I've always thought that Charles Spencer was not only a jerk of the highest order (something, I gather, that some of his own children would concur with), but also an arrogant and malicious archetype of the Spencer family, which has been notorious within the British aristocracy as being one of the two most odious families into which anyone could marry. Everyone should compare Charles Spencer's latest comments with those he made to Larry King when he was promoting his earlier moneyspinning book Althorp: The Story of an English County House in 1999 (published by the American publishers of my two Diana biographies: St Martin's Press). Not only do his past comments and sentiments cancel out his present ones, but his present pretence that Diana's very clever and effective ploy to twist the disordered (some people say suggested) ravings of the mentally ill George Smith into a believable accusation of homosexuality against her husband, so that she could up the ante and increase her divorce settlement from the original offer of £3m to the £17m she walked away, was something believable when everyone, Diana included, knew it was nothing but a bald blackmail attempt. By pretending that Diana's untrue and unfounded accusation was something believable when even she didn't pretend afterwards that it was, Charles Spencer shows to what depths he will sink as he weaponises untrue and unfair accusations against a man who is well known (listen to the Charles/Camilla tapes) to have wanted to be a tampax reposing in his loved one's vagina. Not exactly the sentiments of a homosexual. Not only is Charles Spencer happy to purvey untrue accusations which he has to know were untrue, but he also puffs himself and his family up with further untrue claims, such as the preposterous one that Queen Elizabeth II and his father might have ended up married to one another, had Lord Mountbatten not destroyed Johnny Althorp's chances to ensure that his nephew Prince Philip of Greece would become the consort. Utter rubbish. Queen Elizabeth II never had any such interest in Johnny. The only two young men she had eyes for were Prince Philip and Porchy Porchester, who later became Lord Carnarvon and is sometimes mistakenly thought to have been her second son Andrew's father. Despite the encouragement of her mother, Queen consort Elizabeth, her father King George VI crushed that possibility with the robust naval comment, "I'll be buggered if my daughter is going to marry any fucking butler's son" - the then Lord Porchester having been rumoured to be an Aaron's baby. As for Charles Spencer's ridiculous assertion that Lord Mountbatten had sufficient influence to break up the budding (in Charles Spencer's mind alone) romance between his father (whom everyone in royal circles, the late Queen included, thought a dolt, a sentiment shared by his own father), Dickie Mountbatten was loathed by Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) and regarded as one half of a couple to be kept at arms' length by King George VI. This was partly because of Lord Louis' pushiness but also because of his and his wife Edwina's political and even more so sexual inclinations, which had already resulted in one libel action when her roaring affair with the black singer Paul Robeson threatened to become public. And then there was her affair with Hutch, and an array of other men before she settled down with Bunny Phillips and after him, the Indian Prime Minister Nehru. It is interesting to observe that Charles Spencer does not allow facts to stand between himself and a good story which he presumably thinks will result in increased book sales, any more than he allows the inconsistencies and contradictions betweeen his past and present comments to get in the way of bald and plainly unsustainable assertions.