Piers Morgan Threatens To Sue Earl Spencer Over Claims He Got 'Surly' After Diana Funeral Snub

Piers Morgan has threatened to sue Earl Spencer over a claim in the peer's new memoir that links the broadcaster to secretly taken photographs of Princess Diana exercising at a gym in 1993.

Spencer's book, published this week, also recounts a 1997 telephone call in which he claims Morgan, then editor of the Daily Mirror, sounded 'surly' and 'snarled with annoyance' after being told he was no longer welcome at Diana's funeral. Spencer writes that he personally rang tabloid editors to ask them not to attend the service at Westminster Abbey, reflecting the family's anger over press intrusion into Diana's life. Most, he says, were 'slightly confused' but accepted the request; Morgan, he claims, was the exception.

Legal Threat Centres on 1993 Diana Gym Photos

Morgan has publicly disputed Spencer's account and said he intends to take legal action, but his central objection concerns a separate claim in the book: that he was connected to the publication of photographs secretly taken of Diana exercising at a gym in 1993.

Morgan says the timeline makes this impossible. He has said the photographs were published in November 1993, while he did not join the Daily Mirror until October 1995. At the time, he has said, he was working as a showbusiness columnist at The Sun.

Responding on social media, Morgan accused Spencer of having a 'brass neck' and said the earl had previously denounced what Morgan described as the 'malign cancerous' treatment of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex by the press.

Morgan has stressed that he did not join the Daily Mirror until October 1995, almost two years after the photographs were published. At the time, he was working as a showbusiness columnist at The Sun.

Spencer, for his part, presents the gym photo episode within a broader narrative of Diana's fraught relationship with the tabloid press. In Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, he refers to years of coverage that he believes caused his sister distress, and sets his recollections of conversations with editors against that backdrop of what he sees as persistent intrusion and pressure.

Palace Pushes Back on Spencer's Charles Claims

The memoir also includes Spencer's account of a call with the then Prince Charles shortly after Diana's death, in which he recalls Charles sounding 'strangely matter-of-fact' and, in Spencer's description, 'giddily elated – like a lottery winner'. Buckingham Palace has responded to some of the claims made about the King in the book, saying that grief can 'cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory'. It has not addressed every individual allegation.

King Charles continues to receive treatment for cancer.

Spencer's book, running to 384 pages, has reopened longstanding disputes over Diana's relationship with the press in the years before her death in a Paris car crash in 1997. It revisits controversies over paparazzi photographs, the handling of her private life by newspapers and broadcasters, and the tensions between public interest and personal privacy that marked much of her adult life.

Morgan has threatened legal action, though it was not immediately clear whether formal court proceedings had been issued. Morgan has said he is instructing solicitors to contact Spencer and his publisher.

For now, Spencer's account remains disputed by Morgan, while the memoir has brought renewed attention to the relationship between Diana and the press in the 1990s, and to ongoing arguments over how that period should be remembered and described.