The Crown’s Controversial “Tampongate” Scene vs. the Real Charles and Camilla Phone Call
As if it couldn’t get worse for the royal family. Hot on the heels of The Crown’s “Annus Horribilis”—a season five episode dramatizing what was arguably the worst personal year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, between her children’s shattered marriages and tabloid scandals, and her Windsor Castle fire—the Netflix series recreates one of King Charles’s most humiliating moments. In the episode “The Way Ahead,” which airs about two months after Charles finally became king, Dominic West and Olivia Williams reenact the intimate 1989 phone call between Charles and Camilla that was illegally recorded, then years later printed and parodied all over the world, and dubbed “Camillagate” by some, “Tampongate” by others.
“God, I want to feel my way along you, all over you, up and down you,” West, as Charles, says, reading verbatim excerpts of the actual transcript of the infamous phone call. “God, I just wish I could live in your trousers, it would be so much easier.”
“What are you going to turn into?” laughs Williams as Camilla. “A pair of knickers?”
“Or, God forbid, a Tampax,” jests Charles. “Just my luck.”
In a phone call with Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote about the conversation in Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, the best-selling royal biographer tells Vanity Fair, “It did strike me as more than ironic that when so much of the series is made up—dialogue made up, scenes made up—that it would seek refuge in the factual when it suited their purposes and demean[ed the royal family]. So here we do have an instance in a series that is largely fictional of them recreating the facts of what [Charles and Camilla] said because the [actual words] put them in a very bad light.”
“What I found fascinating about it was really not so much the language that they used, which was eye-opening for the heir apparent and his girlfriend, but that it showed their dynamic—that she was attuned to nuance and she was shrewd and she understood the motivations of other people and how people even in their social set bowed and scraped to him because he was who he was,” says Smith. “Also, that she really understood that he needed to be constantly reassured because he was feeling very vulnerable…She was being very maternal to him. He was being insecure. Those are the things that I tried to emphasize [in my book]. But I think it takes on a whole new and potentially damaging aspect when you recreate those words…I definitely quoted the language, but I did it, I think, in a way that put everything into a sympathetic context.”
The original phone conversation was meant to be private. In December 1989, Parker Bowles was inside her family home speaking to Prince Charles at night. Her husband was away at work, according to Smith’s biography of Charles, but her children were in the house for the holidays. And Prince Charles, who had just wrapped up an exhausting tour, was speaking from the home of a friend, Anne Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster. Somehow, in a mystery that still has not been solved, audio was captured of the call. The official story was that an amateur radio enthusiast accidentally stumbled upon the conversation with high-tech scanning equipment. But, according to the LA Times, given that the tape surfaced within a month that a private Princess Diana call was captured and featured high-quality recording, the possibility was raised that “British internal intelligence agencies may have been involved in taping the original conversations and, for reasons unknown, leaking them to the press.”
In 1993, The Observer wondered, “Can a man who in jest wants to become his lover’s Tampax in reality become the King of England? Can that man and the British monarchy survive the fact that these private secrets have become public knowledge and published throughout the world?”
The Evening Standard weighed in: “After 40 years of earnestly trying to do his best, and after 10 or 15 years of very public service in which the Prince has offered us his opinions on everything from gardening to global warming…it must be dismaying for him to realize that the public at large can probably only remember two of his utterances: his comparison of a proposed scheme to modernize the National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’ and his wish to be reincarnated as Mrs. Parker Bowles’s Tampax.”
Added the Los Angeles Times, “The man who will one day ascend the throne of the United Kingdom must distance himself from associations with infidelity and Tampax jokes.”
Believe it or not, one person to publicly defend Charles during the explosive aftermath of the call was Diana’s step-grandmother, Dame Barbara Cartland.
Smith notes that Diana also had an intimate phone call that was hacked the same year as Charles’s—hers with James Gilbey, heir to Gilbey’s Gin. In their conversation, which was printed by The Sun in 1992, Gilbey repeatedly referred to the princess as “Squidge” or “Squidgy”—hence the incident’s nickname, “Squidgygate.” In 1992, The Evening Standard summed up the conversation as this:
Given the nature of Charles and Camilla’s conversation though, their phone call clearly overshadowed Diana’s—so much so that “Squidgygate” does not make the final cut of The Crown’s new season. For his part, series creator Peter Morgan has defended his inclusion of controversial storylines in the new season. “I think we must all accept that the 1990s was a difficult time for the royal family, and King Charles will almost certainly have some painful memories of that period,” Morgan said to Entertainment Weekly. “But that doesn’t mean that, with the benefit of hindsight, history will be unkind to him, or the monarchy. The show certainly isn’t. I have enormous sympathy for a man in his position—indeed, a family in their position. People are more understanding and compassionate than we expect sometimes.”
