‘On paper, you would certainly call me an alcoholic’ — Spencer Matthews on losing his brother and making his new documentary

“I never really processed his death, because I never fully believed it at the time. And then obviously when I did come to believe it, I didn’t really understand it, given my age.

We just kind of knuckled down and cracked on; that was just the way of it. And so I feel perhaps I’ve been suppressing certain dimensions for most of my childhood, and teenage years especially,” says Spencer Matthews.

He is sitting in the Battersea flat that is the familiar backdrop to many of his wife, Vogue Williams’ My Therapist Ghosted Me podcasts, in which Spencer plays occasional cameos, a posh foil to Vogue’s brusque wit and Joanne McNally’s scorching one-liners.

Even before Vogue, ‘Spenny’ was well acquainted with a certain type of celebrity. As an original cast member of Made In Chelsea, he was chronicled cadding his way around the more bougie haunts of the Eton set, alongside a rotating cast of photogenic girlfriends.

In recent times, however, he has seemed more mature. Despite their occasional forays into reality TV — including getting married for a second time for E4’s cameras — Spencer & Vogue Inc is now quite the empire with podcasts, brand partnerships and enterprises that include Bare By Vogue and Spencer’s CleanCo non-alcoholic drinks company.

In 2021, they purchased an €8m property in Jersey, alongside their homes in London and Dublin.

In between, they’ve found time to have a family of three — Theodore (four), Gigi (two) and 11-month-old Otto James.

Finding Michael, however, is something of a departure. It’s a documentary, executive-produced by Bear Grylls, that follows Spencer’s bid to find the body of his brother and bring him home.

Michael died just after reaching the peak of Everest in 1999. He was just 22 and, at the time, was the youngest Briton to summit the mountain.

Spencer is the youngest Matthews; his half-sister, Nina, is the eldest, then brother James (Mr Pippa Middleton) then, absent Michael, and finally, Spencer. His mother, Jane, appears in the film; his father, David, does not.

It is obvious that the loss of Michael caused a massive trauma. This documentary feels like a catharsis of sorts.

“Part of making the film was to not only try and recover him, but to learn a bit more about Michael.

“Obviously when you’re 10 years old, which is the age I was when he died, things feel a little different to how they might if I had been an adult. Everybody else in my family knew him a bit better than I did.”

The documentary revisits 1999, when Michael left for Nepal.

Back then, Spencer was living on Saint Barthélemy, the island on which his family now run the gilded Caribbean bolthole of the super-rich, Eden Rock.

“I always felt that I had a very interesting childhood, and it always felt different to my peers. Because we moved around a little bit.” They lived in Paris for a year, then his parents bought what was at the time a small hotel.

“It hasn’t always been like that,” Spencer says drily of the now luxe resort. “It was once this tiny, four-bedroom, shack-y type thing, cockroach-infested, wild cats everywhere.”

In any case, Spencer happened to be in London to bid farewell to his older brother as he set off for the Himalayas.

“It just didn’t even cross my mind that him climbing Everest was dangerous. I was told that it was, but it didn’t register with me as something that he couldn’t do. I’d always felt that he could do anything.”

And so, when he was told his brother was missing, his response was: “Alright; well, let me know when you find him.”

“Just didn’t register,” he explains.

“I thought the mood in the room was really odd. I thought, ‘OK, what’s the big deal?’

“They said, ‘It’s unlikely that he survived the night’, in a way that would have been appropriate for a 10-year-old. And I remember thinking, ‘Naah, that’s nonsense’. I just kind of left and cracked on with my day. I wasn’t really willing to accept what I’d heard.”

Speaking to Spencer, the phrase “crack on” appears to be something of a family motto. He acknowledges there was a touch of the ‘stiff upper lip’ to his upbringing, but he is reluctant to blame his family for what could be interpreted as reserve.

“Every time I say this, I feel like it could be spun into me trying to say that I had a shit childhood, which I’m not saying,” he begins when I ask him about the phrase.

“My dad is northern, and all of us grew up in a kind of fun, competitive environment, where it was, I suppose, considered weak to show weakness.

“If we were crying as kids, we were told to buck up, stop crying. And that was just the way we were raised. And I’m kind of guilty of that a little bit nowadays with my son. I try to be as understanding as possible,” he laughs, “but it’s kind of drilled into me that crying is weak, and showing any kind of emotion is weak. And you should be a man with a stiff upper lip.

“I understand that being emotionally in tune would be a nice thing, and not weak at all, but that is just the way I am, and have been my whole life. If you can mask weakness, that was just always the preferred route. Which I don’t necessarily agree with, but it’s just ingrained in me.”

However, it is obvious that in the years immediately following Michael’s death, the entire family struggled.

In the documentary, Spencer says that it felt as if they didn’t laugh together as a family for years after his brother’s death.

He says he went into a kind of emotional shutdown.

Vogue and Spencer at the recent Baftas. Photo: Dave Benett/Getty Images

“It was quite complicated to process it as a kid. The easy thing to do was to put on your blinders and carry on.

