We’re all about to learn the “truth” behind tampongate, according to ‘The Crown’ star Claudia Harrison

The fifth season of The Crown is set to be one of the show’s most controversial. There are hints that Prince Phillip may have had a special lady-friend other than the Queen, whilst there’s also a re-enacting of the Diana and Martin Bashir doc that the BBC swore to the Royal family would never see the light of day again. Most importantly, though, we’ll finally be getting the truth behind the scandal that tops them all: tampongate. 

The Crown star Claudia Harrison, who plays Princess Anne in the forthcoming fifth season of the Netflix drama, has stirred up excitement by claiming the British public will be “surprised” by the “truth” of tampongate. 

The tampongate scandal refers to a 1989 phone call that was leaked to the press between the then-Prince Charles and his mistress at the time, Camilla Parker Bowles (now the Queen Consort). A transcript of the six-minute phone call was printed in The People in 1993, after Prince Charles and Princess Diana split, under the headline: “Charles and Camilla – the tape.”

According to The Independent, In the new series of The Crown, there’s a scene in which Harrison, as Princess Anne, talks to Dominic West’s Prince Charles about the recording. She tells him “no one deserves” the humiliation he’s going through and says that when she got over the “gynaecological” aspect of the transcript, she saw “two teenagers of a certain age being so gloriously human and entirely in love.” Well, if that doesn’t scream romance, we don’t know what does.

“The truth of that recording, I think the British public will be surprised by, because at the time it was portrayed as a thing that it wasn’t,” Harrison told The Independent. “And the even-handedness of The Crown is to examine it, and show the sense of humour, The Goon Show connection Charles had with Camilla. It was a great scene to play,” she added.

For years, Charles and Camilla have called each other by the nicknames Fred and Gladys – characters in the Fifties radio comedy The Goon Show. Harrison added: “[tampongate] happened in the distant past, I was a teenager when that came out and it was spun in a certain way.” We’re not sure how telling your significant other that you wish you could be reincarnated as a tampon so you could live inside her could be misconstrued – but we’re excited to find out! 

She said that, when she was playing Princess Anne (the younger sister of Charles) in the scene, “it felt right” that she would be telling Charles that she “is sharing the load of what it must be like to live in this family.”

The Crown season five will be released on Netflix on November 9th.