Princess Diana Once Revealed Her Parents Never Told Her They Loved Her: "There Was No..."
On July 1, 1961, Lady Diana Frances Spencer was born at Park House, close to Sandringham, Norfolk. She was the youngest child of Frances Shand Kydd and Earl Spencer, the Viscount, and Viscountess Althorp at the time. Unfortunately, her parents divorced in 1969 when she was merely, six years old and Diana felt empty because she believed her parents had never loved her. "My parents, they never said they loved me. No, no, no idea. There were no hugs or anything like that," she revealed to her tutor Peter Settelen, decades later during voice coaching sessions at Kensington Palace from September 1992 to December 1993.
According to the Daily Mail, the private conversation was aired on Channel 4 in 2017 despite heavy criticism. Princess Diana also disclosed during the open conversation that she was offended when she learned about her father's remarriage from the newspaper. "Sarah rang me up and said, 'Have you seen the newspapers?'" When she confronted her father, she said: "We were so angry, but Sarah said, 'Right, Dutch”' - my nickname was Dutch - “You go in and sort him out”. The controversial tapes revealed that Diana slapped Earl Spencer for his action after a heated argument. "I said 'That's from all of us for hurting us' and walked out and slammed the door," the princess shared.
On the twentieth anniversary of her passing, Channel 4 aired the video as part of the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words. It was met with much uproar from Diana's close friends and the royal family. As per The Independent, one of her friends Rosa Monckton called out the channel and stated that it was “a betrayal of her privacy and of the family's privacy”. Dickie Arbiter, Queen Elizabeth II's former spokesman, labeled the footage 'shameful'. However, Princess Diana's former secretary, Patrick Jephson, defended the tapes and explained that they were “legitimate additions to the historical record” showing a “princess finding her voice”.
The List reported that in Andrew Morton's book Diana: Her True Story the late princess described the pain of watching her mother leave after the divorce. She remembered hearing her mother drive off, the tires crunching on the gravel, and how it made her "very unhappy, very unstable, the whole thing." Reportedly, Diana's mother would call and verbally harass her for separating from Prince Charles. "She would ring up and be verbally abusive to the princess," Darren McGrady, the former royal chef revealed. The princess however reconciled with her father during his later years.
When he suffered a stroke she was by his side to comfort him, "He was one person before and he was certainly a different person after. He's remained estranged but adoring since. If he comes and sees me he comes and sees me, if he doesn't he doesn't. It's not my problem anymore. It's his," Diana said. Her mother, Frances, died in 2004 following a protracted fight with Parkinson's disease and brain cancer, and Earl Spencer died in 1992 from cardiac arrest.
