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Elizabeth II gets jealous, Prince Charles plots to depose her and Philip finds a young female friend. Series five of the Netflix drama tackles the royals’ nightmare 1990s

In the new series of The Crown we see Diana, Princess of Wales sitting on the sofa at Kensington Palace watching an ITV special called The Monarchy: The Nation Decides. The host, Trevor McDonald, poses the question: “Do you want a monarchy?” for the public to phone up and weigh in on — Diana picks up the phone and is seen voting no, again and again.

The programme really did happen — the result was 66 per cent in favour of the monarchy, 34 per cent against. But Diana voting is dramatic licence. This is what The Crown does, artfully blurring fact and fiction — and attracting millions of viewers. The fifth series of the Netflix hit comes out on November 9, nine weeks after the death of Her Majesty the Queen. Even if the series were a fawning biopic there would be accusations of insensitive timing but this one is set to stoke more fires than ever. The Sunday Times has seen all ten episodes — the first publication to do so — and as with previous series it makes for uncomfortable viewing for the Palace.

The Crown may be a drama, but it has an impact on our views of the royal family. The new series begins in 1991 with Charles and Diana’s doomed “second honeymoon” in the Med, takes in the Queen’s annus horribilis and stops before Diana’s death in 1997. No shortage of drama then.

The series was written at least a year before the Queen died, and filming was completed many months ago. It was to have been most noteworthy as an inauguration for The Crown’s third new cast, with Imelda Staunton taking over from Olivia Colman as the Queen, Jonathan Pryce from Tobias Menzies as the Duke of Edinburgh, Dominic West succeeding Josh O’Connor as Charles and Elizabeth Debicki following Emma Corrin as Diana.

What this series does is remind us how quickly public opinion of the royal family as individuals and an institution has changed over the years. Wherever you stand on the monarchy, The Crown is going to provoke heated discussion. Spoilers ahead . . .

Prince Philip’s new friend

Natasha McElhone joins the cast as Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, a close friend of Prince Philip’s until his death. Penny is the daughter of the Angus Steakhouse founder, Reginald Eastwood, and became part of the royal inner circle through her husband, Norton Knatchbull (it is a small royal world; Norton Knatchbull was Philip’s godson and a year above Prince Charles at the boarding school Gordonstoun).

Penny was 26 when she met Philip, then 58, and we see them becoming close friends, bonding over a shared love of carriage driving. When Penny’s five-year-old daughter Leonora died of kidney cancer in 1991, Philip stepped in to offer support.

Their friendship endured — Penny, now 69, was the only non-royal to attend Philip’s funeral service at Windsor Castle when it was scaled back because of Covid restrictions. The Crown speculates whether Penny and the duke were ever more than close friends.

When Philip meets Penny, as The Crown tells it, he is feeling useless and wanting interests outside the royal bubble. In The Crown Penny — a young, chic countryside countess — becomes a confidante for Philip. We see them alone discussing how he and the Queen have “grown in separate directions”. While out carriage driving together they touch hands — the camera zooms in and lingers on the touch — and he gives her his private phone number.

Knatchbull at Prince Philip’s funeral MAX MUMBY/GETTY IMAGES

At the end of the episode the Queen asks him if he thinks husbands and wives should keep secrets from one another in a marriage, intimating that she is aware something might be amiss.

This is familiar territory for The Crown: series two dramatised several allegations of the duke’s infidelity, including with the Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova, and this will only heighten speculation about Philip.

Penny’s beauty is readily acknowledged by the duke and the Queen in a bedtime discussion. He tells his wife that he has given up his autonomy and his career to be married to her and points out that they have different interests and passions — he wants companionship and the carriage-driving gang provide that. The Queen snaps back that his carriage-driving companion is his godson’s wife, half his age. “It’s friendship, Lilibet,” the duke says. “It’s not that sort of companionship. That would just make me even more lonely.”

Nevertheless, the Queen does feel compromised. In a key scene Penny is summoned to the stables at Windsor Castle for a reckoning. She has concluded — at the duke’s prompting — that Penny should be brought in to the royal family, not pushed out. “Should people happen to see the Duke of Edinburgh out and about with a beautiful younger companion it would be an irritation if they felt at liberty to jump to any wrong conclusions,” she says to Penny. “So why don’t you come in the car with me to church this Christmas at Sandringham? Nip all that in the bud.’”

Was the Queen a bad mother?

In 1992 Charles came to Windsor Castle to persuade his mother that he and Diana should separate officially. This was the Queen’s annus horribilis —three out of her four children were having marriage breakdowns, with the Duchess of York’s affair with her financial advisor revealed in the papers with a photograph of John Bryan sucking Sarah Ferguson’s toe. In The Crown this prompts a testy discussion between Charles and the Queen. “I’ve done as you asked, Mummy,” he says. “I’ve tried to make it work for 11 years. But there comes a point . . .”

It leads to a wider discussion about the marital difficulties of the Queen’s children’s and the whole role of the royal family as a moral example to the nation. At one point Charles says in exasperation that “if we were an ordinary family and social services came to visit they would have thrown us into care and you [the Queen] into jail”.

