Martin Bashir's infamous 1995 BBC Panorama began life as an investigation of evidence Charles was abusing his senior role in the security service spy agencies to spy on DIana (this was revealed in cross examination of Birt and Hall below) to give himself the advantage in divorce proceedings.
MPs to question former BBC chiefs about Bashir interview with Diana
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/mps- ... 40624.html
WEB15 Jun 2021 · Former BBC director-generals Lord Tony Hall and Lord John Birt will be questioned by MPs today about events leading up to Martin Bashir’s Panorama …
The True Story Behind Charles and Camilla’s Phone Sex Leak on The Crown
https://time.com/6226657/crown-charles- ... ampongate/
November 9, 2022 9:50 AM EST
Royalists have expressed increasing anxiety and dismay about Netflix’s Windsor drama, The Crown, and perhaps rightly so. Season 5 is the show’s most scandalous entry to date. Not only does the series delve into the divorce between Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, but it also dredges up perhaps the most embarrassing moment of newly-named King Charles III‘s life: Tampongate.
In 1993, the British press published the full transcript of a private conversation between then-Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in which the two had an intimate and sexual exchange. The conversation was notable for a number of reasons, not least of which because it involved the heir to the throne saying that he would like to “live inside [her] trousers” and joking that he would be reincarnated as a tampon, hence the name of the scandal. (Some publications referred to the incident by the name “Camillagate,” which has a more sexist connotation because it places the blame on just the woman involved.) Charles and his now-wife and queen consort Camilla were both married to other people at the time. The transcript not only confirmed Princess Diana’s claims that Charles had been cheating on her but threw gasoline on Charles and Diana’s already contentious separation.
The Crown handles what could have been—and probably still is—a tawdry moment with humor and care. Dominic West, who took over the role of Charles this season, brings a light touch to the conversation. Camilla actor Olivia Williams imbues her character with empathy. It’s clear that the tampon joke is more a reference to his endless bad luck and a joke between intimate partners rather than some bizarre sexual fantasy. The scene portrays Charles and Camilla as tragic figures, star-crossed lovers who should have married each other in the first place, and who remained deeply devoted to one another ever after the royal family endeavored to keep them apart. The show handles Diana’s reaction, too, with sensitivity. The moment is obviously devastating for a woman whose marriage was doomed before she ever entered it.
The Crown helms closely to real-life events, though it does elide a few details, including another recorded phone call that had embroiled the royal family in scandal just a few months earlier. Here’s everything you need to know about Tampongate.
Did Charles and Camilla really have that phone sex conversation?
Yes, the conversation between Charles and Camilla that has been since immortalized as “Tampongate” actually took place on Dec. 17, 1989, when they were both still married to other people. (Charles and Diana separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. Camilla and her ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles began living apart in 1993 before finalizing their divorce in 1995.) The press did not print the recorded call in full until 1993.
As depicted in The Crown, Charles and Camilla’s intimate chat ranged from the mundane to the sexual. At one point, Charles told Camilla that he would like to live in her trousers. When she asked if he was going to be reincarnated as a pair of knickers, he joked that it would be his luck to come back as a tampon. Unsurprisingly, this portion of the conversation is what dominated tabloid headlines.
Rumours has swirled for years that Charles and Camilla had had a long affair. And in 1992, the Andrew Morton biography Diana: In Her Own Words accused Charles of infidelity. Tampongate confirmed not only that the pair was having an affair but that they were also very much in love. Read past the sordid headlines, and it’s clear that these two had the sort of bond only achieved in long-term, committed partnerships.
The phone call also proved that all of Charles’ friends were not only aware of the affair but complicit in helping them conduct it. Camilla and Charles spend most of the conversation discussing the logistics of their illicit relationship. They debate which high-born friend’s house they will use for their next rendezvous, implicating several of their friends in hiding the not-so-secret relationship from Diana.
Charles later admitted in a 1994 documentary about his life that he had cheated on Diana. But he claimed he did so only after their relationship had “irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”
What did Charles and Camilla say on the call?
