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Earl Spencer describes King Charles as acting like a “petulant” child in the new book about his late sister Diana, Princess of Wales, which has been released today. The author has been engaged in a PR battle with Buckingham Palace following claims that Charles sounded “giddily elated” after Diana’s death and allegedly said: “We’ll forget her soon enough.” A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said last Wednesday that grief can “cloud reason” and “colour memory”. But Earl Spencer has defended his book’s claims and criticised the royals’ statement as “below the belt”. Pre-released extracts, serialised in The Daily Mail , focused on claims about Charles’ reaction to Diana’s death, the alleged “lack of obvious care” for Prince Harry after the funeral, and the claim that Diana tried to call off her engagement to Charles . Now that the book is available, The i Paper took a closer look at some of the other most eye-catching claims. Spencer describes Charles acting like a ‘petulant’ child Earl Spencer described Charles as acting like a “petulant” child in the book. Charles is said to have told the author that he was “lucky” to be inheriting the Althorp estate while still in his twenties. According to Earl Spencer, Charles told him: “You’re just so lucky – you know, inheriting when you’re so young. I mean, I’m 43 … and I employ fifty people … but my parents insist on treating me like – like a child!” Late Queen alleged to have said Charles was ‘resentful’ Queen Elizabeth II is alleged to h

When our Friday night no-frills flight to Ibiza was delayed, my nine-year-old asked me why “all of the adults are acting like children.” I was beginning to wonder exactly what sort of holiday memories were being formed on what was meant to be a happy family holiday. When we did eventually board, we were one of only a small handful of families on the flight – everyone else was dressed for the club scene and getting into the party spirit. So much so, some had to be separated. We eventually landed just after 1am, and the queue for taxis snaked for miles. My husband was pulling a silent “I told you so” face and I was quietly panicking that I might have scarred our daughter for life. But I needn’t have worried. Yes, the White Isle is (nearly) all about clubbing in summer , but that is not all it has to offer. According to a recent survey by Co-op Travel, Ibiza ranked in the top 10 family holiday destinations for Britons, beating popular sunspots Parga in Greece and Sunny Beach in Bulgaria to take eighth place. As Claire Evans, chief operating officer at Co-op Travel, said: “It’s encouraging to see perceptions changing. Ibiza has quietly developed a fantastic family offering in recent years.” The new Coral Star hotel welcomes families to the White Isle with its ‘adults and kids only’ policy A new concept in Ibiza Among those is the newly opened Coral Star Hotel and Apartments in San Antonio Bay, on the fringes of one of the island’s most well-established party hubs. In the relaxed

The laws of rugby union are a constant topic of debate among players and coaches, fans and pundits – before, during and after matches. In one way, this is the simplest of sports: just move the ball up the field and score some points. In other ways, there is a complex tangle of what’s legal and what is not, at scrums and line-outs, mauls, rucks, tackles, restarts and the rest. There are also grey areas that can never be clarified in black and white, and are left to the referee to decide , and in these can lie both the beauty of the spectacle and the inevitably differing views. We asked the 10 men in charge of coaching the clubs in England’s Prem clubs which laws they would like to see changed or introduced or just got rid of, to improve the game… Rob Baxter (Exeter Chiefs director of rugby) “I’d change the law on the ‘held up over the tryline’, leading to a drop-out. And I’m saying this as someone having won a semi-final on it last year. I just don’t think that’s the way an attack should end, and the defending team getting that much of a pressure release. “People say you hand the ball back to the attacking team with the kick [drop-out], but defences are organised enough now that the way of building a defence out onto your 22 is a massive pressure outlet for a team that has potentially worked the length of the pitch. It doesn’t feel like a productive, positive law change that was introduced, and I don’t think it’s created what the game ever wanted to create.” “People talked abo

Just as one royal blockbuster is produced, so another one pops up. Earl Spencer’s book Swan Song – Diana, My Sister came out on Tuesday. And it now emerges that Prince Harry is in talks to make a documentary about Diana, Princess of Wales, to coincide with the 30th anniversary of her death next year. He is said to have approached Diana’s friends and relations, including Lord Spencer, to appear as talking heads. Why on earth are they doing it? For each man respectively it is no doubt a way to honour a sister and mother whom they loved. But equally, both Prince Harry and Earl Spencer loathe the press for understandable reasons – the paparazzi hounded her to her death in 1997. In his memoirs, Earl Spencer draws a “direct line” between the fraudulent journalist Martin Bashir’s interview and Diana’s death. Diana’s personal driver was sacked because Bashir falsely claimed he was an informant. And so her driver on the night she died was Henri Paul, who was drunk and who worked for Mohamed Al-Fayed. In his eulogy for Diana, Spencer said, “Of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.” How ironic, too, that two men who loathe the media – particularly in relation to the life and death of their sister and mother – should court it over the same story. In Harry’s case, Diana’s life and death are the last bits of his life he hasn’t mined in depth in his TV sh

