two people who really know what who said what inside that room in the private Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, that night. And one of them is long gone.
The Mirror has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment. Yet, however King Charles’ recalls events, Paul saw firsthand how scarred Diana was by her memories of that day. It was years after Harry’s birth in 1984 that the Princess confided in Paul about it during one of their many conversations about her marriage woes. Yet, he says it was still visibly raw and emotional for her to recall.
“Diana told me: ‘I cried myself to sleep that night knowing my marriage was over’,” says the butler-turned-author. “She said: ‘Four years, Paul, I gave him four good years and he was gone. For the rest of the time I had to pretend and put on a facade to the world’.”
Diana was just 23 when she gave birth to Harry. She had married four years earlier and had Prince William, two years after that. Charles, meanwhile, was 36 when Harry was born – and, according to Paul, made it clear the marriage was all but over once he had fulfilled his procreational responsibilities.
Paul, 67, today reveals he reluctantly shared Diana’s story with with Princes William and Harry, after they allegedly asked for a secret meeting in Kensington Palace in 2017. Paul claimed the boys wanted to hear his stories about their mother on what was the 20th anniversary of her fatal car crash in Paris. But then, he says, they asked him why he thought things had gone wrong between their parents. From what Diana had allegedly told him, it was that moment in the hospital which had changed everything.
“Harry stared straight at me poker faced,” Paul writes in his book. “He couldn’t believe what I was telling him. I said to him ‘Harry it’s the truth. I wouldn’t tell you that unless it was exactly what your mother told me’. This happened just before Harry became engaged to Meghan. I think that powered him, and put fuel in his tanks to go forward with everything he felt. “[And it’s] probably why he called his book Spare.”
Charles and Diana lived largely separate lives from 1986 as the now King continued his romance with his now queen, Camilla – and Diana had her own acquaintances. He and Diana officially separated in 1992 – which later became known as the late Queen’s Annus Horribilis, following marriage problems for three of her four children and the fire at Windsor Castle. The Mirror has contacted the Buckingham Palace for comment.
The Royal Insider: My Life with the Queen, the King and Princess Diana by Paul Burrell is out today, Thursday September 11 (Sphere).