In January 1993, a tampon shook the world. A month after Charles and Diana publicly split, details of an intimate exchange between the future King and Camilla Parker Bowles were leaked to the press. Their conversation, recorded in 1989 when both were married to other people, included titillating titbits such as “I want to feel my way along you, all over you, up and down you and in and out...” Another involved Charles’s unexpectedly bawdy urge to be reincarnated as one of Camilla’s tampons. Camilla was just as game, suggesting he could come back as the whole box, “so you could just keep going”. Royal levels of filth.
Recreated in the new season of The Crown – which arrived on Netflix on Wednesday – what came to be known as “tampongate” planted the seeds for how Camilla would be viewed by the British public for the ensuing decade. The other woman. The mistress. The homewrecker. Camilla was effectively cancelled overnight. The flames were further fanned by Diana’s notorious 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, when the late royal memorably said that there were “three people” in her marriage.