When diagnostic radiographer Paul Awak, 39, came to the UK in 2021, he didn’t know whether he and his wife would survive working in the NHS during at the height of the Covid pandemic . “At the time we came in, we never knew if there was going to be any cure or vaccine that could stop the pandemic from progressing,” Awak said. “We came in knowing that we either solve the problem, or we die solving the problem.” Five years later, he and his wife, a mental health support worker, should be eligible for permanent settlement in the UK. But if the Labour Party’s proposed changes to immigration rules come into force this autumn, they will have to wait another five years before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR). Awak said: “We were at risk of dying, and not knowing what will happen to our kids…Now [the Government] is trying to shift the goal posts in the middle of the match. It’s really, really unfair.” Several health and social care organisations have condemned the proposed changes to ILR requirements, warning that making the country less attractive to migrants will cause the NHS to miss waiting list targets. ‘We came here to save lives’ Awak, now living in Bedfordshire, had a career in healthcare in Nigeria but decided to bring his family to the UK on the skilled worker visa route when he “saw the number of deaths from Covid”. “We came here to help the system and to save lives,” he said. “There was lots of applause [during the pandemic] that we put our lives on the

What “common ground” could Andy Burnham possibly have with Donald Trump ? As well as the two men having markedly different politics, the US President is currently in one of his more erratic phases. At home, he’s in a fight with the media , with even pro-Trump Fox News taking a stand against his ban on a number of other media outlets from the White House. He also – quite randomly – called for a united Ireland while visiting the country last week. He was helpfully fronting those comments that he’d “love to see it unified” by saying he didn’t want to “cause any problems” – the geopolitical version of a teenager saying “no offence, but”. So Burnham might be forgiven for thinking that his only task in his first meeting with Trump is to make sure that the two get on, that Trump is flattered sufficiently to overlook those political differences, and to get the hell out of there without looking too much like a lapdog. Ahead of the meeting, he said: “We’ve found a connection. So, I will go with where I feel it’s right, to meet him where he is at, and search for that common ground, which I’m sure we’ll find.” They do have common ground in the way they do politics, though. Both men speak much more from the heart than other politicians in their worlds. The line that the new Prime Minister uses about “giving people hope in their hearts” isn’t a million miles away from “make America great again!”. Both of them know that they have to tell the public that they’re the ones to make things bette

At first, it just seems like the kind of glitch that happens occasionally with live broadcasts. A crowd is assembled on the White House lawn, a gaggle of press photographers is ready, and they begin to applaud politely as Donald Trump walks out to unveil a new helipad. The problem, however, is you can barely hear their applause. Instead, the sound is overwhelmed by what appears to be noise from a helicopter. Usually, this kind of glitch lasts for just a few seconds before a professional switches the audio to the right feed. But on the official White House feed – the day it launched its 24/7 “Trump TV” online channel – the terrible, howling audio just continues. The audio is still howling 30 seconds into the clip when Trump shakes hands with dignitaries . As he addresses the assembled crowd with a few remarks 46 seconds in, all we can hear is the occasional word here and there against the relentless hum. When he finishes speaking and cuts the red, white, and blue ribbon 90 seconds later, the hum is still all we hear. Those with generous spirits might think that, well, helicopters are loud – perhaps the rotors were just too loud for the sound engineers to overcome, except they weren’t even turning. Trump’s audio team just botched their job. It was a humiliating start to Trump TV, which is the President’s attempt to get his message out directly, with a channel that’s all Trump, all the time. Though seemingly not as high on his priority list, his personal popularity hits new lows

In November 2018, I was serving in the first Trump administration . The midterms had just delivered a stinging repudiation of the President’s leadership, and the mood was eerie inside the White House the next morning. Anyone hoping the losses would humble him was sorely mistaken. Donald Trump was on the attack. He fired his attorney general , spoke openly about ejecting his chief of staff and set his sights on cabinet members who challenged his erraticism and frequent impulses toward illegality. He didn’t want anyone around to say “no” to whatever his warped conscience cooked up next. On the same day, Trump blew up at CNN’s Jim Acosta during a post-election press conference for asking uncomfortable questions about the Russia investigation and the President’s immigration policies. Afterwards, Trump decided he would simply throw him out of the White House , breaking with decades of norms that credentialed members of the press are given access to cover the American presidency. That night, I was at dinner in the restaurant of the Trump Hotel with a member of the cabinet and senior national security officials. A few tables away sat the White House communications chief with a group of aides. They were openly gloating and celebrating, before the story had even hit the news. They’d had the Secret Service stop Acosta and take away his pass. If the press didn’t report on Trump the way Trump wanted, he’d censor them. There were high fives. It had the feel of a table toasting a game-winn

