‘The Crown’ Is ‘Unnervingly’ Accurate About Diana, Says Royal Biographer Andrew Morton

Royalist is The Daily Beast’s newsletter for all things royal and Royal Family. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Sunday.

Andrew Morton, the journalist who wrote the book Diana: Her True Story, has told The Daily Beast that a scene in the new season of The Crown in which his office is broken into is accurate, that he believes the break-in was part of a campaign to intimidate him, and that he believed Diana’s claims that her phones were being bugged—as depicted in the show.

He also told The Daily Beast that a scene in which his and Diana’s go-between, James Colthurst, is knocked off his bike, apparently also as part of the same intimidation campaign, is essentially accurate.

He added that the rendition of Diana by Elizabeth Debicki was “unnerving” in its accuracy.

He said: “I was blown away by how authentic Elizabeth Debicki was in her portrayal of Diana. It was like being back in the room with her 30 years ago. It was unnerving. It was like being with a ghost. It spoke to me very clearly.”

One of the themes in the new series of the Netflix show is that Princess Diana believes her phone is being bugged, and that she is being spied on by Britain’s security services. The theme is established in the second episode, when Diana starts to express anxiety about hearing strange clicks and noises on her phone.

When the phone rings, she says: “I’m not answering that. I’m not speaking on this thing again, ever. I heard a click on our line this morning. On this end.”

Her private secretary Patrick Jephson replies: “It’s my understanding that every call, incoming and outgoing, goes through the main palace switchboard, making it very difficult indeed to set up a tap.”

Diana responds: “Yes, but not impossible.”

The background to all this is that she is starting to collaborate with Morton, then a royal correspondent, using tapes supplied to him by an intermediary, James Colthurst.

In another sequence, Colthurst is seen being knocked off his bike as he cycles through London, while Morton suffers a break-in; his office is shown ransacked. The implication is that shady figures within the establishment and the security services are trying to stop Diana from telling her story.

Morton told The Daily Beast: “Writing that book was the royal equivalent off All The President’s Men. You would see danger in the shadows.

“From the first moment that I heard the tapes, I was very careful. I remember standing back from the edge of the platform on the subway going home. I had been admitted into a secret circle. The secret circle knew the truth about Diana’s life, and many powerful people did not want that truth to be revealed.”

Asked about the scene which shows his office ransacked, Morton said: “My office was broken into. It happened just a few days after I had been warned, separately, by {journalists] Arthur Edwards and Richard Kay, that the security forces were looking carefully to find my source.

“An old camera was stolen and some files. Did it increase the sense of paranoia? Yes.

“And James was knocked off his bike in Parliament Square—and left scrambling in the gutter to pick up a tape recording of Diana.”

In The Crown, Diana is so concerned that she calls in a team of specialist security people to sweep her house for bugs, even demanding they check the light fittings.

Morton confirmed to The Daily Beast that this really happened.

“Yes, we had Diana’s rooms swept for bugs. Towards the end, I would use payphones. The Crown shows the sense of un-named and anonymous watchers and it’s absolutely true, there is no need for Peter Morgan to make anything up.”

Diana’s fears are revisited in Episode 7, when Martin Bashir, the interviewer who would subsequently conduct the bombshell Panorama interview with Diana, reads a newspaper clipping saying that her brother Charles Spencer’s security guard, Alan Waller, has been convicted of leaking Spencer’s private information, selling to a newspaper a private letter of Spencer’s which was critical of the princess’s behavior.

This, The Crown implies, gives him the idea of faking bank statements to present to Spencer, which he has since admitted to doing.

Bashir is seen telling Spencer that the bank statements prove that not only is he being bugged but that so, also, is his sister, and controversially implicates Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary at the time, as, “a spy.”

So while Bashir is clearly presented as manipulative, and heartlessly exploiting Diana’s fears, Diana is seen several times making phone calls which do indeed feature mysterious whirls or clicks, including a call with her acupuncturist and a phone call with William.

Asked if he believed Diana’s calls were indeed being tapped, Morton pointed out that four royal tapes made it into the public domain in the ’90s.

While it is obviously hard to prove definitively that Diana was being surveilled, Morton’s compelling argument is that not just Diana but all of the royal family were having their communications intercepted. Most famously of course there is Tampongate, the intimate phone call between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in which Charles fantasized about being a tampon.

As The Daily Beast recently detailed, it simply doesn’t make any sense that the operator recorded the phone call on a Monday but it was made on a Sunday.

The conspiracy theory has always been that it was recorded by enemies of Charles who did not want him to be king, and then transmitted over radio waves in the hope that a scanner would pick it up.

However Morton’s point is that this was just one of four confidential conversations that leaked to the newspapers in the 1990s: Princess Diana was taped having a confidential conversation with her boyfriend James Gilbey, which was published by the Sun in 1992, commonly known as “Squidgygate” because of the pet name he used for her.

There was also “Fergiegate,” in which Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew discussed marital problems and “Dukegate,” in which Prince Philip was recorded making indelicate remarks about Charles and Diana’s impending divorce.

Morton told the Daily Beast: “Even the queen, as I say in my new book The Queen, was wondering when it would all stop... It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that everything was being taped, because the ones that leaked were what I would call significant phone calls. What are the chances of that?”

Ken Wharfe, Diana’s bodyguard, told her inquest he thought the recording was made by the security services and then transmitted “on a loop” to allow radio hams to pick it up.