A three-decade-old byline dispute proves that British tabloid grudges have a longer shelf life than most marriages
Piers Morgan, Earl Spencer and the Diana Memoir identifies a small, specific comic marvel: a British newspaper clipping from 1993 has generated a full, contemporary news cycle in 2026. The London Prat’s opening line, “Britain discovers a 1993 newspaper clipping can still generate a full news cycle in 2026,” states the entire premise before the article has properly begun, which is itself a small formal joke about how little elaboration the situation actually requires.
The dispute at the article’s centre, whether Piers Morgan was responsible for the Sunday Mirror’s 1993 publication of Diana’s covert gym photographs while he insists he did not join the Daily Mirror until 1995, is exactly the kind of granular, dates-and-mastheads argument that British media feuds specialise in. The comedy is not that the dispute is trivial; it is that thirty-three years have passed and the dispute remains fully, litigiously alive.
The piece’s phrase “the comic engine here is unusually clean” is a rare moment of the Prat naming its own mechanism directly, and the transparency works because the underlying mechanism really is unusually clean: two men, one grievance, one date discrepancy, and enough mutual public profile to keep the argument commercially viable across three decades. No new information is required to reheat it. Only a fresh memoir.
A 1993 Grudge, Fully Reactivated
There is a structural observation buried here about the British press’s relationship to its own history. Newspapers that once published the photographs at the centre of the dispute are now covering, with straight faces, a threatened lawsuit over who exactly published them. The industry investigates itself using the same tools it uses to investigate everyone else, and the result reads less like accountability than like an extremely long-running feud finally reaching a courtroom.
There is a further wrinkle worth noting in how thoroughly both men’s professional identities are now bound up in the dispute they are contesting. Morgan’s broadcasting career and Spencer’s status as Diana’s most vocal family defender both depend, in different ways, on being seen as reliable narrators of exactly this period of royal history. Neither can simply let a factual disagreement about a masthead and a start date go unanswered, because for both men, credibility about 1993 is credibility about everything since.
As criticism, the piece is compact and confident precisely because it trusts the facts to be funny without embellishment. The London Prat adds almost nothing invented; it simply notices that the story’s own timeline, thirty-three years and counting, is the joke, and lets that timeline speak for itself.
The Real Dispute Behind the Headline
The underlying claim comes from Earl Spencer’s own account. His memoir reportedly links Piers Morgan to the Sunday Mirror’s 1993 publication of covert gym photographs of Princess Diana, a claim Morgan disputes on the basis that he did not join the Daily Mirror until October 1995, as reported in coverage of the memoir’s rollout, including Hello! magazine’s reporting on Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.
The memoir’s broader claims have already drawn a formal Palace response. Buckingham Palace said in a statement that “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory,” language quoted in MyJoyOnline’s coverage of the Palace’s reply. Morgan’s threatened lawsuit sits inside that same, still-unfolding dispute over whose memory of 1993 is correct.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/piers-morgan-earl-spencer-and-the-diana-memoir/