Let me tell you what happened in Leicester Square tonight, because it was better than the film. The Princess of Wales has not walked a red carpet since May 2022. In between came the year the family does not discuss: the surgery, the diagnosis, the video from the garden bench, the chemotherapy, the months when the country quietly counted the days. Tonight she walked one again. She wore purple. Deep plum, Jenny Packham, cut lower than she has ever dared, the colour of queens. Her hair was half up, so that you could see the earrings, and the earrings were Diana's pearls. At her throat, on a rope of pearls to the waist, hung an amethyst heart the size of a walnut. Queen Alexandra gave it to the Queen Mother in 1923, the year she married into the family. It has been worn through a war, an abdication and a century of clever men underestimating the women who wore it. This morning a book went on sale calling that Queen petty and the King a lottery winner on the morning Diana died. The family's reply to a week of it has been one sentence. Tonight the future Queen answered without one: she wore the Queen Mother's heart and Diana's pearls at the same time, and let the flashbulbs do the talking. And William. Black tie, half a step behind her on the carpet, in her light rather than his own, with the look of a man who walked behind a coffin at fifteen and has spent every year since making sure she would never be alone on a carpet, or in a hospital, or anywhere. She looked magnificent. Not because of the dress, though it was perfect, and not because of the necklace, though it was a hundred years of the family on a single strand. She looked magnificent because she looked well, and happy, and unafraid. The book will be in the bargain bins by Christmas. The amethyst goes back to the vault, until another woman wears it on another night for reasons nobody will need to explain. That is the difference between a family and a grievance. One of them lasts.

Let's be clear about who won this week, because it is not close. Earl Spencer had everything. Five days of front pages. CBS on Sunday morning. Thirty minutes on BBC One with Laura Kuenssberg. A book out today. He set out to prove that on the morning Diana died, the King was 'giddily elated', like a lottery winner. He ended the week admitting, on camera, that he 'cannot be sure'. An assumption, from a tone, as a possibility. He told the country he knows 'lots of things' about the King that he chose not to print, and when that was called a threat, he said it was 'just the reality'. Every headline this morning is about the threat. In 2017 he said his Abbey eulogy was not aimed at anyone; last night he called it a 'direct rebuttal' of the King. His own words have done more damage to his case than the Palace ever could. The King's contribution to all of it was a single sentence about grief and memory. Then he went back to work, in cancer treatment, at seventy-seven. His elder son's contribution was a shinty clubhouse on the Isle of Bute and not one word. That is the scoreline. A week of talking against one sentence of silence, and the silence won. It always was going to, because the country has watched this family for twenty-nine years and knows exactly who told two boys their mother was dead, who brought her home, who walked, and who raised them. The King didn't need to answer. Britain answered for him.