Like a puffing tinpot general at the head of an expeditionary force of toy soldiers, the Earl Spencer has marched off to invade and conquer America.

He is a man on a three-pronged military mission; to promote his book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister; to make lots of lovely money; to continue to pour ordure upon the Royal Family in general and King Charles in particular.

‘They have to gaslight,’ he fumed in one interview. ‘They have to pretend there’s something wrong with my mind or my memory. There’s nothing wrong with either.’

Cripes! What an awfully big adventure for little brother Charles, who packed his trunk with his posh boy blazers and his shiny buckled loafers, then set off for the new world, fizzing with old animosities.

Television, radio, podcasts, broadcasts, newspapers and mags – our hero is ready, willing and able to appear on them all, to sing his song of royal woe and to give his former brother-in-law a kicking at every opportunity, for this unedifying War of the Charleses is far from over.

At the book launch in New York this week, the Earl was interviewed by royal biographer Tina Brown in front of a live audience – and wasted no time in getting to the real nugget of meat on his payback kebab.

Not about the glorious wonder of Diana, but more about the horror of then-Prince Charles. Once more, we were transported back to who said what in the days following Diana’s death in 1997.

‘So, I was very calm,’ the earl tells Tina. ‘And we know that Prince Charles can be not calm. We all bow our heads in respect at what that pen had to endure when he had his tantrum.’

Not the pen, again? I’m afraid so. Tina giggled at this petty slight. So did the audience. Spencer carried on. ‘But the point is, this is a man with a temper, and I was very even that day.’

Of course you were, sire. As even as the reading on your in-person bile-o-meter, which seems to be approaching nuclear fission levels when it comes to the King.

It’s all very cosy, especially as Spencer’s critiques of the Royal Family chime so precisely with the grievances of Meghan and Harry; they seem to believe the Royals only look after their own, that they have all been frozen out and never accorded the respect and homage they feel they deserve.

In the TV studio Earl Spencer is resplendent in his blazer, Gayle is in a pink power trouser suit. Her manner is very buddy-buddy while he is a polished performer – but slick. Gayle proceeds to butter him up as if he were a slice of toast.

She certainly gives good grease. She tells him how marvellous he is for protecting his blood family nephews William and Harry, she instructs viewers to buy the book which she ‘highly recommends’ because it is ‘sensational’, she worries that he has been ‘heavily criticised’ for said book, but Spencer disputes this.

‘I’m getting a lot of criticism fed by Buckingham Palace but not from other people and not from readers.’ This is patently stretching the truth somewhat, but Gayle does not challenge him. ‘Well done, Charles,’ is what she says instead.

Next, he is interviewed by Matt Galloway for The Current, a Canadian radio show listened to by 10 million people every week.

Here, the earl postulates that Diana had ADHD and dyslexia, that her phone was possibly hacked, that she did not manipulate and collaborate with the media as has been widely reported, she only ‘harnessed their power’ to spotlight good causes instead. He offers absolutely no evidence for any of this.

And then in his curiously fluting voice – although he sounds more camp duchess than man in love with his valet – Spencer doubles down on his incendiary written claim that Prince Charles was ‘giddily elated’ at Diana’s death when they spoke on the phone.

‘He was really relaying to me how he had told William and Harry about their mother’s death,’ Spencer told the radio station. ‘I just noted his tone as being sort of buoyant... he did sound upbeat.’

Buoyant, upbeat? As Diana lay on a mortuary slab in a Paris hospital? I’m still finding this bitter interpretation of events and emotions very hard to believe.

When pressed by Galloway, Spencer admitted that he cannot remember what this jaunty, happy cheeky chappy Charles actually said in those dark moments, he only remembers the tone. ‘It was so jarring.’

Then, of course, there was the row about the funeral procession. According to Spencer, Prince Charles was ‘totally out of control, you know when somebody’s lost it. I mean, we know this is a man who loses it. We saw him lose it with a fountain pen...’

Not the pen again!

‘...signing documents just after he had become king. It was a bit like that. Sort of a rant is a good word... and he was rude about Diana and her sense of beauty...’

What?

‘Then he came in with that killer line, [‘we’ll forget her soon enough’]and that was really upsetting.’

Spencer thinks it is up to King Charles, not him, to explain these words. Yet we had a revealing moment of clarity when Galloway challenged Spencer’s portrayal of the King as a callous individual who disparaged Diana.

‘I didn’t set out to criticise the King,’ huffed the author. ‘And they’re not criticisms. They’re reportings of fact. I’m sure people in Canada will never remember but I was a TV journalist for a decade. I’m a historian, I’m a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I’m not a salacious gossip, I deal in fact, and these are facts that I thought were really illuminating.’

Darlings, he is not a gossip, he’s a historian. That’s a bit like saying, I’m not a stripper, I’m an exotic dancer.

And while he vehemently dislikes the royals, he wants you to know he’s a member of a royal society. What a hypocrite.

