RICHARD KAY: Elizabeth Debicki is eerily good as Diana – but real life was SO much more interesting

Like so much about The Crown, it’s almost right. Princess Diana is sitting alone on her sofa at Kensington Palace, eyes glued to a flickering television.

On the screen is one of those interminable debates about the future of the monarchy in which viewers are invited to contribute via a telephone poll to the question: ‘Do we need a Royal Family?’

The princess has her telephone in her hand, her finger hovering over the redial button to repeatedly vote ‘No’.

As a scene setter in an episode of the new series of the Netflix show it is certainly dramatic. Here we have Diana the rebel, kicking out at the institution that rejected her. It’s hardly the most subtle message.

The ITV programme, Monarchy — the Nation Decides, hosted by the broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, was real enough. So how curious, then, that two crucial elements about that night in early January 1997 should be missing.

Point one was that, far from being alone, Diana actually watched the debate with William and Harry, who were sitting alongside her.

The second came when the studio audience of 3,000 — it was filmed at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre — were asked whether Camilla Parker Bowles could ever be Queen, and to respond by holding up cue cards: blue for Yes, red for No.

The vote resulted in a blizzard of red cards and a resounding No. And in Diana’s sitting room, the moment was broken by a then 12-year-old Harry.

‘Who’s Camilla?’ he asked in a small voice. As William sniggered, Diana abruptly told her younger son: ‘Right, bedtime’ — but added, tellingly: ‘You will have to ask Papa about her.’

By any measure, the absence of these details seems bizarre. The Crown prides itself on its attention to detail, from its no-expense-spared locations to the meticulously choreographed fashions. Indeed, its endless boasts of authenticity have shaped the way many millions of people have come to view the Royal Family.

At the very least, this appears to be a missed opportunity by the streaming service filmmakers, who normally take great pleasure in heaping every possible embarrassment on the Royals.

Maybe the reason was an unexpected show of deference to William and Harry, who were then, after all, only 14 and 12.

Or perhaps the more likely reason is that bringing the Princes into the narrative would somehow muddy the waters of the storyline, which uses the Princess as the insurgent battling the spiteful and entitled snobbery of the family she married into. Yet what makes this so baffling is that the new series of The Crown is, at times, unerringly precise.

The Princess’s collaboration with writer Andrew Morton for his book, Diana: Her True Story, is carefully retold right down to his co-conspirator James Colthurst, Diana’s friend who acted as go-between for them, being knocked off his bicycle by a hit-and-run van driver.

There is even a retelling of the break-in when Morton’s study was ransacked — though, inexplicably, the location is moved from his office near Euston Station to his home in the North London suburbs.

The episode devoted to the story of how the BBC’s Martin Bashir obtained his Panorama scoop, detailing his use of forged bank statements, is compelling.

And in Elizabeth Debicki, The Crown has uncovered the most natural and believable Diana yet.

Unlike the elfin-faced Emma Corrin from season four (too short), Australia-born Debicki possesses the Princess’s natural statuesque grace, mischievousness and beauty. She has both her mannerisms and her voice.

Indeed, closing my eyes I found myself imagining that it was my friend Diana speaking.

But fast forward to episode nine and the re-enactment of a post-divorce meeting between Charles and Diana is a gross parody of the actual event.

Once again, it is — very loosely — based on fact. Not long after the couple were divorced, the Prince unexpectedly drops in to Kensington Palace. In The Crown, he is shown driving his Aston Martin through the palace gates and lamely telling his ex-wife: ‘I got in the car this morning and it just sort of drove itself here.’

In fact, he didn’t drive but flew. His helicopter landed on the sports field at the back of the palace because the prince wanted to go to the lavatory.

Even putting aside the other accompanying howlers in the filmed version — no police bodyguard with Prince Charles and Kensington Palace servants in the red-waistcoat livery seen only at Buckingham Palace — the encounter is wickedly twisted.

After she makes the Prince an omelette, the couple move from exchanging compliments to a full-on row in just a matter of moments. An angry Charles’s parting words are that he has been ‘liberated’ by divorce and ‘more certain than ever that only with you out of my life and out of this family can anyone find the happiness and the stability that’s eluded us for 16 years’.

The truth of the rendezvous was infinitely more poignant and offered a far more elegant postscript on their marriage.

