Now The Crown really has slipped
Two months after the Queen died, Netflix sinks to new lows in its distortion of facts
IT has been described as ‘trolling on a Hollywood scale’ – and Buckingham Palace will find little comfort in the fifth series of royal drama The Crown.
It features reconstructions of private conversations in lascivious detail, imagined chats between Prince William and his late mother, and Princess Diana’s infamous interview with Martin Bashir.
Last year the-then Duke of Cambridge made a deeply emotional plea asking that the Bashir interview – which was obtained through deception – should never be aired in public again. Sources have since made clear that this applies to using it for dramatic purposes too.
The Daily Mail can today reveal in detail just how far the makers of the series – and writer Peter Morgan – have gone in chasing viewers for the streaming giant Netflix.
The depiction of senior royals, particularly the new King, is so relentlessly negative – and the dramatic licence used to recreate relatively recent events in their lives so great – that some scenes verge on the defamatory.
Royal insiders also point out that The Crown will air almost two months to the day after the Queen died, making the twisting of facts, even more distasteful.
Charles hatchet job
In one episode Charles is seen holding court at an invented dinner party complaining about his ‘predicament’. He says: ‘And how does one describe being Prince of Wales? It’s hardly a job, still less a vocation. What am I? I’m just a useless ornament stuck in a waiting room gathering dust. There I go again – always a little whine with my cheese.’
He leaves the table to call Mrs Parker Bowles who, given that it is Christmas 1989, is at home with her own family.
The prince chats awkwardly with her husband, Andrew, until she picks up the phone in the bedroom and the pair begin to speak, unaware that their highly intimate conversation is being illicitly recorded by, supposedly, an amateur radio ham.
The eavesdropper goes on, as the programme details, to sell the tape to The Daily Mirror. It was eventually published by The People newspaper, along with the audio recordings, in 1993.
The programme makers are not content to spare the King and Queen Consort with the merest reference to the incident. They insist on returning to what was cruelly dubbed ‘Tampongate’ multiple times in the episode – in excruciating word-for-word detail.
Charles is also seen being derogative about his mother to prime minister Tony Blair in order to curry favour with him in another dramatic invention.
Philip and Penny
The relationship between the late Duke of Edinburgh and his close friend, aristocrat Penny Knatchbull, is at the centre of one significant plot.
It even depicts Prince Philip asking the Queen if she can publicly embrace the elegant blonde wife of his godson, Norton, to show that all is well between the two women. Subsequent meetings are, however, depicted as being frosty, with the Queen privately in tears.
While it is true that Penny, now Countess Mountbatten of Burma, was so much a part of Philip’s life that staff nicknamed her ‘And
Also’ – because his guest lists always ended with ‘and also Penny’ – the two women were actually extremely fond of each other.
Other scenes show Philip and Penny visiting the grave of her daughter, Leonora, who died of cancer aged five. Philip was a great source of comfort to the family and they are understood to be greatly distressed about the inclusion of her death.
Bashir interview
Last year Prince William gave a rare on-camera statement blaming Martin Bashir’s 1995 BBC Panorama interview with his mother for fuelling her ‘fear, paranoia and isolation’ and worsening his parents’ relationship.
He concluded: ‘It is my firm view that this Panorama programme holds no legitimacy and should never be aired again’ and urged any media organisation looking to revisit it to think again. But Netflix has put the entire shameful event at the heart of not one but two Crown episodes.
It shows Bashir convincing his BBC bosses to let him ‘throw his hat in the ring’ and chase an interview with Diana, as well as forging bank documents to convince both the princess and her brother, Earl Spencer, that their staff were being paid by the media and security services for information on them.
Bashir, after meeting Diana personally and feeding her paranoia with tales of how the Establishment is out to get her, is shown swaggering back to the BBC telling his bosses: ‘I tell you, she’s desperate to talk, desperate.
‘She opens her mouth and hand grenades come out. She wants to tear down the temple. I think she’s got a thing for me.’
Later, in a particularly dramatic scene, Diana can be seen driving her Audi convertible when the brakes fail. The scene is a reference to her tragic belief at the time that members of the Royal Family were out to kill her – something that fed into her decision to speak to Bashir – which will clearly prove distressing to her family.
Scenes show William with the Queen at Windsor Castle and looking mortified when his mother rings to ask for a meeting to inform her of what she has done.
Diana later tells her mother-inlaw: ‘I felt the need to clear a few things up about my marriage... about the fact I’ve so often been shut out and left to cope on my own and that I’ve suffered from a lack of sympathy and feeling and compassion.’ The Queen replies uncaringly: ‘Oh honestly, it’s a like a broken record... Haven’t we heard all this before a thousand times?’ The series also recreates significant portions of the interview – including the by now infamous comment about there being ‘three of us in this marriage’.
The surgeon lover
Diana’s doomed romance with Hasnat Khan, a respected heart surgeon, is recreated in excoriating detail. The trouble is that only two people knew what happened between them – and Mr Khan has never spoken to the makers of The Crown. The princess tells him that she finds it ‘unexpectedly sexy’ when he talks about his love of junk food, and says she would like to live in Pakistan.
When he tells her she might find life there too challenging, she says: ‘You think the family I married into is any different? I was instructed to dress modestly, speak in a low voice and walk one pace behind my husband and address him always as sir.’
As they kiss she says: ‘You forget I already had a prince. He broke my heart. I’m just looking for a frog to make me happy.’
Uncaring royals
In a flashback, the Queen’s grandfather, George V, is approached by then-PM David Lloyd George, who offers to provide a ship to rescue his cousins, the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, and bring them to Britain in 1917.
He will not do it, he says, without the king’s support. George asks his wife, Queen Mary, what she thinks. The answer is a firm no, with the Queen adding sniffily: ‘It’s possible one might come to regret it.’
The episode then shows the entire Romanov family being brutally executed while George is out shooting and uncaring Mary is walking her dog,
While historians believe George V could have played a more effective role in trying to help his Russian relatives, he was known to have written to them expressing concern for their welfare.
Camilla on marriage
Camilla is seen meeting Charles’ then PR chief, Mark Bolland at a house in north London, and discussing whether she would ever be Queen if she were to marry the Prince of Wales.
The-then Mrs Parker Bowles is depicted referring to ‘the Q word’ and says it is ‘treasonous to even contemplate it’ – all while watching her car being clamped in a clumsy metaphor for the ordinariness of her current life.
She says: ‘I think if we were to marry, I could actually be some use to him. I know how to make the Prince of Wales happy which he deserves and do a better job which the country deserves.’
Former aides have said this was a subject that the now Queen Consort always refused to discuss.
Post-divorce
In another fictitious scene, Charles unexpectedly turns up to Diana’s apartment at Kensington Palace after their divorce terms have been concluded.
He starts to flirt with her, complementing her on how ‘beautiful’ she looks – and says that she still blushes ‘like the very first time’.
Diana makes him a ham omelette as they sit down to discuss her romantic entanglements before Charles suggests a discussion of why their marriage failed.
The scene is even hammier than the soggy mess he is eating, and – needless to say – never actually happened.