The Crown remains faithful to the true text of the call, but here is the part that scandalized the nation:
Charles: Oh, God. I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!
Camilla [laughing]: What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? [Both laugh]. Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.
Charles: Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck! (Laughs)
Camilla: You are a complete idiot! [Laughs] Oh, what a wonderful idea.
Charles: My luck to be chucked down a lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down.
Camilla [laughing]: Oh darling!
Charles: Until the next one comes through.
Camilla: Oh, perhaps you could just come back as a box.
Charles: What sort of box?
Camilla: A box of Tampax, so you could just keep going.
Charles: That’s true.
Camilla: Repeating yourself … [laughing]. Oh, darling, oh I just want you now.
Was it really an amateur radio enthusiast who recorded the call?
Probably, though there are other theories. At the time, the press speculated that British secret services must be behind the recording of several royal calls, including ones between Diana and friends, and Prince Andrew and his then-wife Sarah Ferguson. Ex-spies interviewed by People magazine in the 1990s said the high quality of the recordings pointed to professionals as the leakers.
But in his memoir, Dogs and Lampposts, former Daily Mirror editor Richard Stott says that the tape was recorded and brought to the paper by a Merseyside resident “who had had a few pints of lager and a curry and decided he would test out his latest gadget, an electronic homing device that picks up Cellnet signals.” Charles was staying nearby, and apparently the amateur radio enthusiast stumbled on the call and immediately recognized the prince’s voice.
Tina Brown argues in her biography of Diana, The Diana Chronicles, that intercepting such calls in the 1980s wasn’t all that difficult, and Charles just suffered from bad luck. “From analysis of the radio signals embedded in the Charles-Camilla tape, there is little doubt that it was genuinely recorded off-air.”
Did the press bury the call?
According to The Diana Chronicles, the man who recorded the Tampongate call kept the tape to himself for several years. It was only after the press published a recorded phone call between Diana and an intimate friend that came to be known as Squidgygate (more on that call later) that the unnamed man realized he could sell his recording make a good deal of money from the tape. Brown writes that the man brought it to the Daily Mirror in 1992 and was paid £30,000 for his troubles.
The Mirror’s editor Richard Scott did not publish the Camilla-Charles conversation immediately for fear of undercutting the royal marriage. It was October of 1992, and Charles and Diana were on what the Palace told the press was a reconciliation trip to South Korea. But the tour was a disaster—the press noted that both prince and princess looked miserable. On Nov. 11, the Daily Mirror began teasing the pillow talk conversation with headlines like “Charles’s Secret Bedtime Phone Call,” though they did not publish the now-infamous tampon quote.
That winter, a fire at Windsor Castle burned down 100 rooms, devastating the Queen. The announcement of the split between Diana and Charles came soon after.
It was only after all this drama that, on Jan. 17, 1993, both the Sunday People and Sunday Mirror published Charles and Camilla’s full conversation—tampon reference and all. According to Sally Bedell Smith’s biography of Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, a poll released shortly after the publication of the phone recording found that 68% of respondents said Charles had tarnished his reputation, and 42% thought 10-year-old Prince William should succeed Elizabeth as the next monarch.
What was the Squidgygate scandal?
The Crown skips over a second phone call scandal the plagued the royal family around the same time. In 1992, The Sun published a recorded phone call between Diana and her close friend, James Gilbey. Throughout the call, Gilbey calls her “darling,” and “Squidgy,” implying the two were having an intimate affair. Diana complains to Gilbey that Charles makes life “real, real torture.”
But the most tense part of the conversation came when Diana worried about getting pregnant, proof of her infidelity to Charles. Gilbey reassures her that it won’t happen.
The Squidgygate call took place just 14 days after the Tampongate phone call, likely on New Year’s Eve in 1989, given several context clues. Cyril Reenan, a retired 70-year old bank manager, made the recording of Diana’s call and sold it to The Sun. According to Brown, the paper held onto the tape for years because the editors decided it was “too hot even for them”
“Scurrilous rumors are one thing,” Brown writes, “but hard evidence that the sweetheart of the British public was not all she seemed in the virtue department was thought to be a commercially risky proposition, one that might also expose the paper to prosecution for unlawful interception.” It was the National Enquirer that finally received a copy of the tape and broke the story in August of 1992.
