Is ‘The Crown’ Season 6 Accurate? The Queen’s Former Staffer Calls Out Inconsistencies

Queen Elizabeth II’s former press secretary is not a fan of how some of the events unfolded in Season 6 of The Crown, specifically regarding Princess Diana’s death, according to Deadline.

The first part of Season 6 of The Crown, the fictional TV series about Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, was released on Netflix
NFLX
on Nov. 16. The episodes centered on Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki)’s life after her divorce from Prince Charles (Dominic West), as well as her relationship with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) before the new couple died in a car crash Paris in August 1997.

Dickie Arbiter — who previously worked for Queen Elizabeth II and was briefly played by David Phelan in the series — accused The Crown’s creator Peter Morgan of “dramatic license gone bonkers.” The former staffer is particularly troubled by the scene where Prince Charles (Dominic West) breaks the news of Diana’s death to her sons, Princes William and Harry.

“The sequence of Charles telling his sons of their mother’s death was so insensitive, it was so unnecessary,” Arbiter told Deadline. “The death of their mother is still raw with both of them.”

He continued, “The scenes between Charles and his mother, in which he blurted out that she wanted Diana to come back in a Harrod’s van were absolute nonsense. It just didn’t happen like that. Of course an aircraft was going to be made available [to bring her body home from France]. The Queen was the first one to agree to that.”

The Buckingham Palace spokesman also criticized how preparations for Diana’s funeral were depicted in the historical drama. He recalled that it was Diana’s brother Charles Spencer who decided that the princess should have a public ceremony, not the Queen.

“I was in charge and media arrangements for that week,” he said. “Spencer thought that because Diana was a public figure, because she was very popular and people adored her, that it should be something handled by the royal family to make it a public event rather than a private family event.”

Another inconsistency he noted was that Prince William did not go missing for 14 hours at Balmoral Castle after learning of his mother’s death. Although, he did say that the princes did go for walks after Diana’s death to deal with their grief.

Arbiter’s comments come after the show’s producers told Deadline earlier this year that they approached the events of Diana’s death with “enormous sensitivity.” “The show might be big and noisy, but we’re not,” said executive producer Suzanne Mackie. “We’re thoughtful people and we’re sensitive people. There were very careful, long conversations about how we were going to do it.”

Morgan, who has written every episode of the series, has acknowledged in the past that The Crown intertwines “acts of imagination” with real-life events, according to Deadline, so it’s not going to be 100% accurate.

The anticipated release comes more than a year after the death of Her Majesty, the longest-reigning monarch in Britain’s history. Morgan described the series as a “love letter” to the late 96-year-old monarch.

Morgan previously told Variety that he was compelled to change the direction of the final season after the Queen’s passing. “We’d all been through the experience of the funeral,” he said in the interview. “So because of how deeply everybody will have felt that, I had to try and find a way in which the final episode dealt with the character’s death, even though she hadn’t died yet.”