“It always felt like we had such a happy family, and we were all quite close together, and his death kind of changed the feeling of that,” he says now.

“Not that it made us not close, but there was a morbid, dark time in the family, where people felt a plethora of different feelings around Mike’s death.” For Spencer, one of those “different feelings” was that the death had been avoidable. What had been initially disbelief, and then numbness, later gave way to anger.

“I think during my teenage years I grew to resent the circumstances surrounding his death. When I was slightly older and able to understand things a bit more.”

He admits himself that, as a person, he is “pretty black or white. I kind of lack empathy, I lack sympathy. I’m not not empathetic. I’m kind of reserved with it,” Spencer laughs.

In an interview with The Times in 2020, Spencer conceded that he had “no idea what anxiety was prior to meeting and spending a lot of time with Vogue. It wasn’t something that was ever on my radar. I was really naive about it.”

His own teenage years, then — comprising anger, booze, then reality TV — seem like an understandable, if unfortunate, response to such an unfathomable tragedy. Does he think he was using alcohol as a coping mechanism?“Perhaps, yeah. But I’ve almost purposefully not taken the view that I drank alcohol to excess because my brother died when I was young. I don’t want to put the situation that I was in… you know, I don’t want to liken those two things. I’m obviously very happily sober now, and, thinking about it, it could have been related, I suppose, but it’s not something that I feel the need to get to the bottom of.”

In the past, Spencer has talked about feeling like the black sheep of his family, and then how sobriety paved the way to unlocking parts of himself he didn’t know were there.

Spencer travelled to Everest to bring Michael home. Photo: Disney+

“The black sheep comment was made because when I used to drink alcohol excessively, I felt very different to my brother [James] and dad, both of whom are very successful in their own regard. Dad came from Sheffield, was a mechanic for a period, and then began to be very successful completely off his own back. I think when you look at our family, as we’re often described, a very wealthy family, or whatever it is,” he laughs. “That’s my dad. Before my dad, there was nothing at all. My dad is completely self-made.”

Where they were successful, he had far more interest in socialising. “Being the loudest person in the room, considering myself to be an entertainer, but not a businessman. I wouldn’t be included in their thought process when considering how to further the interests of the family, as an example. I would be the kind of dumb, drunk kid.

“And they would be the serious individuals in the family. And I think when I addressed my relationship with alcohol, and was able to move through it, I felt like I became more welcome in my own family, almost. There was a level of respect, almost, I hadn’t felt before.

Spencer and Bear Grylls in the documentary Finding Michael. Photo: Disney+

“I think they had been proud of me in the past for certain things, but there was a general level of disappointment, perhaps, with my general lifestyle.”

That old Spencer has now been put to bed.

In the documentary, he is mature, mindful, respectful, perhaps still a little naive — he doesn’t appear to realise that Everest will be snowbound or that Base Camp would host a thousand climbers — but he seems nonetheless sincere.

Indeed, sitting on the banks of the Thames speaking to Bear Grylls about the logistics of the mission to Everest, he could be a mainstream television presenter.

There are only flickers in the documentary that seem a little too celebrity, such as his glee that Base Camp now has wifi and the occasional, just too-lingering slow-motion shot.

Clearly, Bear Grylls has been instrumental in the shaping of the narrative. It was after conversations with him that Spencer decided not to dwell on the circumstances of Michael’s death; he went missing just after reaching the summit.

“The film is not about how he died, it is about finding him, and bringing him home. I think had he gone up the mountain and not been able to do it, and fallen off and died under normal circumstances, then there would have been no anger,” Spencer says. “The grieving would have been different.” Instead, he says the family were led to believe at the time that his brother’s death could have been avoided.

“We had heard from people on the climb that oxygen systems weren’t working, that certain oxygen systems were being paired with other apparatus that were not meant to be paired together. Oxygen bottles were being filed down so that different regulators could fit that bottle.”

“I kind of lack empathy, I lack sympathy. I’m not not empathetic. I’m kind of reserved with it.” Spencer Matthews. Photo: Lee Malone

Nothing was proved, but it “felt negligent”, he says. “Because that could have absolutely been avoided. And then he was left on the mountain, instead of being looked after; presumably struggling to breathe. He wasn’t assisted in the way that you could have been expecting on that kind of expedition.”

If his own son was carrying around pain and anger, the advice would be to try and let it go, Spencer says, then acknowledges immediately that this is easier said than done in some cases. The fact he felt Michael’s death could have been avoided made it tricky to let go of in this case. Having been on Everest has helped.

“I think it is quite easy to understand that a lot can go wrong, and a lot can be outside of your control, and actually helping an individual in trouble, up near the summit, would be a really difficult thing to do,” he says of having experienced the mountain’s environment.

“Just getting a firmer and better understanding of not necessarily the circumstances, but just what life up there is like; it’s easier to understand that there could have been other factors involved.”

In spite of his various travails — including the death of his brother and his extreme celebrity — he has only once had therapy. He spoke to a mental-health professional for three hours before making the film.

