It is almost impossible to tell Princess Diana’s story without also putting the media at the center. Throughout her life—and infamously at her death—photographers were an ever-looming presence. The tens of thousands of images and column inches devoted to her both reveal her story and are her story.
It is natural, therefore, that season six of The Crown devotes much time to illustrating the ways in which the Princess encountered the press. Her hounding by packs of photographers is given much attention with a heavy sense of mounting foreboding. However, the drama also features scenes which show Diana confronting and speaking with photographers as well as a scene about her giving a journalist information.
In episode one Diana (played by actress Elizabeth Debicki) is shown posing for photographers on holiday before later taking a boat to speak with them. “Hello boys,” she says, asking sarcastically how long she was going to have the “pleasure” of their company. In episode two, there is a scene featuring Prince Charles (played by Dominic West) being told by an aide that Diana has passed information to her “favorite journalist” about Charles spending the weekend with Camilla and not his sons.
The scenes in The Crown are fictional. But it is true that Diana did speak directly with several journalists and photographers as she attempted to manage the intensity of the spotlight. “The Princess of Wales had a surprisingly intimate friendship, particularly by today’s standards, both in public and in private with some of the photographers and journalists,” Joe Little, Editor of Majesty Magazine tells T&C, adding that she would “exchange banter” with them at times. “Diana was just 19 when her relationship with the Prince of Wales became public knowledge and her life became intense. She developed her own coping mechanism, with varying degrees of success.”
Diana: Her True Story–in Her Own Words
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The most infamous example of Diana confiding in a journalist is Andrew Morton (played by actor Andrew Steele in The Crown’s season five) who she famously passed information to indirectly for his bombshell book. However, Daily Mail reporter Richard Kay was also known for having gained her trust to the extent that she called him just before her 1997 death.
In a 2003 column for the Independent newspaper, Kay wrote about being photographed in a car with Diana in 1994 and the fallout that ensued. “Meeting her in the middle of a busy metropolis and then going for a drive with her was probably not one of the brightest things to do,” he wrote. “But she wanted to talk to me and this was the preferred method, because at the time she thought that all her phones were bugged…Inevitably, it made a lot of people in Fleet Street extremely jealous of me and some fairly serious attempts were made by other newspapers to try to destabilise this relationship.”
While the relationship Diana had with Kay was the exception rather than the rule, other media figures have boasted conversations and private meetings with the Princess. Piers Morgan has famously revealed that he had a private Kensington Palace lunch with Diana and a young Prince William in 1996 when he was editor of the Daily Mirror, recently writing in The Sun that she “enlightened me about everything.” Former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings shared in a 2020 Channel 4 documentary that she had opened up to him not long before her infamous Panorama interview, describing their conversation as “absolutely gripping stuff.” And photographer Jason Fraser spoke to the Daily Mail in 2013 about being updated by Diana about her whereabouts while she was with Dodi in 1997.
However, in a 2004 article for The Guardian, author of Diana’s biography Rosalind Coward wrote that an “image of Diana the manipulator” was “entirely at odds” with what her research found. Suggesting that the extent to which Diana communicated with the media over her whereabouts has been mischaracterised, she wrote, “One of the supposed proofs of her manipulative skills is the fact that the press were tipped off once or twice to hostel and hospital visits,” she wrote. “It is well known that Diana visited homeless hostels and occasionally took her sons. What is not known is how much private and casual visiting she did.”
Diana on the Fayed yacht, the Jonikal, in July 1997.
Interestingly, The Crown swerves entirely the idea that Diana played any part in giving information to photographers over her whereabouts with Dodi in the summer of 1997. Instead, a fictional plot about Mohamed Al Fayed engaging photographer Mario Brenna (which is the name of the real photographer who took the real images) is presented.
However, The Crown’s suggestion that Diana gave a favored journalist a story in the summer of 1997 is rooted in fact. Indeed, journalist Richard Kay recently addressed this directly. Writing in the Daily Mail how The Crown scene had his “full attention,” he continued, “The source of this princely anger was me and an article I had written for this newspaper on August 9, 1997. In it, I reported how William and Harry, who had been holidaying with their mother on the French Riviera, had been handed over by the divorced Diana to their father. And how, just a day afterwards, the young princes had been packed off from Highgrove, Charles’s Gloucestershire home, to spend two days with their nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, at her parents’ estate on the Welsh borders.” While stopping short of confirming outright that Diana was the source of the story, Kay wrote that he sometimes spoke to her five or six times a day that summer.
The reference to Kay’s story in The Crown is a blink-and-you-miss-it moment and the scene showing Debicki talking to photographers is similarly brief. Yet both serve to reignite discussion about aspects of the Princess’s much-debated and often differently-defined relationship with the press.
When it comes to Diana and the media there are facts, there is interpretation and there is also fiction. The Crown is consistently found wanting when it comes to fact-checking. However, season six does get to the heart of one truth—that Diana’s story is inseparable from the industry that told it to the world.
Contributing Editor
Town & Country Contributing Editor Victoria Murphy has reported on the British Royal Family since 2010. She has interviewed Prince Harry and has travelled the world covering several royal tours. She is a frequent contributor to Good Morning America. Victoria authored Town & Country book The Queen: A Life in Pictures, released in 2021.
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