I’ve had a few feuds in my time – like any fascinating woman – but one of the funniest was when I fell out with my comrade, Julie Bindel. We were both women of working-class origin propelled to the giddy heights of media notoriety, and I had always felt that we vied to see who could remain truest to our proletarian roots. Then, with one stroke, conclusively, I had won – because I backed Diana after the ‘Three of us in this marriage’ interview with Martin Bashir, while Bindel backed Camilla. We laugh about it now, but at the time, at my instigation, we didn’t talk for five years.

Now, nearly 30 years after Diana’s death, her brother, Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, has revived hostilities with the royal family and King Charles for their treatment of her in his new book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister. And the urge for side-taking is as strong as ever.

Alongside several other shocking claims, Spencer says that soon after Diana’s death, he received a call from Charles, in which he sounded ‘giddily elated – like a lottery winner’. And later, during a row ahead of Diana’s funeral, Spencer says that Charles told him, ‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough’.

‘So he could marry that woman!’, spat a splendid Welsh lady recently on a radio call-in – and just like that, the carefully rehabilitated image of Queen Camilla, from a woman who never worked a day in her life to defender of battered women and promoter of reading, disintegrated.

My own enmity towards the woman Charles had so enthusiastically been doing for decades had never quite left. And so with the current brouhaha, I’m right back there, wishing I could have been one of that bold brigade allegedly pelting Mrs Parker Bowles with bread rolls in the car park of Chippenham Sainsbury’s back in the 1990s.

I know this is childish. I know that my own private life barely bears inspection. I know there are some schools of thought that might advise that only she who is without sin should cast the first bap. But emotions can often be stronger than logic – and if, like me, you’re a republican, any ammunition that makes the ruling house look bad is going to be agreeable. So I very much believe Charles Spencer – for soppy reasons, because I was sweet on Diana, but for solid ones, too.

The solidest is my absolute and objective loathing of King Charles, who I believe to be a selfish, self-pitying narcissist; the opposite of his mother, who had her own misgivings about him becoming king. I recall many years ago reading the story of him allegedly saying to Spencer at the funeral of the latter’s father how ‘lucky’ he was to ‘inherit young’ (and being perplexed that it had mysteriously gone missing whenever I attempted to Google it, until the new book put it back in the news). I was also struck by how easy it was to imagine him saying it, so keen was he to get his hands on the sceptre and orb. 

Charles has quietened down now, but as Heir Apparent, he really was a gob on a stick, with his constant speechifying about the wonders of everything from homeopathy to Islam and the notorious ‘black spider memos’ he bombarded politicians with. From badger culls (in favour) to supermarkets (against), there was nothing this none-too-bright man did not consider himself an expert on – how unlike the hands-off impartiality of our own late queen. Labour MP Paul Flynn called him ‘the lobbyist supreme in the land’, forever ‘putting forward a whole variety of views – including many bad science views and others that should have no more weight than the man down the pub’.

Despite his image of himself as a firebrand intellectual, his love of luxury was remarked on even by other members of a family not known for humble living. He had at one point four valets. The queen reportedly believed that ‘the amount of kit and servants he takes around is grotesque’. In 2002, his 85-strong court prompted several MPs to ask how he could justify such a large number of people waiting on him. 

Since he became king, his ego has been mollified somewhat. He doubtless appears ‘nicer’ than the man who would sneer ‘Diana the Martyr’ at his young wife when she visited hospital patients. But that’s because he finally got to where he wanted – the top of the Ruritanian heap, with all the subjects who used to bow and scrape to his mother now giving fealty to him. Beneath it, he’s still the same ignorant big-head who wrote of Israel in a 1986 letter to Laurens van der Post after a tour of his beloved Gulf, that while there is ‘Much admire [in] some aspects of Islam… the influx of foreign Jews, especially from Poland, has helped to cause great problems… Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby?’

‘Oh, but Charles Spencer’s been married four times!’, squeal the seat-sniffing prudes. So? He probably didn’t marry any of them without loving them because the one he loved had been around the block a few times – let’s not forget that the king’s weakness in not marrying Camilla when they were young started the whole tragic mess. Whatever Spencer got up to with a gaggle of international glamour girls, I doubt that he wooed a dreamy teenage virgin into marriage while keeping his mistress on speed-dial. In the light of what Windsor inflicted on a trusting girl barely out of school, four marriages seem small beer.

Do I like the fact that there seems to be an alliance of kinds between Earl Spencer and the ghastly Sussexes? Not particularly – but I don’t have to like everything about a person to believe that they’re telling the truth, as I am not six years old. Recollections may vary, but a man who can become unhinged about a faulty pen, or who can complain in the manner of Adrian Mole (‘We can never be on time… there’s always something… this is boring’) about a minor delay while sitting in his coronation coach outside Westminster Abbey, is definitely capable of saying very strange things when only one person is listening.

The truth remains that he was wildly envious of his young wife’s popularity, and his flunkies played up to his sense of injustice. So much so that his friend, the Tory MP Nicholas Soames, announced after the 1995 Bashir interview, in which Diana talked about her husband’s adultery, that she was ‘in the advanced stages of paranoia’ and suffering from ‘mental illness’. One of the things that endears Prince William to people is his obvious pride in his wife’s popularity. But no one would be surprised if the king were envious of his Diana-faced elder son and the higher ratings he consistently gets in public polls.

To sum up, in this ruck of the Chucks, my money’s on Charles Spencer, because I am a grown-up who doesn’t believe that multiple marriages make your memory unreliable. And if anyone wants to disagree with me, and suck up to the preposterous pretender on the throne, that’s them off the Christmas card list for the next five years.