Puzzlingly, until his dying day Reenan claimed he made the recording on Jan. 4, 1990, four days after the conversation likely took place. And the company Cellnet has said that Reenan could not have made the recording on their airwaves in January since they had not yet built a base in the area. (Outside experts confirmed Cellnet’s claim.) Brown cites several experts who argue that Diana’s phone was bugged and speculates the recording must have been replayed over the air in hopes a civilian would pick it up.
Who exactly may have been behind the recording will likely remain a mystery. In The Crown, Diana becomes paranoid that British special intelligence is tapping her phone. Brown’s book suggests her concerns were not unfounded: She expresses skepticism at British officers’ denials that they recorded royal phone calls.
scienceplease 2 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 29, 2014 10:24 am Some analysis from the Guardian...
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014 ... kah-brooks
Please read whole thing... but I've cut out sections and highlighted stuff below...
My summary: Murdoch promoted young, ambitious, morally-ambiguous, "morons" (with no memory or aptitude with technology and fiances, apparently) but had demonstrated use of the "dark arts" (bugging and blagging) and then applied extreme pressure on them to deliver dirt "to destroy people's lives". So who do you blame? The puppets or the puppeteers?Over the course of 138 working days in court number 12 of the Old Bailey, Mr Justice John Saunders proved himself a man of enormous patience, great stamina and not a little dry wit. The judge's epic five-day summing up of the hacking trial was a model of rigour and rectitude. [:roll:]
.....
Just occasionally, to keep spirits up, he ventured a lawyerly joke. When the end was in sight, for example, and he was addressing again News International's initial strategy to confine the hacking scandal to the "rogue royal reporter" Clive Goodman and his private investigator accomplice Glenn Mulcaire, Saunders noted that this had proved, perhaps, on reflection, and with the benefit of hindsight, "not the most successful damage limitation exercise ever undertaken".
....
News International's efforts to manage the scandal had, you imagined, back in 2006, seemed like a costly undertaking. One that involved, among other things, paying for the continued employment and legal fees of Mulcaire and Goodman after they were charged. Over the years since, however, as something like the whole truth has slowly emerged, that failed damage-limitation exercise has resulted in the conviction of six senior journalists – including one editor and three news editors – with trials of 12 more journalists scheduled. It has seen News International – now News UK – pay millions of pounds of compensation to more than 700 victims of hacking, with several thousand more potentially able to sue. It has shut down the most popular Sunday newspaper in the world and prevented Rupert Murdoch's companies taking a virtual monopoly of satellite broadcasting in Britain. And it has engendered one of the largest police investigations in Scotland Yard history at a cost of £32.7m so far, plus a trial that will cost £100m. As damage limitation goes it was about on a par with the burghers of Hamelin trying to short-change the pied piper.
....
In the pursuit of this goal [of destroying "other people's lives"] whole support networks of "dark arts" practitioners were available to reporters – not for just phone hacking and blagging, but also for around-the-clock surveillance and as specialist "followers".
....
This was a procedure, it emerged, that the News of the World applied pretty indiscriminately against everyone from the home secretary to bereaved families of soldiers, concocted celebrities and royal princes, rival journalists (including those in different departments on their own paper, and even Rebekah Brooks, who the jury exonerated of all knowledge of illegal practices). In one of the more telling pieces of evidence Mulcaire, on a salary, unbeknown to his editor, of nearly £92,500 to work day and night to get into other people's phones, complained by email to the news desk of the repetitive strain of their demands: "Overload! NO MORE PLEASE!"