If he were a true historian, would he want to rewrite history to suit himself and his own agenda? Wouldn’t he want the whole truth, not supposition and innuendo supplied by himself?

Elsewhere on this tour, Earl Spencer claimed never to have read Prince Harry’s best-selling autobiography Spare, which was published in 2023. What historian would turn away from his own family history and the important role he himself plays in it? None of it makes much sense.

As Earl Spencer continues his publicity tour, I seethe with the same annoyance and frustration as when Meghan and Harry were out on the stump, airing their peeves, implying the Royal Family was racist, belittling an entire country they found unbearable, intolerable.

Charles Spencer is on the same self-serving trajectory – and he is making an impact. His book now tops US bestseller lists while he spreads his grim message about our King and the monarchy across America.

After the Tina Brown interview, one commentator wrote; ‘We should never invite the British Royal Family to any American state occasions again.’ One feels that is precisely what Charles Spencer wants, along with destroying an elderly man who once got annoyed at a leaky fountain pen.

Wow! The sensibility of a real star 

To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect... Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience – or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope... If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Oh, la! There is barely a word in Sense and Sensibility that is not as relevant today as it was more than 200 years ago, when Jane Austen wrote her first novel.

A sumptuous new film version has just been released, starring radiant Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood and George MacKay as Edward Ferrars.

I love them both, the costumes are exquisite, right down to the last pin tuck, the bonnets are bonny while the suppressed longing delicious to behold, yet somehow it’s all just a bit... boring. I got fed up of arty shots of bees buzzing around flowers in ye olde English countryside and readers, fell asleep twice.

Yet there was one wideawake highlight – Esme Creed-Miles as Marianne Dashwood. Esme’s portrayal of the younger and more impetuous sister might have been a bit frantic, but wow. She has really got something. When Esme, pictured, is on screen, you simply cannot take your eyes off her.

She is the daughter of Samantha Morton and Peaky Blinders’ Charlie Creed-Miles, and clearly a talent to watch. Not all nepo babies are a waste of space!

As pricey as ever, it’s the gift that keeps on taking 

All I don’t want for Christmas is Meghan’s advent calendar.

The Duchess of Sussex has launched her first As Ever Christmas calendar, called The Joy of Anticipation. It features an illustration of her Montecito home and contains 24 chocolates behind the festive doors and windows. And guess what? It only costs £112, which works out at about £4.60 per chocolate.

Choc flavours include raspberry, orange marmalade and ganache truffle. Each ‘piece’ is finished with its countdown number etched in Meghan’s personal penmanship, hand-painted in edible gold lustre.

A fiver for a chocolate? Is she taking the pith? Out of the citrus fruits, I mean. Stop it.

The attempted hijacking of the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday showed the best and worst of humanity. One pilot stabbed the other and allegedly wanted to crash the plane and kill everyone on board. He was stopped by the heroics of many onboard, including the stricken pilot and passenger Yaniv Hayun, who with another man dragged the hijacker out of the cockpit before going back in to ‘pull up the yoke and straighten the plane’, which he knew how to do after watching a tv programme called Air Crash Investigation. A horror, a nightmare and a miracle, all on one short journey. Thank goodness for a happy ending, for once.

What about Ed’s freedom of speech? 

If you want to understand the sheer idiocy of cancel culture, look no further than the Ed Sheeran debacle.

The pop singer has lost 500,000-plus Instagram followers because of something that wasn’t his fault and which he tried his best to rectify.

That’s cancel culture in a nutshell; the blind leading the stupid in a parade of know-nothing lemmings acting without thinking for the greater glory of performative identity politics and their own good selves.

To recap: the rapper Macklemore was dropped as an opening act from Ed Sheeran’s Loop stadium tour after he made a ‘Free Palestine’ statement before performing a protest song at two concerts last month.

He was dropped from the tour not by Sheeran, but by the venues themselves, who want all their visitors to feel safe, not just the keffiyeh-wearing rent-a-mob. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

Sheeran himself has said that lots of children come to his concerts and he has always wanted to create a feeling of joy in a politics-free zone. U2 confirmed this week that when they collaborated earlier this year on the song Yours Eternally, which is about Ukraine, Sheeran expressed resistance about doing such a politically-minded song. ‘You’re not going to get me into politics, are you?’ he fretted to Bono.

I respect his wish to stay above the fray. I applaud it! Isn’t that his freedom of speech, too? The other support acts dropped out, too. Among them was Finneas – pop star Billie Eilish’s brother – who said: ‘Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.’

For God’s sake. As if the opinion of some nonentity third on the bill matters to the crowds, who have paid their money to attend a pop concert, not a political rally.

I wouldn’t mind so much, but there is never a peep of protest against Hamas, a murdering death cult whose acts of savagery – at a music festival! – are somehow always overlooked by these pious peaceniks.

Meanwhile Ed is on the outs and Macklemore has gained more than two million followers. Sometimes I loathe young people.