Suing Over the Earl Spencer Memoir Only Sells More Books

Piers Morgan spent Monday threatening to sue Princess Diana's brother, and by Tuesday morning he had already won. Earl Spencer apologised. The disputed passage in the new memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister was acknowledged as an error within 24 hours, which is about as clean a victory as public disputes ever produce. Then Morgan decided it was not enough, and the fight over the Earl Spencer memoir entered its second act. He is pressing ahead with legal action anyway, and that is where the whole affair turns silly: every fresh headline about the lawsuit is free advertising for the book he wants passages removed from.

The facts first. Earl Spencer's memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, was published on Tuesday, September 22, as reported by USA Today, amid a public dispute between Spencer and King Charles III over separate claims in the book about Diana's death. On Monday's edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored, the broadcaster accused the memoir of containing what he called "fabricated inaccuracies" about him. He said his lawyers would contact Spencer and the book's publisher, Penguin, demanded the disputed passage be removed, and requested a donation to the King's Trust, with no amount disclosed, according to Entertainment Daily.

The passage in question concerns a phone call Spencer says he made to tabloid editors before Diana's funeral to withdraw their invitations. In the book, Spencer writes: "The only one who sounded surly, as opposed to merely confused or embarrassed, was Piers Morgan of the Mirror, who snarled with annoyance before he hung up." Spencer then connects that reaction to hidden-camera gym photographs of Diana, published by the Sunday Mirror on November 7, 1993, which he describes as "such an intolerable invasion of her privacy that Diana instructed lawyers to sue the Mirror Group and to block further use of the images." His stated assumption was that Morgan felt particular guilt because, in Spencer's words, "four years earlier, he and his Sunday Mirror counterpart had published" the photographs.

Morgan's rebuttal is a matter of dates, and dates are stubborn things. He told viewers: "I joined The Daily Mirror in October 1995." At the time the photographs were published, he said, he was writing a showbusiness column for the rival newspaper The Sun. He went on to edit the Daily Mirror from 1995 until 2004, which makes the allegation, in his telling, factually impossible. He called the book's description a "complete lie" and told the earl on air: "Earl Spencer, you'll be hearing, and your publishers, from my lawyers."

The apology already happened

Here is the part that makes the continued legal threat so strange: Spencer conceded. On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the earl issued a statement saying Spencer's account of the phone conversation itself was accurate, but that his assumption about the photographs was wrong. "As an historian, accuracy is important to Earl Spencer," the statement read. "He therefore wishes to clarify that his assumption was incorrect. Earl Spencer apologises to Mr Morgan for this error." That is a full, on-the-record correction of the exact error Morgan identified, delivered within a day.

The dispute over the Earl Spencer memoir then produced its strangest beat. Morgan's response, posted on X, was to pocket the apology and escalate anyway: "Earl Spencer has apologised to me for his defamatory lies published in his new book, Swan Song, published today. But I am pursuing legal action against him and his publisher Penguin to have the lies removed, and damages paid to the King's Trust." Note the phrasing. The book is "published today." The apology is already in hand. The passage's removal could be handled between publishers and lawyers without another camera pointed at anyone. What the continued campaign guarantees is not silence but noise, and noise is exactly what a newly published memoir needs.

Nobody remembers the correction. Everybody remembers the fight.

This is the oldest trap in media law, and Morgan, of all people, should see it coming. The correction will be a footnote. The fight is the story. A quiet arrangement with the publisher would have excised the offending lines and ended the matter. A threatened lawsuit, complete with a demand for charitable damages, keeps Swan Song in the headlines for another news cycle, then another. Each round reminds millions of readers that the book exists, that it is on shelves right now, and that it contains explosive claims about the royal family, including Spencer's allegation that Charles said Diana would soon be forgotten, a claim Buckingham Palace answered with its carefully worded statement that "the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss."

To be fair to Morgan, his underlying complaint has real substance. Getting the dates wrong on a defamation-adjacent claim in a book published by Penguin is a genuine editorial failure, and "I wasn't even at the paper" is about as solid a defense as exists. But winning the argument and winning the outcome are different things. The apology gave him both, and he is now trading the second for television segments. In a week already crowded with entertainment headlines and viral media pile-ons, Morgan has ensured that the Earl Spencer story stays at the top of the pile. The memoir's first-week sales figures will tell the rest. Read Entertainment Daily's full report on the dispute and USA Today's coverage of the memoir's release for the complete picture.