If King Charles said this to Charles Spencer in September 1997, why did Spencer wait until now to tell anyone? Spencer has just come out of his third divorce, finalized in December after a bitter fight in which an arbitrator ordered him to indemnify his ex-wife Karen for legal costs her side put at more than £2 million, arising from a privacy claim brought against her by his new partner, the archaeologist Cat Jarman, whom he married in Arizona in May, his fourth wedding. In July it emerged Spencer had sold 310 acres at Dallington, on the edge of the Althorp estate, to Persimmon Homes for a reported £60 million. In 2010 he auctioned £21 million of Althorp’s heirlooms at Christie’s, including a Rubens, in the week of Diana’s birthday. When Diana asked in 1993 to live in the Garden House at Althorp, Spencer refused. He has since said it was “the right decision for her,” though “she probably couldn’t see it.” When she died, Spencer was in Cape Town, in the middle of a divorce from his first wife, Victoria Lockwood, in which her lawyers accused him of adultery with a dozen women. The Irish Times headline in November 1997 was “Star of Westminster Abbey falls shamefully to earth.” Many people watching a man with four marriages, two ruinous divorces and a £60 million land deal behind him sell the secrets of his sister’s misery to a tabloid, will conclude that he is doing what a great many others have done since 1997: monetizing Diana. credit Tom Sykes, The Royalist