Prince Harry followed in the footsteps of his late mother when releasing his tell-all memoir Spare, as Princess Diana once exposed her own truths in explosive tape recordings.

Diana wasn’t afraid of expressing herself, and in a controversial move, she secretly collaborated with a royal author on a biography about her life – during which she claimed that King Charles, then Prince of Wales, was sorely “disappointed” upon Harry’s birth, for one particular reason.

Diana was not able to meet up in person with the royal author Andrew Morton, so instead she collaborated with him using go-between James Colthurst – a mutual friend of the journalist and princess. Colthurst took Morton’s questions directly to Diana and recorded her answers on hours’ worth of recordings. These tapes were then turned into a documentary back in 2017, and a follow-up film in 2023 included audio of Diana saying that Charles had been “disappointed” by Harry’s birth. Diana revealed that the frank admission caused a real upset in the Spencer family.

“At Harry’s christening, Charles went up to Mummy and said ‘we’re so disappointed, we wanted a girl’ and Mummy snapped his head off and said ‘you should realise you are lucky to have a child that’s normal,'” Diana said on the tapes, adding that it impacted the quality of Charles’s relationship with her mother. Ever since that day, the shutters have come down. That’s what he does when he gets somebody answering back at him.”

This wasn’t the only major revelation on the tapes that Diana recorded – something that was fictionalised in the hit Netflix show The Crown. Morton explained he could barely believe his ears when he pressed play on the recordings Diana had made: “I felt I’d been transported into a parallel universe. The Princess was talking about her unhappiness, her sense of betrayal, her suicide attempts — and two things I’d never previously heard of: an eating disorder called bulimia nervosa and a woman called Camilla.”