The two women also had a man in common: Prince Charles. There, Raine’s wisdom would prove invaluable. She was instrumental in persuading Diana that she should be positive about Charles whenever possible, and it was rumoured that the prince had begun to drop in on Diana for tea at Kensington Palace. ‘Raine’s influence was certainly steadying and influential in that direction and I think the Palace knew it,’ says a friend. Conversely, Raine would have much to thank Diana for. It would be Diana who would suggest to their mutual friend, Mohamed Al Fayed, that he hire Raine as a director at Harrods, saying: ‘Mohamed, this woman can organise anything.’
From ‘wicked stepmother’ to unlikely ally: inside Diana’s relationship with Raine Spencer – on the anniversary of her death
The late Raine, Countess Spencer, died eight years ago today. In Tatler’s October 2022 issue, author Tina Gaudoin shared an extract from her book, Three Times a Countess: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Raine Spencer
By Tatler
21 October 2025
RAINE SPENCER LEAVING THE CONNAUGHT HOTEL AFTER LUNCH WITH DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES IN 1997 Antony Jones/Getty Images
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To the press and the British public, she was ‘Acid Raine’, the wicked stepmother of Diana, fairytale Princess of Wales. But now, on the ninth anniversary of her death, will the late Countess Spencer finally be revealed as the hero of the story?
Everything she’d ever experienced, achieved, lived through and married into had been leading up to this moment. On 12 December 2007, Raine Spencer – at different times the Countess of Dartmouth, Countess Spencer and La Comtesse de Chambrun, divider of loyalties, rehabilitator of royal relationships and, most latterly, board director at Harrods – swept into Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice and took the stand at the coroner’s inquest into the death of Diana, Princess
As the late princess’s ex-stepmother, once vilified by her, but later one of her closest confidantes, Raine had plenty to spill. She’d cherished three men in common with Diana: her late husband and the princess’s father, Lord Spencer; Prince Charles – a long-time friend; and Diana’s last lover, Dodi Fayed, a close office mate of Raine’s, who had died on impact that steamy August night in Paris in 1997, in the terrible crash that changed
The countess had cut an iconic, divisive figure ever since she had been voted debutante of the year in 1947. With her enormous bouffant hair, cut-glass vowels and demure yet forceful manner, it would not be an understatement to describe her as formidable. Certainly, the press thought so. Everything about Raine – from her mother, the romance novelist Barbara Cartland, often nicknamed ‘the pantomime dame’ for her pink outfits and lurid make-up, to her much-publicised feud with Diana – was ‘good copy’.
AT DIANA’S FUNERAL AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY ON 6 SEPTEMBER 1997 Julian Parker/Getty Images
It was no surprise, then, that in 2007, when the 78-year-old countess’s expertly made-up face – the artfully mascara’d hazel eyes, the glossy red lips – first came into view, along with the trademark sculpted hair, with pearl and jewel earrings the size of scallops clinging to her ears, appreciative applause ricocheted around the press room. As the counsel to the inquests was preparing his first question, the countess slowly raised her veil, fixed the QC with a dazzling smile and, taking a deep breath, perhaps for dramatic effect, began…
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Diana’s father, Edward John Spencer, known as Johnnie, was rumoured to be the gloomiest man in London. It had not always been thus. Before his wife, the Honourable Frances Roche, daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy, had publicly deserted him in 1967 for Peter Shand Kydd, the dashing heir to a wallpaper fortune, Spencer had been the very model of a society bon vivant. But by 1972, Johnnie’s life had settled into what many (and indeed he himself) might have described as a quiet monotony, waiting to inherit the 13,000-acre Althorp Estate, the 31-bedroom family seat for more than 500 years. What attracted 43-year-old Raine (already married to one earl) to the 48-year-old divorced viscount, heir to an earldom, with ties to the Royal Family and enough Gainsboroughs, Rubens and van Dycks to rival the world’s greatest art galleries? It was easy to draw the obvious conclusions – and many did.
In reality, the attraction was simpler and deeper than status: they were mad about one another. ‘Raine loved men and she loved sex. She simply found Johnnie irresistible,’ says a friend. Biographer Anne de Courcy adds: ‘Apparently they were always nipping into lay-bys and hotels, and leaving the chauffeur waiting outside.’