In the context of such wall-to-wall compulsive behaviour – which included the unprecedented reporting mania of the "crowdfunded" hack Peter Jukes, who heroically tweeted to his followers every single exchange of the trial: that's 24,000 tweets, 450,000 words, 2.5m keystrokes, two knackered keyboards – it was impossible not to feel something of a hopeless journalistic lightweight in attending very far from all of the 138 days, in trying to pick my moments, in doing other stuff at the same time.
....
It was, at the outset, the prosecution's stated purpose to show that the principal defendants, Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and Stuart Kuttner, the veteran News of the World managing editor, "must have known" about the hacking and payments to public officials that happened in their newsroom. Andrew Edis QC, leading for the crown, then devoted eight months to the attempt to change that passive formulation to the active one that they "did know" in the minds of the jurors. In the case of Andy Coulson, there was something of a paper trail ("do his phone", he once memorably demanded of a reporter believed to be leaking information to a paid celebrity stooge, Calum Best). There was also Coulson's under-oath admission that he had heard the taped voicemail of David Blunkett, which made his guilty verdict all but inevitable. (No unanimity could be reached about his knowledge of payment to public officials, and a decision will be made about a retrial in the coming days). In the cases of Brooks and Kuttner, those two phrases – "must have known" and "did know" – were never conclusively elided for the jury, and both were found not guilty of all charges.
Brooks's legal team, led by Jonathan Laidlaw QC at an estimated cost of £30,000 a week, employed what Rupert Murdoch's authorised biographer Michael Wolff has called an "American-style defence". This Wolff defined in a blog contentiously titled "How Rupert Murdoch won the hacking trial", as the manner by which "captivating and theatrical lawyers overshadowed the crown's straightforward prosecution. They showed great flair and style, addressing the complicated charges with inundating detail and great confusion. It was certainly the most dizzying defence money could buy… "
I'm not sure "captivating and theatrical" are the words I'd always have used.
....
If you really wanted to find other beginnings though, you could keep going, back through another generation of royals, through the outlandish taboo-breaking phone-tapped revelations of "Squidgygate" and "Camillagate". Those extraordinary invasions of privacy had allowed certain journalists to believe that any intrusion at all might be possible and even legitimately in the public interest (a mindset that Paul McMullan, former features editor of the News of the World, has justified in these terms: "Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in. Privacy is for paedos. Privacy is evil, it brings out the worst qualities in people").
....
Tne result of this at Rupert Murdoch's red-tops was the sudden elevation of gossip columnists and showbiz editors to the top jobs. Piers Morgan became editor of the News of the World in 1994 at the age of 29 straight from editing the Sun's Bizarre column. At a stroke almost, in a culture already high on gossip, the traditional dividing lines between news and features, politics and entertainment were recast.
....
From the late 90s phone hacking promised to provide the access-all-areas pass to lives that were in every other respect gated. It allowed the hacker not only behind the roped-off cordon into the VIP area, but also into the most private details of the lives of politicians and anyone else briefly in the public gaze. The appetite for such access was a growth industry. The snatched phone message was often the nugget of fact around which a whole destructive fantasy world could be created. As the former News of the World showbiz reporter Dan Evans, another who has pleaded guilty to hacking charges, observed in court, once you had the killer detail – in this case Sienna Miller signing off a message to Daniel Craig with the words "I love you" – then you could fill the story out with "the kind of imaginative detail that tabloid reporters use on such occasions".
....
There were seven defendants in the dock but most of the time, in moments of drama, all eyes were on Brooks. Over the course of her 13 days in the witness box she barely deviated from her chosen narrative – that she trusted her journalists and never pressed them on where exactly their stories came from; that she was as shocked as anyone about the revelations of the hacking of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone (she was in the middle of an appointment at a fertility clinic, she said, when the Guardian broke the story); that she wasn't much use when it came to technology or finance; that her primary interest as an editor was in campaigning against paedophiles (Sarah's law was never far from her answers); and that it was all quite a long time ago.
In attempting to deflect her from these themes Brooks was asked many questions, but as the days wore on, and she hardly put a foot out of place, the question you really wanted the answer to was: how did she get here?
