Who was Charles’ valet? Diana’s brother revives shock claim about king’s sexual past

The latest excerpt of Charles Spencer’s book about his sister, the late Princess Diana, makes a shocking claim about her reasons for getting a divorce from the future king: She had discovered the existence of a love affair between Charles and his valet.

In this excerpt from “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister,” published by Daily Mail, the 9th Earl of Spencer almost breezes by this stunning allegation with a couple sentences, whereas he focuses much more on the alleged tense conversations he had with the then-Prince of Wales in the aftermath of his sister’s 1997 death.

But earlier in the excerpt, Spencer briefly describes an occasion in the 1990s when he joined his older sister for lunch at a posh London restaurant. That’s when she told him she would seek a divorce and her reasons for doing so, he wrote.

“I was silent for a moment. I had known things were bad, but not this bad,” Spencer wrote. When he expressed his concern that the British public would turn against her because they had bought “into the fairytale” of her marriage to the future king, she replied, “But my husband is in love with his valet.”

In the excerpt, Spencer does not name the valet, but journalist Tom Sykes explains who he is and refers back to a “toxic” rumor going around royal circles in the early 2000s. The unfounded rumor is that Charles had a sexual relationship with someone who worked for him. But according to a 2003 report in The Guardian, police investigated what was referred to as alleged misconduct in the royal household and found it unsubstantiated. Charles’ spokesperson at the time also denounced the allegation as “totally ludicrous and, indeed, risible.”

During Charles’ marriage to and divorce from Diana, his valet was Michael Fawcett. At one point, the future king regarded Fawcett as his closest confident, and had him famously squeeze his toothpaste for him after his arm was broken playing polo, as Sykes explained in a post on his The Royalist Substack.

Fawcett joined the royal household as a footman to Queen Elizabeth in 1981 and rose through the ranks to become Charles’ valet and then head of The Prince’s Foundation, a nonprofit that funds his favorite charitable causes. But in more recent years, Fawcett has become best known for his disgrace in the “cash-for-honors” scandal in 2021.

That year, the Mail on Sunday reported on a letter in which Fawcett offered to help a Saudi billionaire secure British citizenship and a knighthood if he donated large sums of money to causes of particular interest to Charles. The Metropolitan Police launched an investigation but no one was arrested or charged in the scandal.

Now, Fawcett finds himself at the center of a potential new scandal, though it remains to be seen how seriously it will be taken by the public.

Sykes said the affair rumor originated with George Smith, another valet in the prince’s household. In 1996, Smith alleged, while in the throes of a mental breakdown, that he had been raped by a senior aide to the prince and, separately, that he had witnessed an incident involving a member of the royal family and a servant, Sykes reported. Diana got involved in the case by supposedly recording Smith’s account and keeping the tape in a locked “mahogany box” in her apartment.

Diana’s butler Paul Burrell made this claim about the tape in the mahogany box during his 2002 criminal trial on charges of stealing more than 300 items from Diana’s estate, according to Sykes. Burrell claims he had seen the box in her apartment, but that its contents vanished after her death.

Whatever happened to the tape, Burrell’s trial fell apart and the charges were dropped when it became known that the butler had told the late Queen Elizabeth II that he was keeping some of Diana’s possessions.

According to Sykes and other reports, Smith’s allegations about a sexual relationship between Charles and Fawcett became part of a separate legal case involving Smith’s misconduct allegations.

Fawcett went to court in 2003 to stop a publication from naming him in a report about the alleged misconduct, according to Sykes. Fawcett called the rumors about him “false and damaging,” while Charles representatives issued a rare public condemnation.

His spokesperson at the time, Sir Michael Peat, said the person making the claims was a man suffering from mental health problems, The Guardian reported. Without detailing the nature of the allegations, Peat also said he knew the allegations were untrue because Charles “told me it is untrue and I believe him implicitly.” Peat also said: “Anyone who knows the Prince of Wales at all would appreciate that the allegation is totally ludicrous and, indeed, risible.”

“This allegation is becoming common currency, it is the subject of much speculation and innuendo, and I just want to make it entirely clear, even though I can’t refer to the specifics of the allegation, that it is totally untrue and without a shred of substance,” Peat also said, according to The Guardian. Peat noted that Prince William and Prince Harry also were made aware of the allegations.

Twenty-three years later, Buckingham Palace issued what’s seen as a broad repudiation of Spencer’s book. In a statement, it warned that grief can “cloud reason” and “color memory.” Sykes said he doubted that the palace will issue another statement about Spencer’s book, including a statement in response to Spencer bringing up the old valet rumor.

Broadcaster Piers Morgan was among those who were shocked that Spencer would make such a claim.

“My god … Hard to imagine more incendiary claims, or ones more deliberately aimed to harm King Charles’ reputation,” Morgan said on X.

Some of Morgan’s followers agreed with what Peat said in 2003 — that Spencer’s claims about the valet sound “ridiculous.” They assert that Spencer is trying to cash in by publishing a sensational book about his sister and the royal family. They wonder why Spencer waited 30 years to address the valet rumor when he’s had plenty of opportunities to do so in past interviews or in other books he’s written.

“I don’t believe a word of this book anymore, and I’m pretty sure the public is going to dismiss it as well,” another person said.

Meanwhile, the excerpt published Thursday offered new context to Spencer’s allegations about his tense interactions with Charles following Diana’s death. He wrote that Charles sounded “giddily elated” when he first called about the news that Diana had been involved in the fatal car crash in Paris.

The excerpt also goes into detail about Spencer’s view of the men’s dispute over having William and Harry, then 15 and 12, walk behind their mother’s coffin in her funeral procession. During that dispute, Spencer controversially alleged that Charles voiced “pent-up contempt” for his ex-wife, and “hissed,” “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough!”