So, Spencer got to work writing. “On the Tuesday night [Diana’s funeral was on a Saturday], I jotted a few things down,” he told Brandreth. “[It was a] very traditional eulogy, almost. You know, ‘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.’”
This was the moment that things took a turn. “Overnight, I must have been chuntering away and I realized that my job actually wasn’t to do that, but it was almost to speak for her,” Spencer reveals. “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. Obviously, the other parent being alive, that meant nothing, but it meant something to me. That sort of duty, I think. And then I wrote [the eulogy I ended up reading] in an hour and a half and, yeah, that was it, really.”