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Spencer's marriage was troubled from the beginning. Sixteen months after the wedding, Spencer confessed to London's Daily Mail that he had had an affair with Tatler magazine cartoonist Sally Ann Lasson in Paris, "a second one-night stand, four years after the first." The move was intended as a pre-emptive strike against plans by News of the World to tell Lasson's account of the couple's trysts. In the midst of all this, Lockwood was battling anorexia, a condition, it appears, Spencer did not always deal with sensitively. In a widely reported incident, Spencer apparently told guests at his 30th birthday party that his father had always advised him to find a woman who would stick with him through thick and thin and that "those of you who know Victoria know that she's thick, and she certainly is thin." Spencer and Lockwood claim that this was said in jest, but the comment seems rather harsh nonetheless.
That Spencer, like his famous sister, would find romantic relationships especially unmanageable comes as little surprise given their home lives as children. As the younger siblings, Diana and Charles Spencer bore the brunt of their parents' breakup. In 1967 their mother Frances left the family to be with her lover, wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd. The two later married and eventually moved to a farm on the tiny Isle of Seil in western Scotland. Spencer won custody of his daughters and son. (Mrs. Shand Kydd, who recently converted to Catholicism, continues to live there today; her husband left her in 1988 for another woman.)
A number of nannies came through Park House and later Althorp, where the children moved with their father in 1975. According to biographer Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story, the future 9th Earl did not sit down to a meal with his father in the downstairs dining room until he was seven. The arrival of a new mistress in 1977 brought no burst of happiness to the manor. Charles first discovered that his father had married Raine, the former Countess of Dartmouth and daughter of novelist Barbara Cartland, from his headmaster at boarding school. He and Diana quickly came to dislike their stepmother, dubbing her "Acid Raine."
After his father's death in 1992, Spencer spoke openly in the press about his distaste for Raine, likening her redecoration of Althorp to "the wedding-cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco." This, as well as the Lasson episode, was one of the many instances in which Spencer, like the Princess of Wales, used the media to his advantage, despite a long-expressed loathing of its intrusiveness. In fact, after university, Spencer joined the press corps, taking a job as a light-news correspondent on NBC's Today show, for which he reported directly from the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York. In a truly paradoxical move, Spencer appeared on the scandal-mongering, syndicated American tabloid show Inside Edition in 1994 to blame the press for the breakup of his sister's marriage and to deem the British media, in particular, "the biggest cancer in society today." Well, perhaps not the biggest. That same year he posed happily for a lengthy cover story in Britain's Hello! magazine with his newborn son.