It was really interesting, he smiles. “I’m not somebody that regularly takes therapy sessions. Nothing against them at all, I just never felt the need for them. This gentleman was fantastic, he made me think in a different way about stuff. It was he who suggested I had repressed emotions for some time. And that could be why I’m so black and white.

Spencer with James Middleton and Prince William at James Matthews’ wedding to Pippa Middleton in 2017. Photo: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images

“He was certainly suggesting that the excessive drinking throughout my teenage years and 20s would almost certainly be as a result of Mike’s death. That’s something that I have never thought about, and to be honest it’s something that I’m not really willing to blame on circumstances outside of my own control. I feel that perhaps it had something to do with it, perhaps it didn’t.”

Beyond the documentary, and the eponymous podcast he hosts with Vogue, Spencer’s main project is CleanCo, which he founded shortly after giving up alcohol.

“What was clear to me was that alcohol was becoming problematic to my health and just my general ability to function at the level that I had always been keen to function at. I began to no longer believe my own ambition. And I began to see things that I had always hoped for myself slipping away.

“I’ve always enjoyed a wonderful relationship with Vogue, but when she was pregnant with Theodore, my drinking was quite bad, and of course the contrast of her not drinking at all probably accentuated it.”

He had always wanted to be a good father, run a business of his own. These goals began to seem less attainable.

“And it was just quite a sharp awakening. After a particular heavy night one night. And some general look of disappointment from Vogue,” he laughs slightly. “I realised that I really want to make this woman proud of me. I really want my family to be proud of me, and I’m not giving myself the best chance for that at the moment.”

He decided to get completely sober, realising a few days in that “this was a total game changer for me”. “I drank to excess often. Not problematic, usually, but certainly to excess regularly. It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, I was able to function at what I felt to be at almost full capacity. Or full capacity.”

Spencer with his older brother Michael, who died when Spencer was aged 10. Photo: Disney+

He has spoken on the company’s Instagram feed about how he finds the word alcoholic problematic. “I think labelling yourself as an alcoholic is quite a big and brave step for anybody.” Would he call himself an alcoholic?

“Em, I think on paper, you would certainly call me an alcoholic, an ex-alcoholic, I don’t really know. I don’t drink alcohol, so it’s difficult to call me an alcoholic, I suppose. But yeah, this is exactly my point.

“For people who know they drink too much, or perhaps feel drunk more regularly than they know is kind of socially acceptable, I don’t think that those people necessarily need to label themselves as an alcoholic before trying to understand how they can curb these habits. Or how they can drink less, or find suitable alternatives to reduce the amount of alcohol you’re drinking.”

He thinks the word almost prevents people from getting the help that they need. “Because most people would not be comfortable calling themselves an alcoholic. So that would stop people going to AA, as an example. Which I think can be very helpful to lots of people.”

Spencer himself went to two or three meetings, and while he understands it is a lifesaver for millions, it didn’t feel right for him.

“But in order to go to AA and stick your hand up and go, ‘Hi, I’m Spencer Matthews, I’m an alcoholic’, that’s a very brave thing to do, publicly in front of people. Even though it feels safe, it’s also far more exposed and public than you perhaps feel comfortable with at the time.”

“My view on Michael’s death is I’m far more relaxed about the whole thing. I’ll never be wholly accepting of the circumstances, but I understand more about it now.” Photo: Lee Malone

Starting his own business, turning it into a success, has put him on more of a level with his family, given them something in common.

That’s on the business side. He has also bonded more with his brother James by emulating some of his physical achievements, including running the Marathon des Sables, a six-day, 251km ultramarathon, something James had run previously.

“I always just thought he was mad. I would be drinking and partying. The very idea of even signing up to that thing was just hell for me. And I couldn’t understand why he did it, right?

“It actually alienated him from me a bit, because I just thought he was weird. I obviously had respect, like, ‘that is amazing, but it’s also odd’. Lo and behold, fast forward time, I’ve now completed that race, and I completely understand why you want to do things like that.”

It’s the fact that pushing yourself through uncomfortable activity is “an interesting part of growth, and understanding who you really are,” he explains, adding that he found the whole thing to be an exciting adventure. “In the same way Mike would have found climbing Everest exciting.”

In a way, he’s following in both of his brothers’ footsteps.

“I think when you’re very comfortable, and you stick to the things you know, I find that life can become a little bit repetitive. And at times a little mundane, so having an exciting physical challenge on the horizon, for me anyway, helps me stay completely on top of training, which helps me always feel good.”

He feels fundamentally changed by making Finding Michael. “My view on Michael’s death is I’m far more relaxed about the whole thing. I’ll never be wholly accepting of the circumstances, but I understand more about it now. I feel no anger at all. I feel closer to him, and I understand him better, which is great. I’ve wanted that.”

It’s a film about brotherly love, and the love of a family. And about tragic loss.

“Attempting to give my brother some kind of legacy is a nice feeling for me. I would like people to know the name Michael Matthews, and people to understand how he was, a little bit. Maybe it’ll help someone.”

​‘Finding Michael’ is now streaming on Disney+