Prince Harry. Photo / AP
OPINION:
Sometimes the universe really has a perverse sense of humour. On Tuesday, new drama surrounding the next season of The Crown detonated after one of Diana, the Princess of Wales' best friends Jemima Khan very publicly raised concerns over how the production would portray the tragic, late royal.
And Diana's son Prince Harry? Why, on Tuesday night he is slated to appear as part of a conference panel on misinformation.
Even though we are about a year out from the next instalment in The Crown hitting screens, the controversy is already heating up over how the regal soap opera will handle the sensitive and tragic final chapter of the princess's life.
Now Diana's confidant, Khan, has very loudly distanced herself from the production and raised doubts about the series' treatment of the royal.
Khan, who was close to Diana in the years before her death, had initially been working with The Crown creator Peter Morgan, telling the Times: "After a great deal of thought, having never spoken publicly about any of this before, I decided to contribute."
She and Morgan then proceeded to spend from September 2020 to February this year working on scripts that covered Diana's romance with surgeon Hasnat Khan (a cousin of Jemima's ex-husband Imran Khan), her trips to Pakistan (where Jemima Khan lived at the time), her incendiary Panorama interview and her relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed.
However, Khan has not only pulled the pin on her involvement but has very vocally made it known that when she realised that the princess's story "would not necessarily be told as respectfully or compassionately as I had hoped, I requested that all my contributions be removed from the series and I declined a credit".
The unspoken imputation here is that The Crown's treatment of this turbulent period of Diana's life is going to be far, far from all rose-tinted remembrances and pastel-hued saint-in-waiting material.
Cue some ominous thunderclaps and background music.
And it is because of this Khan situation that Harry is now in the line of fire, again, from some quarters in the UK, with calls growing for him to speak up given that he and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex are now commercially in bed with Netflix.
Or to put it another way, he needs to address things given he is set to rake in an estimated $150 million from the very same organisation which looks set to profit off the back of his mother's suffering and pain. (Or if you want to get really smart about it, it's maman versum mammon.)
Harry dodged this tricky Crown question when he was interviewed, having left his dignity in his other pants, on top of a bus by James Corden in February this year. In what sounded suspiciously like a Dorothy Dixer the talk show host asked how he felt about the hit series. Harry replied, in part: "I am way more comfortable with The Crown than I am seeing stories written about my family or my wife. That (The Crown) is obviously fiction, take it how you will."
A deft piece of fancy footwork putting the spotlight back on his bete noire, the British press.
(Also, do audiences, especially outside of the UK, truly understand The Crown plays fast and loose with the truth? There are more than 67 million members of Generation Z, who were born in or after 1997, in the US and therefore have no living memory of Diana. Last year, then-British Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden asked Netflix to add a 'health warning' to the show, saying "Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.")
However, this Sussex Netflix shambles is going nowhere, fast.
He and Megan have needed and will continue to need a huge amount of cash to keep their new Californian life afloat, a sum that the Daily Mail has estimated at being as high as $8.3 million including the cost of their mortgage and security. Enter Netflix and the streaming giant's very, very deep pockets.
(The question that has never been answered is why they decided to work with this company and not any of the other major players such as Apple or Amazon.)
Netflix might have solved any liquidity issues facing Harry and Meghan but in attaching themselves to $300 billion plus behemoth they have also got themselves in an unwinnable situation.
The Sussexes have firmly established themselves as litigious and loud voices willing to take aim at media outlets and publications who they see as invading their family's privacy, yet they have offered nothing but Harry's lily-livered Corden defence on a series which amounts to the most egregious invasion of the royal family's privacy. Ever.
In the UK, Harry is coming under attack over this situation.
Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine, has told The Sun: "I don't think Harry gets it. I presume when he did the deal with Netflix he didn't think it through — but Meghan would have, she's not an idiot.
"He talked about The Crown during his bus interview with James Corden, so he's not totally oblivious."
"The ONLY time Harry remains blessedly mute is when it comes to Netflix," commentator Clemmie Moodie wrote, also in The Sun. "But hey, money talks."
Angela Levin, who spent time with the royal in question for her book Harry: A Biography of a Prince, has argued that he "should tear the deal up and make a stand for his mother. What's more important, money or defending his mum? It's astonishing he can't find his voice on this."
There is such an exquisitely painful irony here. Harry and Meghan left the claustrophobic strictures of a powerful organisation to live a life unfettered and unbound. And yet they now find themselves fettered and bound by another powerful organisation, unable to bite the very generous hand that is feeding them. This time though, the shackles are of their very own making.
This Crown situation could also see relations between Harry and his brother Prince William sour even further.
Earlier this year, the BBC found that journalist Martin Bashir had used faked bank statements (which pointed to the royal being bugged) to get Diana to agree to her 1995 Panorama interview. William released a scorching (and highly unusual) personal video statement saying "It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC's failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her."
Harry also forcefully spoke up at the time saying that "the ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life."
As we inch closer to the new season of The Crown's release date, on one side we have William very clearly staking his ground and ready to take up PR arms to guard the legacy of his mother and on the other, Harry who is accepting a literal fortune from the same company who looks set to plunder and mine Diana's memory for the sake of entertainment.
Because make no mistake: the next outing of the royal soapie will be raking over the most damaging period of time in regards to the Princess of Wales. Sure, her disintegrating marriage to Prince Charles will likely get plenty of air time but during the same period there was a lot else going on that neither her sons nor family would surely want dramatised for the screen.
Take her growing paranoia and that she became convinced that the security services or other mysterious forces were bugging her Kensington Palace apartment; or the ignominious Oliver Hoare situation which saw police intervene after Diana started making harassing phone calls to the married art dealer; or the fact that her former longtime love interest James Hewitt had betrayed her with the publication of his tell-all, Princess in Love. (On the day it landed on shelves, Diana reportedly went to a session with her healer Simone Simons and shouted "I hope his c**k shrivels up!")
Seeing this Diana, the complicated, real woman, and all of her pain, loneliness, and fear, or whatever interpretation of all of this which The Crown offers up, rendered in high definition for our viewing 'pleasure' will surely be deeply painful for her family.
What a mess. What a huge mess.
The only winner here? Netflix's stock price.
• Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
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