In the last years of Princess Diana’s life, she was deeply in love with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani surgeon who worked in London. Diana was very interested in Pakistani culture and she dreamed of marrying Khan and splitting her time between London and Pakistan. She befriended Jemima Khan, a British heiress who was (at the time) married to Imran Khan (they later divorced and she went back to her maiden name, Jemima Goldsmith). Jemima and Diana visited Pakistan together several times and they were very good friends. After Diana passed away, Jemima kept her friend’s secrets. But Jemima decided to reveal some of those secrets to Peter Morgan and Netflix’s The Crown. Jemima began dating Peter Morgan when he was on a break from his relationship with Gillian Anderson. According to Jemima, she joined The Crown’s writing staff to give further insight into Diana’s life in the 1990s. Then… Jemima and Peter broke up, he went back to Gillian Anderson and apparently Jemima no longer wants anything to do with The Crown.

A real-life rift at the heart of The Crown is making its own news this weekend. The U.K. Sunday Times reports that Jemima Khan, a close friend of Diana’s who also dated series creator Peter Morgan for a few months until February this year, has withdrawn her co-operation from the show because she believed it was not telling the story “respectfully.”

Morgan and Khan, The Times says, were friends for years but only started dating “late last year” after Morgan broke up with Gillian Anderson (who famously played Margaret Thatcher in series four). By then, Khan says, she had come on board as a writer, telling The Times that 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 adds that she has never publicly spoken before about her friendship with Diana.

In her statement to The Times, Khan goes on to add that she worked on “outline and scripts” from September 2020 until February 2021. The Times notes that Khan and Morgan “broke up in February” when he got back together with Anderson.

Whatever the context of the breakdown in the writing relationship may be, Khan says that she pulled out of the project, asked for her contributions to be cut and “declined a credit.”

A spokesperson for The Crown provided a counterpoint, noting tartly that while Khan was a source for the show’s writers, “She has never been contracted as a writer on the series.”

[From The Daily Beast]

Well, I have some questions!! First of all, do you think Peter Morgan hooked up with Jemima with an ulterior motive of getting dirt from Diana’s friend? Was this writers-room espionage?!? And how much did Gillian Anderson know? Did she think her partner (Morgan) was just briefly getting too close to a source he was using for work? Did Jemima think it was love? Did Peter Morgan? What a mess! And yes, the statement from the Crown’s spokesperson was very TART. Turns out, Jemima never really joined the writing staff after all! As for any disrespect towards Diana… who knows. I would think that Jemima simply felt used by Morgan.

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