Jemima cuts ties with 'The Crown' over 'disrespectful' portrayal of Diana's story

Writer, producer and the late Princess Diana’s friend, Jemima Khan has withdrawn her support for and cut ties with The Crown over its “disrespectful” script, according to The Sunday Times.

Khan, 47, who was hired to advise writer Peter Morgan, 58, as per the Daily Mail, also enjoyed a brief romance with him and broke up recently. Now, she has refused a writing credit and backed out of the project, claiming the show’s handling of Diana's story is not being executed as “respectfully or compassionately” as she had hoped.

Morgan has since reunited with his partner of four years, Gillian Anderson, who also played Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. Prior to Thatcher, Khan was responsible for providing insights into her close friend's final years before her passing in the tragic car crash of 1997.

Khan worked with Morgan from September last year to February this year on details of Diana's relationships with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan and Dodi Fayed as well as her sensational BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. Khan admitted that she had only agreed to help write the fifth series when approached by Morgan in 2019 after not speaking about it publicly for years because she wanted Diana’s story to be “portrayed accurately.”

She told the British newspaper, “In 2019, Peter Morgan asked me to co-write on the fifth series of The Crown, particularly those episodes which concerned Princess Diana’s last years before she died.”

Khan added, “After a great deal of thought, having never spoken publicly about any of this before, I decided to contribute. We worked together on the outline and scripts from September 2020 until February 2021. When our co-writing agreement was not honoured, and when I realised that the particular storyline would not necessarily be told as respectfully or compassionately as I had hoped, I requested that all my contributions be removed from the series and I declined a credit.”

However, a spokesman for The Crown has claimed that Khan has “been a friend, fan and a vocal public supporter of The Crown since season one. She has been part of a wide network of well-informed and varied sources who have provided extensive background information to our writers and research tea, providing context for the drama that is The Crown. But she has never been contracted as a writer on the series.”

Khan, who was an associate editor of political magazine The New Statesman and was a European editor-at-large for the US magazine Vanity Fair, now helms a film production company. She has two sons – Suleiman, 24, and 21-year-old Kasim – from her marriage to former cricketer and now Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, who’s also Hasnat Khan's distant cousin.

The couple married in 1995 but divorced nine years later. Diana visited the duo twice in 1996 and 1997. Since then, Khan, the daughter of the late tycoon James Goldsmith and socialite Lady Annabel Goldsmith has dated several high-profile men including Hugh Grant, Russell Brand and Shane Warne (ex of Liz Hurley), according to the British tabloid.

Morgan, on the other hand, is a father-of-five and nominated for an Academy Award for his script for the 2006 film The Queen, starring Helen Mirren. His other screenwriting credits include Frost/Nixon and The Damned United, as well as the critically acclaimed stage play The Audience.

The Netflix hit series traces the life of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in British history. It has come to feature the stories of several prominent figures who played a significant part in the Queen’s journey, including Diana — her son Prince Charles' first wife — in season four. In September this year, shots captured in sunny southern Spain showed director Philip Martin onset of the highly anticipated fifth series of The Crown, which is thought to cover the Royal Family from the 1990s to 2003.

However, there were no official visits to Spain by the royals in the 90s and it is thought that the crew could have been recreating scenes from when Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed visited St Tropez together in 1997.

Nevertheless, the next season of The Crown is expected to premiere in November 2022.

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