Over the last year, the surge of Germany’s radical far-right has been celebrated by both Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This week, the anti-immigration, pro-Russia group Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the most votes in the state election of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the third time it has emerged as the strongest party in a region . The party is set to remain shut out of power in the state because of a “firewall” of non-cooperation agreed by the other main parties. With rising fears that the AfD could become the first far-right party to hold state power since the Second World War, two Brits living in Germany, who asked not to be named, tell of their fears and worries. The first time Ben* saw a swastika in Germany , it was a year after he had left the UK – the symbol burned into the cycling path on his route home from work. He was shocked – displaying, distributing, or publicly showing swastika flags is illegal in Germany. It was in 2015, around the same time he believes far-right sentiment really started “simmering” in the country again, at a time when Germany was welcoming a record-breaking number of asylum seekers fleeing war and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Years later, on a beer run, he remembers seeing a Nazi flag hanging out of the window of a derelict building. Since then, he’s seen “lots” more. “It’s supposed to be unacceptable but I think people have gotten more brave,” he says. Although the British web developer has now been happily living in

There’s little more British than strawberry jam . Of course, we eat all sorts of preserves – raspberry, blackcurrant, plum – and they are all delicious. But nothing captures the nation’s hearts quite like strawberry. No jam is as widespread, or as deeply embedded in our desserts and afternoon teas . On scones with clotted cream, in a roly-poly, simply spread over buttered toast, as a filling for Victoria sponge or, perhaps a more modern take, with granola and yoghurt. And while such an old-school product could, in theory, go out of fashion, the opposite appears to be happening, with sales of strawberry jam at Ocado rising 31 per cent in the year to August. While making your own can be a fun way to use up a seasonal glut (this summer has seen a bumper harvest) supermarkets are filled with excellent options, from own-labels under a pound to fancier jars. You’ll find these variously labelled as jams, preserves or conserves. While similar, jams tend to be smoother, preserves and conserves a bit more chunky. Here, The i Paper has tested 14 options across the three categories available in British supermarkets, judging primarily on taste and texture, while taking into account price, too. Diddly Squat strawberry jam £4.90 for 340g, Ocado. Sugar: 65g per 100g Wincingly sweet, this is one that will please children but divide adults. There’s a nice texture, with a little bite from the seeds, but it really needs a little acidity to cut through the sugar. There are better options out ther

Hurrah, it’s time for the “UNGA games” – the week when world leaders converge on New York to praise themselves and lecture others at the United Nations General Assembly. The air will be thick with lies and hypocrisy as the world’s biggest political forum struggles to prove it still has relevance in a conflict-ridden world. This year’s talking shop comes at the end of a year when the post Second World War “rules-based international order” was declared dead. Donald Trump has not only decapitated governments in Venezuela and Iran but also turned on his own allies as well, notably Canada and Denmark/ Greenland . In truth, its demise was mourned only by those who clearly benefited from it, namely the US and its allies. Much of the rest of the world had long ago perceived that the only real rule in the rules-based order was the one that gave America and its friends the right to do whatever they wanted, while the rest did whatever they were told. This meant that human rights abuses in a Nato member such as Turkey were conveniently overlooked, while similar abuses in places like Russia prompted outrage and sanctions. Earlier this century, the rules-based order allowed the US and UK to launch a massive illegal invasion against Iraq without the two countries’ leaders facing any reprisals. Yet, when Vladimir Putin thought he could pull off a similar stunt in Ukraine , he discovered the rules didn’t apply to him. It was sanctions and international arrest warrants, while George W Bush liv

A former mentor of mine, an uncompromising newspaper editor of the old school, once told me that he could tell whether a job applicant was going to be successful by how they walked into the interview. Anyone who didn’t stride in purposefully was not going to get a job with him. This, by the way, was a man who fired someone because he saw them walking too slowly to the photocopier. Yes, different days, all right. I mention this because I wondered what he would have made of someone walking in for an interview holding a matcha in a disposable cup. I doubt they would even have made it to the sit-down bit of the meeting. I think he would have regarded it as disrespectful. Or unprofessional. Or maybe a sign of slovenliness. Or of a distracted mind. Or even of poor time management. Or maybe all of them. Today’s boss class, undeniably, is much less harsh in its judgements and less intransigent in its reliance on first impressions, but nevertheless the clutching of a coffee cup has become a touchstone topic in the modern culture wars. On social media channels, a debate is taking place about the politics of coffee , and particularly as it relates to job interviews. A TikTok post from an experienced New York recruiter has gone viral. In it, she says: “When you show up with an iced coffee or an iced latte, it is perceived… that this interview is just a stop on your list of errands for the day,” It projects an unserious attitude, she added. Unsurprisingly, this prompted a vehement respons