On 9 June 1975, Johnnie’s father, the 7th Earl, died and the Spencers moved from Park House, Sandringham, to Althorp. Diana, then 13, and Charles, 11, had been reluctant to move from Norfolk to Northamptonshire, where they knew no one. It didn’t matter that a 100,000-square-foot stately home awaited them. Johnnie made a feeble attempt at explaining away Raine’s constant presence by telling the children she was there to organise the move. The press, however, were getting wind of what was going on, ] [helped by Johnnie’s eldest daughter, Sarah, once answering the phone and saying her father could not be disturbed as he was still in bed ‘with Lady Dartmouth’. Perhaps it was the publicity, or maybe Raine’s husband, the normally mild-mannered 9th Earl of Dartmouth, was simply tired of being cuckolded. Either way, he sued Raine for divorce on 29 May 1976, naming Earl Spencer as co-respondent.
Two months later, The Times carried a simple announcement. The couple had married in secret at Caxton Hall registry office. ‘Even I didn’t go,’ said Raine’s mother, Barbara Cartland. The children were livid, as Diana later related in a 1992 videotaped session with her voice coach. ‘Sarah rang me up. She said, “Have you seen the newspapers?”
I said, “What?”
“Daddy married Raine.”
“My God, how do you know that?”
“It’s in the Express.”’
According to Diana, her remonstrations with her father – who said of Raine: ‘You’ll grow to love her as I have’ – ended with Diana slapping him around the face, ‘if I remember rightly’.The ‘wicked stepmother’ narrative was so speedily crafted that, by the mid-’80s, it was hard to see Raine as anyone other than the impossibly demanding wife of Johnnie and wicked stepmother of the future queen. No detail was too tiny, from Raine’s predilection for using talcum powder post-bathe, to her desire to have her monogrammed sheets changed daily and her habit (hardly a crime) of being served breakfast in bed while making her morning calls, propped up on pillows in her silk negligee.
Where Althorp was concerned, Raine was going to need a very thick skin. ‘Raine began restoring it to its former glory and, although it took a long time, she achieved it,’ says Frank Partridge, whose firm, Partridge Fine Arts, participated in the much-criticised renovation. ‘She was direct and clear about what she wanted and was always a pleasure to deal with,’ he says.The project took seven years. ‘There was always a bloody big bill to pay,’ says Partridge. ‘They needed to sell some paintings and furniture to pay for it, but it was Johnnie who did the selling, not Raine.’ And though some may dispute it, she probably knew more about the house than any of the Spencers. ‘The children have a lot to thank Raine for,’ Partridge adds.
Yet for the children, after a fractured, difficult upbringing, having Raine arrive on the ancestral doorstep would not have been a walk in the park. ‘I would have minded very much if my father had remarried and that person had tried to change everything in my home,’ says Raine’s great friend Lady Glenconner. ‘I did understand the children’s position.’ Later, Charles Spencer took the opportunity to criticise his stepmother’s taste. ‘Some rooms were successful,’ he concedes. ‘Others had the wedding-cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco.’Nonetheless, the couple were radiantly happy. Raine certainly enjoyed being the chatelaine and her parties and dinners were legendary. But shooting weekends and house parties meant that the children were often asked to move upstairs into the old servants’ quarters to make room, something they understandably never forgave Raine for. When the society diarist Kenneth Rose went to stay at Althorp, he described the tension: ‘You could cut the atmosphere between Raine and the children with a knife. They joined us for a meal. I said to Jane, “Do you come here often?” and she said, “When I am asked.” They never addressed a word to Raine.’
Everyone’s attention would temporarily be diverted by momentous events. In Diana’s words: ‘The feeling [in the Royal Family] was, “I wish Charles would hurry up and get on with it.”’ He did, and the engagement between the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer was officially announced on 24 February 1981. The night before, Raine and Johnnie were invited to Prince Charles’s apartment for a celebratory drink. As the prince was helping Raine with her floor-length mink at the close of the evening, he paid his future stepmother-in-law a compliment: ‘This is a very nice fur coat.’ Raine didn’t miss a beat: ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘it’s a little present – from me to me.’ There was no question but that Raine, as Diana’s stepmother, would need to be invited to the wedding and reception, but there was also no reason, as far as Diana was concerned, that Raine should get to be seated anywhere prominent and certainly nowhere near the Royal Family, the
Spencer family or, for that matter, Johnnie. Certainly, it was right that Diana’s mother, Frances, should have had top billing, but to seat Raine four rows back in the congregation seems to have been unnecessarily unkind.By the late ’80s, it was clear that the Waleses’ marriage was unravelling. But that didn’t
prevent Raine and Prince Charles from continuing their friendship. Privately, Raine was sympathetic to Charles’s problems with Diana. Reports were leaking to the press that both he and Diana were terse with their staff, irritable and difficult to please. And it was in this frame of mind, in September 1989, that Diana arrived at Althorp to attend the rehearsal for her brother Charles’s wedding to the model Victoria Lockwood.
