The much-criticized fifth season of The Crown opens in 1991, when the marriage of Prince Charles, as he was then, and Princess Diana is crumbling. The future of Britannia looks grim, and John Major is prime minister. It ends in the summer of 1997, after the Prince and Princess have separated and divorced, Tony Blair has been elected, and Princess Diana has given her infamous Panorama interview and been invited to the south of France by Mohamed Fayed. Peter Morgan, The Crown’s writer, has said that this season “is a fictional dramatization, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the royal family — one that has already been scrutinized and well documented by journalists, biographers and historians”. That should have given the filmmakers ample chance to produce a faithful representation of what was going on, and possibly even help us to understand it, as good fiction does. Instead, though, the series falls seriously short of the truth on numerous occasions. Here we sort the fact from the fiction.
Did a Sunday Times survey find the Queen was unpopular and out of touch?
Answer: false
So what wasin the press in August 1991? By this time, the troubles in the Prince and Princess of Wales’s marriage were becoming more public. In response to a gooey 700-picture edition of Hello! on the tenth anniversary of their marriage, the well-connected biographer Selina Hastings wrote in a Telegraph article that “the princess appears deeply hurt by her husband’s unloving behavior”, and suggested that the Queen was “sufficiently worried by the state of the Waleses’ marriage, and their wretchedness, to have given instructions for plans to be devised for a constitutionally justified separation”.
