HAVE you taken sides in the royal spat? Maybe you think that Earl Charles Spencer is a man who truly loved his sister, despised her treatment by the royals during her life and seethed at the injustice of her death. King Charles III, in contrast, you may see as a man who loved a woman other than his wife, cared little about his wife during her life, and by some accounts punched the air and told Charles Spencer that his sister would soon be forgotten, even as the English people went a bit nuts in grieving over her. (Remember those mountains of flowers?)
The Gallagher brothers are a bit less discreet in their family spats. During their first US tour, Liam kept changing the words of songs to the point where his brother Noel, who had written the lyrics, lifted a tambourine and whacked Liam about the head with it.
And it didn’t stop there. Their 1996 US tour got more than a bit ragged when Liam declared he couldn’t sing because of a sore throat, then sat watching his brother Noel try to handle the vocals on his own. In 2009 the brothers had a disagreement so strong and divisive their band Oasis came apart at the seams.
But money talks, or in this case sings: In 2025 the Gallagher brothers got together again and did a 41-stop series of performances that swelled their already obese bank accounts.
With the two Charleses, it’s all so much more sophisticated. The notion of Charles Spencer attacking his brother-in-law Charles Windsor with a tambourine or anything else is simply unimaginable. But the loathing between the two is every bit as intense as between Liam and Noel. Both intra-family feuds have gone a long way beyond money. If you doubt me, check out the mansion where Laura Kuenssberg recently interviewed Earl Spencer – together they mounted a carpeted stairway that could have taken twenty people side-by-side and still left room for one of the late Queen Elizabeth’s horses. Earl Spencer is worth well over £80 million, while the man on the throne is worth about £680 million.
Why do Noel and Liam scrap so much? Because they’re (formerly) working-class brothers with Irish blood, so of course they’re going to engage in physical combat and shout swear words at each other. There’s something a bit more honest about their punch-ups than the way Charles III and Charles Spencer lock horns. The King v The Earl is all about what was said. Earl Spencer in his new book (there’s always a book) declares that Charles III was like a man who’d just won the lottery when he heard Di was dead, and assured his dead ex-wife’s brother that she, Diana, would soon be forgotten.
He was right, of course, but it’s not the kind of thing you say when the deceased is barely cold and people are weeping openly in the street. The royal widower was delighted his ex-wife had died, we're told, because it cleared the way for him to get married to his mistress.
There’s one key difference between life with the Gallaghers and life with the Windsors. The Gallaghers, over a short span of time, made their money from composing and singing some really memorable songs. The Windsors, over centuries, got their wealth from killing opponents and looting countries.
The Gallaghers don’t sound or look like people you’d be glad to see move in next door, but they have produced a few songs that are truly memorable. I mean, Noel Gallagher wrote the thrilling ‘Stand by Me’; Charles the King can’t even write his surname on a document.
