A SECRET KEPT FOR 27 YEARS — Charles Spencer breaks decades of silence to reveal the emotional eulogy he didn’t give at Princess Diana’s funeral — and why he changed it at the last moment.

Charles Spencer is revealing new details about his original eulogy for Princess Diana.

The 9th Earl Spencer, 61, said that the eulogy he’d initially planned for his late sister’s funeral was “very different” from what he eventually read.

“I flew back [to the U.K.] – I was living in South Africa – I flew back from Cape Town overnight. [I had a] very sweet stewardess help me, because I was in bits,” Spencer said on the Oct. 24 episode of Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud podcast.

He further explained that he initially searched for someone else who could give the eulogy. “I had a big, thick address book, and I thought, ‘I want to find someone who’s going to make the speech for her.’ And I got to ‘Z’ and I hadn’t found anyone,” Spencer recalled.

“[I] got off the plane in Heathrow [Airport], called my mother, I said, ‘I can’t think who’s going to give the eulogy. And I’ve got an awful feeling it’s going to have to be me,’ ” he continued. “And she said, ‘Well, it is going to be you. Your sisters and I have decided it.’ ”

When he started putting together the tribute, Spencer said, “[It was a] very traditional eulogy, almost … ‘She was very good at this as a child’ and all that. And then I thought, ‘Well, this is ridiculous, that’s not who she was.’ “

He said he then “realized” his job in that moment wasn’t to speak about Diana, but to “speak for” his late sister, who died at age 36 after a car crash in Paris in August 1997.

“And I knew I’d been left at that stage – it had no legal standing – but I knew she’d left me as guardian of her sons,” he continued, referring to his nephews, Prince William and Prince Harry.

“Obviously, the other parent being alive, that meant nothing, but it meant something to me,” said Spencer. “That sort of duty, I think. And then I wrote it in an hour and a half and, yeah, that was it, really.”

 

The 9th Earl Spencer also revealed on the podcast that he did “take one bit out” of his eulogy about Rupert Murdoch, deeming it “rather unnecessary.”

Back in January, the News Group Newspaper, which is owned by Murdoch, apologized to Prince Harry, 41, “for the serious intrusion” of his private life for decades, along with his late mother, as part of a settlement ending Harry’s legal battle against The Sun.

Spencer praised Harry following the legal victory, writing in an Instagram post at the time, “It takes an enormous amount of guts to take on major media organizations like this, and incredible tenacity to win against them.”

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Spencer famously delivered his eulogy at Princess Diana’s funeral in September 1997.

In it, he denounced the mistreatment of Diana and pledged to ensure that her sons would be raised so that their souls “can sing openly as you planned.”