Which is to say, how exactly did Brooks transform herself from being the daughter of a tugboat worker who died of liver disease aged 50; from being the girl who was state-educated in Warrington, and who had no formal journalistic training, to becoming perhaps the most powerful woman in the country in the space of around 15 years?
One answer, in court, was provided by Brooks's mother, whose appearance in the witness box revealed the source of some of her daughter's ambitious charm, as well as a formidable steeliness under pressure. Another answer is provided by Piers Morgan, who in his memoir, The Insider, suggests himself, with typical humility, as the man who discovered and created her. The young features assistant first came to Morgan's attention when, cheque-book to hand, she broke the story of Paul Gascoigne's abusive relationship with his wife Cheryl, and not only made the story a focus for a campaign highlighting domestic violence, but also kept both parties onside (a trait that came to characterise her editorship). Subsequently she assisted Morgan in bugging the hotel room in which "royal love rat" James Hewitt was to be interviewed, and then proved to him she was up for anything by dressing as a cleaner and talking her way into the Wapping printing silo so that they could scoop the Sunday Times's lead story, excerpts from Jonathan Dimbleby's book about Prince Charles.
On this somewhat flimsy basis, Morgan made her his deputy. From there, as Murdoch explained to Michael Wolff, approvingly, she "social-climbed through his family", befriending first his daughter Elisabeth, then his son James, and along the way establishing a relationship with the old man in which, as Vanity Fair suggested, she became the daughter he'd always wanted: intensely loyal, obsessed with print journalism, ruthlessly ambitious. It is a loyalty he could hardly have valued more highly; not least in the reported £16m severance payments which have been used in part to fund her defence.
....
Brooks concentrated in court on doing what she was told, trying to find her way through the mass of evidence in front of her, mostly resisting any flicker of annoyance or frustration, just occasionally allowing herself the flirtatious half-smile by which, as one former colleague observed, she always "gives the impression of knowing more than she is letting on".
If she never betrayed it in person, the evidence itself was conclusive that she wielded her Murdoch-given power with all the hypocrisy and flexibility of conscience that her role demanded. The evidence dwelt in some detail on the exposure in Coulson's News of the World, and Brooks's Sun, of the affair between David Blunkett, then home secretary, and Kimberly Quinn. Blunkett was described by Brooks as a friend, someone "she had worked closely with on Sarah's law", but that did not stop her being the first to publish the name of Quinn, and assuming correctly that the home secretary, though "devastated", would remain an ally. Enemies were treated with far less kindness.
There was the sense by the end, despite the unanimous not guilty verdict, that the trial itself had been a form of rough justice for Brooks. It treated her own privacy with the same level of respect as she routinely treated the "targets" of the News of the World's journalism. Which is to say that, over the course of several months, everything she wanted hidden was dragged blinking out into the sun.
She got to know how it felt to be the subject of an adulterous "sex scandal", in the exposure of her on-off six-year affair with Coulson. She got to know what it was like to have her own phone hacked, her own movements tracked, her own home staked out. She understood only too well the importance of trying to evade the pack and the paparazzi as they sought to secure the one "killer photo" of the moment of her arrest, the photo as she said "from which you can't recover". And, courtesy of her husband, Charlie, whose defence in the botched plan to dispose of his laptop computer rested mainly on his insistence that he wanted to hide his "Lesbian Lovers" porn videos, she got her own "Jacqui Smith moment". (Charlie Brooks's barrister emphasised in summing up that his client was many things but "academically gifted" was not one of them; in this sense the Old Etonian horse trainer's defence essentially boiled down to the proposition that he was a stupid *. The jury clearly found that entirely plausible.)
...
The ultimate source of that power – Rupert Murdoch – was largely absent from proceedings, by name at least. You rarely felt sympathy for Andy Coulson, who hardly changed an expression of embattled seriousness from opening comment to verdict, but one occasion when it was hard to avoid a pang was when the former News of the World editor and Tory spin doctor was questioned about having to make a particular phone call. The phone call was to Murdoch, and was to relay the "tricky" news of the arrest in 2006 of Clive Goodman and a police raid, the first of many, at his newspaper's office.