What happened next was predictable. Diana vented years of frustrations over both Raine and her own failing marriage on the one person she could be pretty sure would not answer back: Raine herself. The infamous row took place on the landing at the top of the grand oak staircase that runs adjacent to the spectacular two-storey, black-and-white-checked entrance hall to The Saloon and Spencer Gallery around which the family portraits were hung.In the princess’s own words (from transcripts of the tapes she prepared for Andrew Morton): ‘I took it upon myself to air everyone’s grievances in my family… I was so angry. I said, “I hate you so much. If only you knew how much we all hated you for what you’ve done – you’ve ruined the house, you spend Daddy’s money, and what for?”’ Raine retained her legendary self-control: ‘You have no idea how much pain your mother has put your father through,’ was her restrained reply. But by that point, Diana was uncontrollable: she shoved her stepmother, who toppled down the first set of carpeted steps onto the wide landing. ‘I pushed her down the stairs,’ she told her voice coach later, ‘which gave me enormous satisfaction.’
Diana’s row with Raine set the scene for what was to be an uneasy marriage celebration for her young brother and his bride. A fawn-like, nervy Victoria Lockwood, cloaked in an ivory Tomasz Starzewski wedding gown, the Spencer tiara balanced precariously on her long brunette locks, dodged the rain and puddles as she made her way out of the church on her groom’s arm. At one point, the five-year-old Prince Harry took off his cumbersome wide-brimmed brown velvet pageboy hat, fiddled with the enormous sash encircling his tiny waist and stuck his tongue out at the cameras – as if to speak for the entire party. And there was Johnnie, trying to mend fences in his characteristically good-natured, slightly bumbling fashion.
When Johnnie died in 1992, Raine did not expect any sympathy from the Spencer children – and she was not disappointed. The retribution was swift and decisive. On the night of her husband’s death, Raine had repaired to her Mayfair home at 24 Farm Street, and Charles Spencer, who had driven down the motorway a viscount, swept back through the wrought iron gates of his new home, Althorp House, as the 9th Earl.
Raine called her personal assistant, Sue Howe, asking her to send some appropriate clothing down to London in a taxi. When Sue arrived at Althorp, she found the Princess of Wales and Earl Spencer present. According to Howe, they wouldn’t agree to her taking Johnnie and Raine’s monogrammed Louis Vuitton suitcases, instead removing the contents and stuffing Raine’s belongings into bin bags, at which point they were ‘thrown out onto the tarmac’. Hyperbole or truth? As Queen Elizabeth II so succinctly put it during a more recent family spat: ‘recollections may vary’.
I went back to Althorp with Raine,’ says Peter Constandinos, the countess’s hairdresser, ‘and Raine wanted to go up to her room. They agreed, but someone was stationed outside to check that Raine didn’t leave with anything. But what they had forgotten – or didn’t know – was that Raine and Johnnie’s rooms were adjoining, so we simply walked through the connecting door into Johnnie’s room, took some more of her things that were lying around and packed them into my hairdressing bag. We then left through Raine’s room and no one was any the wiser. It was a great shame that she wasn’t allowed the time and dignity to remove her own things without the pressure.’
Charles Spencer made no secret of how he felt in his book Althorp: The Story of an English House: ‘Immediately after my father’s death, Raine appeared at Althorp, armed with stickers to be stuck with prominence to all the things in the house that were hers. It was the grimmest tour of the house I had ever undertaken, reaching a crescendo at the end when Raine handed over the catalogues of chattels dating from grandfather’s time, with the words, “You’ll find a lot of these are missing. Still, you have more than most people, so don’t complain.”A year later, Raine had remarried, to the Comte de Chambrun – her third husband and the third time she had become a countess. The Princess of Wales had bumped into the couple in Claridge’s and offered her warm congratulations. Later, she’d sent flowers and a handwritten note. An onlooker noted that the friendliness between Raine and Diana was at odds with their reputation as sworn enemies. In fact, Raine had begun seeing the princess every few weeks for lunch, to offer support with Diana’s upcoming divorce.
