Harry’s tribute to Diana with roles for the Spencer family

PRINCE Harry has ensured that his late mother’s family will play a key role on his big day as a way of ‘celebrating the memory’ of Diana, Princess of Wales.

All three of her siblings – Earl Spencer, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale – will be guests, along with their families.

Lady Jane, 61, who is married to the Queen’s former assistant private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, will also give a reading.

Movingly, Diana was a bridesmaid at her 1978 wedding at Westminster Abbey. And it was Lady Jane, along with her sister, Lady Sarah, who accompanied Prince Charles to Paris to repatriate their sister’s body in 1997. The decision to ask her to do a reading on behalf of the family is also a tactful one. For while Harry’s uncle, Earl Spencer, gave an address at Diana’s funeral, he used the occasion to launch a thinlyveiled attack on the Royal Family.

In it, he said: ‘On behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.’

A Kensington Palace spokesman said: ‘In addition to having the support of the Queen, his father the Prince of Wales, and his brother Prince William as best man, Prince Harry is also keen to involve his mother’s family in his wedding.’