Certainly, Diana was startled by her ex-husband’s arrival. The Prince didn’t even know she was in when he knocked on the door of the former marital home.

Alerted by her butler Paul Burrell, the Princess hurried downstairs from her first floor drawing room. Instead of a ham omelette she offered him a cup of tea. There was no rancour, no bitterness — and after a peck on the cheek, the Prince left jokily promising to pop in again.

How do I know? Because even before the Prince had got into a car for the short drive to St James’s Palace, where he then lived, my phone rang. It was Diana. ‘Ricardo, you’ll never guess who came to see me,’ she said. ‘My Ex!’

She described the brief meeting as the ‘best kind of therapy’. She said he asked if he could ‘use the loo’ and then afterwards, over tea, they talked about ‘the boys’. At the time, Diana was particularly concerned that Prince Charles wanted William to see one of his alternative therapists. Diana was against it.

But they also talked about themselves. ‘I told him we had been a great team, and he agreed.’ There was no shouting, no anger, no storming off.

But as she talked to me, Diana admitted she was a bundle of nerves. For someone who often felt belittled and even ignored during the marriage, she described the episode as ’empowering’, adding: ‘It was very grown up.’

Clearly Peter Morgan, The Crown’s all-powerful creator, knew something of this moving encounter — but in its re-telling, he once again chose to dilute the actual story with his imagination. But, then, that is The Crown way. Despite all the protestations that, in Morgan’s words, they do their ‘very, very best to get it right’, it is in reality based on not much fact but an awful lot of fiction.

As ever, the programme strives with the period detail: the right cars, the cumbersome mobile phones so familiar from the early 1990s and, at least in Diana’s case, stunning clothes.

The slim Debicki is immaculate in the sleeveless cashmere jerseys, outsize cricket jumpers and Ralph Lauren shirts that Diana loved to wear in private, and in the tailored jackets she wore on duty.

But why on earth would the Princess have to query the South Kensington location of the Royal Brompton Hospital which she had visited officially and unofficially for years?

‘South Ken?’ she asks a friend whose husband is about to undergo surgery there. It was at the Brompton that she met Hasnat Khan, the Pakistan-born heart surgeon she fell passionately in love with.

Considering he spent almost two years with the Princess between 1995 and 1997, his appearance in The Crown is curiously brief. Diana’s two trips to Pakistan — which she undertook to see if she could ever live there — are strangely missing.

The ordinariness of his life and devotion to his medical duties which so attracted Diana are instead replaced by a furtiveness.

For example, she disguises herself in a brunette wig to see Tom Hanks’s Apollo 13 with Khan at the cinema. Oddly, this excerpt is filmed at the former Hammersmith Odeon, where the Princess actually attended a charity premiere of the film in September 1995. And no, Dr Khan did not go with her.

The frenzy of the time is well caught, however, when she has experts combing Kensington Palace for suspected listening devices on her telephones.

This did, indeed, happen. Diana asked close friends to have their lines checked, too. A security firm came to my home and to the Daily Mail to sweep for bugs.

‘There are so many clicks on the line, so obviously someone else is listening,’ Diana told me one day. Often she would end a conversation to me saying: ‘Goodnight to MI5 and the boys at GCHQ.’

One friend, encouraged by Diana, challenged the Home Office over whether her calls were being listened to. There was no unauthorised tap on your phone, she was told. Unsaid was whether there had been an authorised tap.

In episode seven, there is a hair-raising incident when Diana loses control of her Audi cabriolet after the brakes fail. While this did not happen, she was involved in a three-car crash in which she was forced to abandon her BMW coupe on a busy London street.

Critics will say that this series of The Crown is the Princess’s version of events. Almost an entire episode is devoted to the excruciating Camillagate tape which recorded a bedtime conversation between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles. But the equally damaging Squidgy tape of Diana and her old friend James Gilbey is, unaccountably, not included.

Has The Crown lost its way? Certainly the excitement of the earliest series has been lost, replaced by a cynicism as we move closer to modern times.

As Diana watched that tawdry monarchy debate with her children 26 years ago next January, the prince turned to his mother and said that every call she made to the TV poll was costing 10p.

‘Don’t worry,’ Diana replied. ‘Your father left me a bit of money in the divorce.’

What a shame that not a smidgen of that humour permeates The Crown.