Royal Rumor Resurfaces: Was King Charles’s Valet Michael Fawcett Involved?

When Charles Spencer, the late Princess Diana’s brother, opened up his memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, a few sentences managed to set the internet buzzing again. He writes that, during a lunch in the 1990s, Diana told him she was planning to divorce the future king because “my husband is in love with his valet.” No name is given, but the hint was enough for royal‑watchers to dust off an old, apparently unfounded story.

According to journalist Tom Sykes, the unnamed valet was Michael Fawcett – a footman who started out serving Queen Elizabeth II in 1981, later became Prince Charles’s personal valet, and eventually ran the Prince’s Foundation. In the 1990s, Charles reportedly relied on Fawcett for everything from tying his shoes to, allegedly, squeezing his toothpaste after a polo accident.

The claim that the two men were more than friends first circulated in royal circles in the early 2000s. A 2003 Guardian report noted that police had looked into alleged misconduct in the household, only to label the accusations “unsubstantiated.” At the time, Charles’s spokesperson dismissed the gossip as “totally ludicrous and, indeed, risible.”

What makes the story oddly persistent is a tangled web of other scandals. In 2021, Fawcett’s name resurfaced in the “cash‑for‑honours” affair, when the Mail on Sunday reported that he offered a Saudi billionaire a knighthood and British citizenship in exchange for large donations to charities favored by the Prince. The Metropolitan Police opened an inquiry, but no charges were ever filed.

Digging deeper, Sykes points to another valet, George Smith, who in 1996 – amid a mental health crisis – claimed he had been raped by a senior aide to the Prince and that he had witnessed a “something” between a royal family member and a servant. Supposedly, Diana recorded Smith’s account on tape and kept it locked in a mahogany box in her apartment. The claim was later echoed by Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell during his 2002 trial for allegedly stealing items from her estate. The tape, if it ever existed, vanished after Diana’s death, and the trial collapsed.

Fawcett himself tried to keep his name out of the headlines. In 2003 he sued a newspaper to stop it from publishing the rumors, arguing the allegations were baseless. The case fizzled, leaving the gossip to drift in the shadows of tabloid speculation.

So, does the new excerpt change anything? Most observers say probably not – the rumor remains unproven, and the royal household has long treated it as a “toxic” piece of gossip. Still, the resurgence shows how a single line in a memoir can revive a story that never truly died, reminding us that the British monarchy is forever a magnet for intrigue, no matter how thin the thread.