King Charles III made every effort to avoid reliving the demeaning controversy known as “Tampongate.” He made an effort to prevent Prince Harry from discussing the tapes, which brought Camilla, the Queen Consort, the Royal Family, and the monarchy much disgrace.
Prince Harry, however, made the decision to defy all conventions and speak in court for the first time about the enormous scandal that rocked the establishment. The High Court is hearing Prince Harry’s case against News Group Newspapers, the company that publishes the BBC, this week.
The media corporation owned by Rupert Murdoch is being sued by a British royal for allegedly unlawfully collecting information about his personal life.
Prince Harry didn’t show up in court. Even yet, his attorneys read the astonishing witness statement he had provided, in which he had made some shocking admissions and charges only days before King Charles and Camilla, Queen Consort, were to be crowned.
King Charles, according to Prince Harry, did not want him to file a lawsuit because he was conspiring with the newspaper “to ensure the Sun supported his ascension to the throne and Camilla’s role as queen consort, and had a specific long-term strategy to keep the media on the side for when the time came.”
The Guardian reports that Prince Harry made his father’s close and remarkable connection with the British media public. Then-Prince Charles called Prince Harry, according to Prince Harry, and insisted that he drop the legal action.
“I was summoned to Buckingham Palace and specifically told to drop the legal actions because they have a ‘effect on all the family,” the Duke of Sussex said. It came directly from my father and other senior royal aides as a request (or demand).
The shameful “Tampongate” incident and telephone recordings were the reason King Charles and his wife, Camilla, Queen Consort, did not want Prince Harry to proceed with the case, Prince Harry said.
In “Tampongate,” a collection of secret phone conversations captured in 1989, the then-Prince Charles—then married to Princess Diana—confesses to Camilla Parker-Bowles (now Queen Consort) that he wanted he could be reborn as a tampon so he could dwell within her.
The reason for this was to avoid the situation where a member of the Royal Family would have to sit in the witness box and recount the specific details of the private and highly sensitive voicemails that had been intercepted by [the News of the World Royal reporter] Clive Goodman, according to Prince Harry, who explained how the King and Queen’s steamy scandal is connected to his current lawsuit.
The institution was extremely concerned about this, he continued and wanted to avoid at all costs the same kind of reputational damage that it had experienced in 1993 when the Sun and another tabloid had illegally obtained and published details of an intimate telephone conversation that had taken place between my father and stepmother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother.
Some commentators claim that Prince Harry’s most recent bombshell makes mending fences with the Royal Family all but impossible.