The Queen is later shown talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey (played by Richard Rycroft) and conceding that such a run of broken relationships “begins to look like parental failure of the most awful kind”. As with most private conversations in The Crown, there is no verbatim record of either of these conversations. But in his 1994 authorised biography Charles did describe himself as “emotionally estranged” from his parents, while craving the “affection and appreciation” from them that they were “unable or unwilling” to offer.

Tampongate

Charles’s call to Camilla in 1989, recorded and sold to the press by an amateur radio operator, is featured here, and although the tape has been doing the rounds on TikTok since King Charles’s accession, our new monarch won’t thank Netflix for dredging the whole thing up again. In the tape, the full transcript of which was published by Sunday People in 1993, Charles says he wants to “live inside your trousers” and would therefore like to come back in another life as “a Tampax”.

In context, however, the tampongate episode is part of a more measured assessment of Charles’s character — the call is shown as part of a touching, private moment when Charles, on his own at a shooting weekend with friends, calls Camilla at her home to tell her how much he misses her. They bat ever more risqué suggestions back and forth about precisely what they would do were they with one another, but throughout it is a scene of genuine affection rather than lewdness.

The same episode also takes great pains to show Charles as a moderniser and champion for youth through the creation of the Prince’s Trust. He’s even shown attempting to breakdance at a Prince’s Trust event in 1985 where he is invited to the dancefloor. This may be more embarrassing than tampongate (highly recommended — it’s available on YouTube); our new King is willing but ultimately lacks rhythm.

Did Charles want mum out of the way?

For years Charles’s longing for the top job has been a running joke in Private Eye, but The Crown says unequivocally that he was indeed a frustrated king-in-waiting. Charles is shown summoning John Major (Jonny Lee Miller) to Highgrove for a secret meeting and effectively pitching to replace his mother. “What makes the Conservative Party successful? Its instinct for renewal and its willingness to make way for someone younger. For almost 60 years my great-great-grandfather Edward VII was kept waiting in the wings. He longed to be given responsibilities but his mother refused. And yet when his time came he proved his doubters wrong and his reign was a triumph,” he tells Major. Charles asks that Major, when he comes to Balmoral, judge for himself “whether this institution is in safe hands”.

The angriest he gets in the whole run is when confronting Diana with her comments from the Bashir interview that he was “unfit to be king”. “The expectation, the waiting for it [being king] to happen — look how miserable it’s made you,” she says over tea at Kensington Palace. “It’s not the waiting that’s made me miserable,” he counters. “It’s the years spent rotting in a marriage to someone trying to destroy me.”

Waltz with Bashir

The tell-all Diana interview in 1995, in which she said there were three people in her marriage, was watched by nearly 23 million viewers in the UK, or39.3 per cent of the population at the time. It isn’t recreated here — although the BBC says it will never air it again, you can find it on the internet — but Netflix and the writer Peter Morgan are pretty clear who is to blame for it happening. Martin Bashir (played by Prasanna Puwanarajah) is shown forging documents then lying to Earl Spencer. Ironically, given all that followed, Bashir then assures Diana that she should go with him, and not Oprah Winfrey, for example, because then she would be “protected by the best brand name in the world for integrity — the BBC”.

Diana v the deep state

Was Diana bugged by MI5? The Crown says indisputably that she was. There are numerous scenes of Diana roaming a deserted Kensington Palace, phoning friends and staff. Often the calls end with her hearing strange clicks and screaming down a crackling line at whoever might be listening in. In one incident the brake cables on her car appear to have been cut, leading to a dangerous near miss. The implication in The Crown is that Diana’s butler Paul Burrell’s “dark forces” were very much at work and that the Palace was behind them. Debicki’s Diana is superb, portrayed as lost, isolated and paranoid — but with good reason.

Fayed, Dodi and Diana

An entire episode is given over to Mohamed Al Fayed (Salim Daw, Oslo), his son Dodi (Khalid Abdalla, The Kite Runner) and their obsession with the royal family. Both actors, in particular Daw, are terrific, breathing life into figures portrayed so often as pantomime villains. For Fayed, the royal family was the golden ticket to entry and acceptance into British high society. The suggestion is that by spurning Fayed’s attempts to buy his way into royal circles (sponsoring a horse trial that he thought would get him to sit next to the Queen; buying and refurbishing Edward and Wallace Simpson’s French villa, then returning the contents to the royal family), the monarchy drove Diana towards the family of a fellow outsider.

Britannia for the scrapyard?

Episode one sets up the Royal Yacht Britannia as a metaphor for the Queen — “a floating, seagoing expression of me” is how she describes what she also calls her favourite home (before even Balmoral). The problem is that others, namely Charles, Philip and the British public, see “the boat” as outdated: “She’s so obviously past her best.” Should millions of pounds of public money be spent to keep the edifice afloat or should it be scrapped? Spot the metaphor — the relevance of the monarchy is a thread. Discussions take place just as a Sunday Times poll reveals that the public would like the Queen to be replaced by Prince Charles.

Series five of The Crown is on Netflix from November 9

Source: Why The Crown’s new season is the most controversial yet Benji Wilson, The Sunday Times October 15 2022