Consorting with spirit

Considered at one point to be Britain's most hated woman, Camilla, the Queen Consort, has finally gained acceptance. Laura Hampson looks at how she charmed a sceptical public

- Laura Hampson

In January 1993, a tampon shook the world. A month after Charles and Diana publicly split, details of an intimate exchange between the future King and Camilla Parker Bowles were leaked to the press. Their conversation, recorded in 1989 when both were married to other people, included titillating titbits such as "I want to feel my way along you, all over you, up and down you and in and out..."

Another involved Charles's unexpectedly bawdy urge to be reincarnated as one of Camilla's tampons. Camilla was just as game, suggesting he could come back as the whole box, "so you could just keep going". Royal levels of filth.

Recreated in the new season of The Crown - which arrives on Netflix on Wednesday - what came to be known as "tampongate" planted the seeds for how Camilla would be viewed by the British public for the ensuing decade. The other woman. The mistress. The homewrecker. Camilla was effectively cancelled overnight. The flames were further fanned by Diana's notorious 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, when the late royal memorably said that there were "three people" in her marriage.

"People felt outraged at their blatant disrespect for Diana, staunch loyalists even questioning Charles's ability to rule," royal expert Tiwa Adebayo tells me. "Being royal, of course, Charles was shielded from the worst of the vitriol. [That] was reserved for the evil temptress' who had led our future king astray."

So how did the most hated woman in Britain - who was always framed in opposition to "The People's Princess" - become so widely embraced in 2022? According to an ongoing YouGov ranking, Camilla is equal with the King as the fifth most popular British royal. Only the late Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Princess Anne rank above her. For context, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex rank ninth and 13th respectively.