Responding to the Palace’s statement pushing back on the story, Earl Spencer said: “I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said.
“I’ve only ever had two calls on the line with Prince Charles at any stage in my life.
“I was hyper-alert to what he was saying, and those are precisely the words he said. And I promise that to you now. Genuinely, that is what he said.
“I don’t hear him saying he didn’t say that.”
The earl said he told “close friends and family” about the “monstrous” comment.
When asked if people should believe him or the King, he said: “Well, I’m telling the truth… what else would have made me hang up on the King that day?”
On what Princes William and Harry might think of the comments being brought up nearly 30 years later, he added the words “will not be a surprise” to the brothers.
He also said his renowned funeral eulogy, in which he said his sister’s qualities would never be “extinguished from our minds”, was a “direct rebuttal” of the prince’s comments.