On the afternoon of Friday, 29 August 1997, Raine called in to see her friend Michael Cole in his Harrods office. At the time, Diana was in the throes of what seemed to be a full-blown love affair with Al Fayed’s son Dodi. The couple had been pictured cruising around the Mediterranean together in Mohamed’s yacht, Jonikal, on their third trip together. But Raine and Cole did not discuss the press storm; rather they chatted about Raine’s upcoming weekend at a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice. Before leaving, Raine took a piece of paper from the desk and wrote down the details of where she’d be staying, ‘just in case’. ‘It was not something she ever did,’ says Cole.
At about 12.45am on Sunday morning, Cole’s bedside telephone rang and he answered to hear a reporter from The Sunday Times asking him about rumours of a car crash involving Diana and Dodi Fayed. Cole chose not to reply. The phone rang again. ‘Is it true about the crash?’ demanded another reporter.
Cole began calling everyone and anyone who might be able to provide more information. Finally, he remembered the paper Raine had given him two days before. He scrabbled through his briefcase and found the details written in Raine’s clear, sloping hand. He dialled the number in Venice.
‘I told her briefly everything I thought I knew. That Dodi was dead and Diana was injured and that the hospital would only provide a family member with more details,’ says Cole. He gave her the number of the hospital where Diana had been taken, and Raine snapped into action.
Her French was fluent and, as a family member, she would be able to ascertain the situation. Within five minutes, Raine was back on Cole’s line: ‘Michael, Diana has not survived. I am afraid that they are both dead.’ Cole remembers falling to his knees and weeping, still holding the receiver with Raine at the other end. As ever, Raine had already mastered herself and the situation. ‘It’s a terrible thing but there’s nothing we can do. We must think of how we can help now and what we can do to make things easier,’ she said to Cole calmly, trying to ease his distress. At that point, television reports were suggesting Diana had only broken her arm. Raine was the first person to learn the truth.
On 6 September 1997, throughout the 90-minute funeral service, during which Diana’s coffin, draped in the Royal Standard with an ermine border, lay before them, Raine sat between Mohamed Al Fayed and his wife, holding their hands. It was a dignified, warm gesture of acknowledgement for the grieving couple who, without Raine, would in that uneasy climate have been treated as outsiders at best. ‘Raine was not a fair-weather friend; she would never let you down,’ says Andy Kerman, Raine’s lawyer and friend
Ten years later, seated in Court 73 for the opening of the inquest into Diana and Dodi’s death were Al Fayed, the princess’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, private secretary to Diana’s sons, Princes William and Harry. Together with the 11-person jury, they listened as Lord Justice Scott Baker explained: ‘Mr Al Fayed had maintained throughout that the crash had been in furtherance of a conspiracy by the Establishment, in particular, His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who used the security services to carry it out.’ It was a shocking accusation and the trial promised to excavate the claim in full.
She begged the court’s indulgence while she explained: ‘If I could just divert to prove my point? John [Spencer] and I used to be asked the most incredibly impertinent questions, about not only Diana, but the rest of the Royal Family, and people used to listen agog at dinner parties, waiting for our reply. We developed a reply which always amused Diana very much. We used to say, “It is very kind of you to ask. I am afraid we cannot possibly answer that because we know too much.” It always annoyed people very much indeed, which was quite deliberate, because the questions were extraordinarily impertinent.’
But what the world and Lord Justice Scott Baker most wanted to know about was Raine’s relationship with the late Earl Spencer’s children. ‘It is right, is it not, that your relationship with his children was not an altogether happy one during the course of your marriage?’ asked Ian Burnett QC, representing the coroner
‘Correct,’ the countess responded dryly, offering no further elaboration.
Burnett pressed on: ‘But in the years following his death, you re-established a cordial relationship with the Princess of Wales; that is right, is
‘Yes,’ said the countess, adding that the pair had ‘become very close’. ‘I feel so happy, your Lordship, that at that particular point in her life, when she really was very down, I was able perhaps to help her a little. She would ring up and, at short notice, would come round and sit on the sofa – or plan ahead, even, for lunches. And she wanted us to be seen in public, which was so nice. She always said that I had no hidden agenda. I think that so many
people, because she was so popular and so famous, wanted something out of her.’
After almost an hour of questioning from both sides, it was obvious who knew the most about the princess’s state of mind in the period leading up to her death. The one person who had never, and would never, sell out Diana was that consummate keeper of secrets – her once-despised
stepmother, Raine.
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