As soon as news broke that copies of Charles Spencer’s memoir about the late Princess of Wales, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, had been stolen from a truck in the Netherlands, it was inevitable that the contents of the revelatory and potentially scandalous book would soon make it into the public domain. And so it has proved, albeit through the time-honoured means of a serial deal in the Daily Mail. Yet although the first official excerpt will only be published later today, there is already a war of words brewing between Buckingham Palace and Spencer over a particularly shocking story from Swan Song.

Anyone who remembers Spencer’s incandescent and emotive eulogy to his sister, in which he attacked the Royal Family and the media, will know that he has an axe to grind when it comes to his former siblings-in-law. If reports of the book’s contents are correct, he has offered intimate detail about one of the most contentious scenes that took place after Diana’s death in August 1997. The young princes William and Harry were instructed, apparently by Prince Philip, to walk behind their mother’s funeral cortege: an action that could either be viewed as heartless thoughtlessness or a sincere, if misguided, attempt to involve the boys in the funeral in a meaningful way.

In either case, Spencer now writes that he attempted to veto such an action for his late sister’s sake, even going........

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