Lady Colin Campbell was so angered by the portrayal of Queen Elizabeth’s marriage in Netflix’s hit series “The Crown,” that she decided to set the record straight.
In her new book, “The Queen’s Marriage” (Dynasty Press), out now, the controversial socialite and former reality TV celebrity writes that Her Majesty, 92, was “intensely sexual” as a young woman and that Prince Philip, 97, may have been “a great flirt” and “an alpha male” but he has always been extremely devoted to his wife with whom he has long enjoyed a strong, passionate bond.
In “The Crown,” Prince Philip is depicted as an overprivileged womanizer, who spends much of his time partying with his friends and as little time as possible with his long-suffering and duty-bound wife at Buckingham Palace.
According to Lady Colin, their real-life bond was forged as a result of the Queen Mother’s opposition to the Greek-born Philip as a suitable royal spouse for her daughter, who was known by her childhood diminutive Lilibet. The Queen Mother tried everything to discourage the union, according to Lady Colin.
“On a perhaps unconscious level, one of Philip’s appeals for Lilibet was that he was strong enough to withstand her powerful mother,” she writes.
In addition to his strength, Philip also “exuded masculinity from every pore and, put crudely, seemed to promise goodness both in and out of bed.”
And she continues: “Philip’s masculinity, which I can tell you was potent in person, set him apart. It was akin to that of Sean Connery at the height of his fame as James Bond.”
But it’s racy observations like these coupled with unverified palace intrigue that have landed Lady Colin, 68, in hot water in England, where her book was released last month alongside its launch in the US.
Many royal watchers have slammed the bombshell tome as “lurid” and “tawdry.” Last week, a critic in The Daily Mail dubbed “The Queen’s Marriage” as “vulgar and tasteless.” And Her Majesty’s former press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, even weighed in: “I will not dignify anything Lady Colin Campbell writes or says with a comment.”
“Anyone can make up these claims,” said Paul Burrell, a former footman to Queen Elizabeth and butler to Princess Diana, in a recent interview with The Mirror. “You can only be a true, reliable witness to history if you are there. Lady Colin Campbell was none of those things. She is writing about our head of state, our head of church and someone who she does not know. She is writing about someone who she is not familiar with.”
Lady Colin shrugs off the criticism, describing Burrell, himself the author of a palace tell-all in 2003, as “a disgraced royal servant.” As for the rest, they are “journalists on the periphery” and simply jealous of her access to inner circles of power. She claims that she has the ear of many courtesans and aristocrats who are very close to the royals.
“My critics know that I have an exemplary record of writing facts, and of scooping them because of the people I know socially,” she told The Post. “The rat-pack hacks who have made those comments have not read the book and lied about its contents. They hate me because I have access and they don’t.”
Lady Colin herself is no stranger to scandal. Born with a genital malformation in Jamaica, she was christened George William Ziadie and raised as a boy in a rich merchant family. After undergoing corrective surgery as a teenager, she changed her name to Georgia. Her friends call her Georgie. She married Lord Colin Campbell, the youngest son of the 11th Duke of Argyll after a whirlwind five-day romance in 1974, only to divorce him several months later.
But she kept the title, and used her newfound aristocracy to snoop around the royal family, producing best-selling books on the Princess of Wales, the Queen Mother and now the Queen herself.
Her aristocratic connections have also landed her on national television as a contestant on “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!” in 2015. In the popular reality TV show, contestants live in a jungle for a few weeks at a time and battle each other and the elements in order to be crowned king or queen. While on the show, she claims she was “the most Googled living individual for 2015.”
“I can’t walk down the street without people asking for my autograph,” said Lady Colin, who has two adopted adult Russian sons and spends a great deal of her time at Castle Goring in Sussex, the ancestral home of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley that she bought and lovingly restored over three years. She rents out part of it for destination weddings in order to recoup her expenses.
Although Lady Colin has been criticized in the past for making up stories about the royals, many of her observations have proven true. She was the first to chronicle Princess Diana’s affairs and her bouts with bulimia in her 1992 bestseller “Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows.”
Many of those details may have actually come from Diana herself, who briefly worked with Lady Colin on an aborted authorized biography, she said.
“Had Diana told me she wanted me to produce a panegyric, I would have turned her down cold,” writes Lady Colin in the introduction to her second book on the Princess of Wales, “The Real Diana,” published after her death in Paris in 1997. “However, she did not. She led me to believe she wanted me to ‘write the truth of my life’ to quote her . . . Only later, after contracts were signed and the book was well underway, did Diana and I appreciate that we had misunderstood one another’s positions. She did not want a truthful account of her life, but a heavily slanted version with which she could gain a separation from Prince Charles.”
It was ostensibly to support another prince — Charles’s father, Prince Philip — that drove Lady Colin to write “The Queen’s Marriage,” she told The Post.
“My impetus to do it now was that the Duke of Edinburgh deserves to have a book which examines the reality of his marriage and life and his role as royal consort before he dies,” she said. “He deserves the truth because he is a wonderful man. I am appalled at the way he was characterized in ‘The Crown.’ They portray him as a dunce and a Lothario. And he is none of those things.”
Despite his overt sexuality, Lady Colin asserts that Philip conducted himself like a gentleman during his courtship of Princess Elizabeth in 1946 — a time when their relationship intensified beyond that of “cousinly affection.” Philip and Elizabeth are royal cousins several times removed.
“His reputation was that of a young man who was ‘safe in taxis,’ ” she writes. “For all his undoubted charm and sex appeal, there was not a breath of scandal about his conduct. Had there been, you can be sure it would have been used against him in the run-up to the engagement, a time when Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) and her courtier cronies were doing their level best to put barriers in his way.”
And throughout their more than 70-year marriage, Philip has been “incredibly supportive,” said Lady Colin, adding that their collective strengths and weaknesses balance each other out to forge their strong union. “Where she is soft and pliable, he is hard and inflexible,” she writes. “She is a traditionalist and conservative by nature, while he has always been an open minded innovator. She is no intellectual, while his vast library and wide range of interests betray an intellectual bent.”
By writing about the challenges and the political intrigue surrounding their marriage, Lady Colin is hoping to shed some light on how royal dynasties really work.
“This is solid realpolitik,” she said. “The book is about the realities of a young, modern and progressive couple to modernize the British monarchy and the British political system.”
If that sounds like another recently married royal couple, Lady Colin says she is not in a position to judge the union of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
“I haven’t met Meghan,” she said. “Not yet.”