....
Bollockings passed inexorably down that executive chain of command at the News of the World. Brooks rarely administered them herself, but she relied on men – her news editors, Miskiw and the rest – who did. Clive Goodman and Dan Evans, the only two journalists giving evidence, spoke wearily of the culture of constant harassment. Goodman, who in the heady days of Diana's indiscretions had broken five consecutive front-page splashes, a newspaper record, had turned in desperation to Mulcaire's little black book of hacking contacts as his own sources of stories dried up, as the demand for them only increased (he was known to the news desk as "the eternal flame" because despite their "encouragement" he never went out of the office). In his book about the ongoing nightmare of satisfying the News of the World's (and its readers') appetite for lurid exposure, Graham Johnson observed, "if you had a story to feed the bosses, they'd get off your back for a week. That's all that mattered."
It didn't, Johnson claimed, crucially, matter at all how those stories were obtained. "In truth, executives rarely challenged the integrity of reporters because it was a no-go area. Simply because many of us had no integrity at all. We lied for a living, cheated members of the public and broke the law routinely. Direct questions threatened to penetrate the Chinese walls that were supposed to protect executives from contamination…"
...
As well as effectively ending the particular dark arts in question, the trial has, you trust, altered for ever the instinctive fear and favour that our political leaders and the police have demonstrated towards News Group. Still, both David Cameron and Ed Miliband remained happy enough on this day of all days to do Murdoch's advertising for him, gurning with a front page. I don't know for sure of course, but despite everything, you imagine New York allowed itself a little smile at those images, before trying to get back to business as usual.
Trial timeline
November 2005 News of the World journalist Clive Goodman publishes information that could only have been found by intercepting the royal family's communications.
August 2006 Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire are arrested for accessing voicemails; both admit the charges. Andy Coulson states that as editor he takes ultimate responsibility, but that the incident was down to a "rogue reporter". He resigns a few months later.
July 2007 Coulson is appointed director of communications for the Conservative party.
July 2009 The Guardian's Nick Davies reveals that Murdoch's News Group Newspapers have paid over £1m to phone-hacking victims in legal settlements, in return for their silence. The News of the World protests its innocence; in November the Press Complaints Commission states there is "no evidence" of phone hacking beyond that by Goodman and Mulcaire.
September 2010 Former journalists at the News of the World tell the New York Times that hacking was "industry-wide"; reporter Sean Hoare says Coulson "actively encouraged" him to hack phones.
5 July 2011 The Guardian reports that murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's voicemails were intercepted during her disappearance in 2002. It is later revealed that other targets of phone-hacking include relatives of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and relatives of 7/7 victims. Rebekah Brooks denies any involvement in the hacking.
7 July 2011 The 168-year-old News of the World announces that the issue of 10 July will be its last. On 8 July, Clive Goodman and Andy Coulson are arrested.
13 July 2011 David Cameron appoints Lord Justice Leveson to inquire into the culture, practice and ethics of the British press. NewsCorp withdraw their bid to take over British satellite broadcaster BSkyB.
15-19 July 2011 Brooks resigns as News International's chief executive; two days later she is arrested. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson resigns due to links to the News of the World. Sean Hoare is found dead at his home in Watford: police say his death is "unexplained but not suspicious".
14 November 2011 The Leveson inquiry opens in London.
May 2012 Brooks and her husband Charlie are charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
4 November 2012 Private text messages between Brooks and Cameron are made public. Brooks wrote of Cameron's address to the Tory conference: "Brilliant speech. I cried twice. Will love 'working together'."
5 June 2013 Brooks pleads not guilty to all charges.
28 October 2013 The trial "R v Brooks, Coulson and six others" opens at the Old Bailey.
31 October 2013 It is revealed that Brooks and Coulson had an affair from 1998 to 2004, when much of the phone hacking is alleged to have taken place.
11 June 2014 The jury deliver their one guilty verdict: Andy Coulson is guilty of phone hacking.