Princess Diana plotted to move to South Africa with her lover Dr. Hasnat Khan in a bid to flee her
“petulant” ex-husband, King Charles, her brother Charles Spencer claims in a bombshell new book.
The tragic royal went as far as to speak to famed medical pioneer Dr. Christian Barnard as she hoped he could snag Khan, a British-Pakistani cardiothoracic surgeon, a post at his Cape Town hospital.
As Spencer, her youngest sibling, notes in his new memoir, “Swan Song: My Sister, Diana,” out today, his sister was “prone to naive yet impossible dreams about as to how her life could be.”
He details the chaos Diana lived in — a state of frenzy also whipped up by the stories planted about her by palace courtiers, the “men in grey suits,” as she dubbed them.
Life in England, indeed, had become “intolerable” by the time she flew to visit her brother at his home in Cape Town in March 1997, he asserts.
“She had come to see for herself if this sublimely beautiful tip of Africa … could provide a haven for her and her heart surgeon lover,” he writes.
“Might they, she dared hope, move there together, and carve out a life?”
Diana, whom Spencer admits was “mercurial,” dated Khan in secret for two years before they split in the summer of 1997, weeks before her death at age 36 in a car crash in Paris. She famously called him “my dishy doctor.”
The now-62-year-old Earl Spencer admits Diana had previously “scoured” Country Magazine “looking for a rural getaway” where she could live in “perfect peace” with an “earlier man in her life.”
Now, he said, “in the latest of these whimsical scenarios, she hoped her new love could work at Groote Schuur Hospital, a few miles away from my Cape Town home. This was where Christian Barnard had performed the first successful human heart transplant thirty years earlier.
“Diana dreamed that she and her man could live happily — normally — nearby. The other side of the world seemed to offer the possibility of asylum.”
Dr. Barnard, in turn, promised that he was “busy investigating possible medical opportunities for her man. He was confidant something suitable would turn up.”
With her sons, Princes William and Harry, boarding at Eton College in the UK, the world was opening up for Diana, Spencer said.
Although he spent the trip trying to shield his sister from the press, she asked to meet President Nelson Mandela, which he facilitated.
As for Khan, Spencer writes, “Diana had spent her waking hours at my home with her mobile in her hand, constantly waiting for the man in her life to call. And, to her obvious distress, he rarely had.”
The couple first met in 1995, two months before her infamous Panorama interview, when the princess was visiting Joe Toffolo, the husband of her friend Oonagh, who was having triple bypass surgery at the Royal Brompton hospital, supervised by Khan.
After the visit, Diana returned to the hospital almost every day for three weeks to pursue Khan and a romance eventually began.
Although it was Diana’s most serious relationship since her separation from the then Prince Charles in 1992, the relationship was kept away from prying eyes.
On one occasion Diana wore a black wig to slip into Ronnie Scott’s, the Soho jazz club, while another time, Khan hid in the trunk of a car to enter Kensington Palace and visit the princess, with the help of Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell.
Burrell was even asked by Diana to find a priest who would marry her to Khan, who is a Muslim, though Khan later said the thought of this was a “ridiculous idea.”
She also visited his parents’ home in Pakistan and introduced him to William and Harry.
In an inquest into Diana’s death in 2008, Khan admitted that he feared married life with the world’s most famous woman “would have been hell for me … because of who she was.” He said although they had once considered moving to Pakistan, Diana finally rejected the idea.
“I knew I would not be able to live a normal life.” he added.
It was Diana who finally called off the relationship after she returned home from a vacation with Harrods owner Mohammed Al-Fayed and his family in July 2997, he said.
Khan confessed he was “mad as hell” when she started dating Al-Fayed’s son Dodi, who also died in the Paris crash, alongside driver Henri Paul.
During Diana’s visit to Cape Town, Spencer says it was clear her eating disorder was “rampant” and notes how “deeply unhappy she was.” He had not been able to help her, he says, which remains “heart breaking”.
But Spencer’s account of his sister’s doomed search for happiness is only one strand of a memoir that paints an often bruising portrait of life inside the royal family.
Spencer has already drawn the fury of King Charles for claiming his ex-brother in law sounded “giddily elated” and like a “lottery winner” when he spoke to him following Diana’s death, likely due to the fact he could now be with Camilla Parker-Bowles.
The four-times married, father-of-seven makes no secret of his distaste for Charles, with whom he says he clashed about forcing William and Harry, then 15 and 12, to walk behind their mother’s coffin in the funeral procession.
Charles “hissed” down the phone, “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”, he claims.
This prompted Buckingham Palace to issue an extraordinary statement suggesting Diana’s brother had misremembered events, saying “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise”.
However, in an interview with the BBC Sunday, Spencer stood firm in his recollection, telling Laura Kuenssberg,“I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said.”
Sensationally, he also alleges in the book that Charles had wanted his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who died aged 96 in September 2022, to step down.
Detailing a rift between Charles and the Queen’s offices over Diana’s funeral plans. Spencer says, “Some who knew him well claimed that Prince Charles ,by this stage, wanted his mother to abdicate in his favor.
“Others felt that he just wanted more official responsibilities, while remaining respectful of his mother’s right to see out her reign as she wished.”
He also recounts a story he heard where the Queen talked about her oldest son’s character, saying, “Don’t worry — he always resents things — he even resented it when I taught him the alphabet.”
Spencer also alleges that the monarch got his staff to brief the press against him alongside his own — unnamed — relatives, leading him to “repeatedly” contemplate suicide.
A PR friend told him “the prince’s right hand men had come to them frequently, telling them to leak lies about me (and also various of the prince’s relatives) to newspapers.”
Throughout the book, Spencer admits that Diana could cut off loved ones for months on end —including both him and her own mother, Frances Shand-Kydd. During one fallout with her mom, she retaliated by befriending her stepmother Raine, whom the siblings nicknamed “Acid Raine”.
Nearly 30 years on from his sister’s death, Spencer said he was writing the book to honor her memory, describing her as “a one off, dynamic character, full of love, charisma and self doubt, who gave life a hell of a go, and left the world a far better place, despite exiting the stage while still so young.
“She achieved all this despite never feeling the depth of love she always crave,” he writes. “For that she deserves respect and applause.”
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