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The Most Controversial Royal Family Moments They Want You To Forget

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Nearly a century of scandal, distilled into one royal highlight reel nobody in Buckingham Palace asked for.

Nicki Swift’s video essay, “The Most Controversial Royal Family Moments They Want You To Forget,” runs through the House of Windsor’s dirtiest laundry from 1936 to 2021. It’s not a clip show of garden parties and christenings — it’s abdications, leaked phone calls, a break-in at the Queen’s bedside, and an Oprah interview that shook the institution to its foundation. The video treats these moments as a connected pattern rather than isolated embarrassments, and once they’re lined up chronologically, the pattern is hard to ignore.

• In 1982, Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace and made it all the way to Queen Elizabeth II’s bedroom before anyone stopped him.
• The 1992 “Camillagate” recording leaked an intimate phone call between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles while he was still married to Diana.
• Harry and Meghan’s March 2021 sit-down with Oprah Winfrey put allegations of racism and institutional neglect directly on the record.

From Abdication to a Handshake With Hitler

The video opens its historical arc with King Edward VIII, who gave up the throne in 1936 so he could marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson — a decision that rocked the monarchy at a moment when it desperately needed stability. What the clip doesn’t let anyone forget is what came next: in 1937, the newly titled Duke and Duchess of Windsor traveled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler, a visit that’s dogged the family’s historical record ever since and sits alongside other documented royal ties to Nazism from that same era.

Break-Ins, Bites, and the Offshore Money Trail

Security failures and legal trouble make up a surprisingly large share of the family’s low points. Michael Fagan’s 1982 intrusion into the Queen’s private quarters remains the gold standard for royal security embarrassment — he got past the palace’s defenses entirely. Two decades later, in 2002, Princess Anne pleaded guilty under the Dangerous Dogs Act after her bull terrier attacked two children in Windsor Great Park. And in 2017, the Paradise Papers leak exposed offshore investments tied to the Duchy of Lancaster, reviving questions about royal tax practices that the family has never fully shaken off.

The Tabloid Era’s Greatest Hits

No royal scandal reel is complete without the tabloid sensations, and this one delivers them in full. The 1992 “Camillagate” tape — an X-rated phone call between Charles and Camilla — leaked to the press and became one of the most humiliating royal stories of the decade. That same year, Sarah Ferguson was photographed having her toes sucked by financial advisor John Bryan, and in 2010 she was caught in a tabloid sting offering access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew for £500,000. In 2012, France’s Closer magazine published topless photos of Kate Middleton taken with a long-range lens, prompting legal action from the couple.

£500,000 — the price a tabloid sting put on access to Prince Andrew, with Sarah Ferguson caught brokering the deal on camera.

The Younger Royals Get Their Turn

Prince Harry supplies several of the video’s most cringe-worthy segments. In 2002, he checked into Featherstone Lodge rehab center, a story that broke wide in the tabloids. Three years later, in 2005, he wore a Nazi costume complete with swastika armband to a colonial-themed party, a photo that resurfaces in nearly every “royal scandal” retrospective since. And in 2012, nude photos of Harry playing strip billiards during a Las Vegas trip made global headlines, another reminder that being a working royal doesn’t come with much privacy — a theme explored further in Royal Family Members That Are Nothing Like They Seem.

The Modern Flashpoints

The video’s most recent material is also its most politically charged. Princess Michael of Kent wore a “blackamoor” brooch — widely condemned as racist imagery — to Meghan Markle’s first Queen’s Christmas lunch in 2017. Markle later drew scrutiny of her own for wearing diamond earrings gifted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shortly after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Prince Andrew’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein escalated into a full-blown crisis after his November 2019 BBC Newsnight interview, widely regarded as a public-relations disaster. The compilation closes on Harry and Meghan’s March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which the couple described racism within the institution, personal isolation, and what they characterized as the family’s failure to protect them — the same rupture chronicled in A Timeline Of Meghan Markle’s Parents’ Dysfunctional Relationship.

Twenty-four minutes, twenty timestamped scandals, and not one of them invented — that’s the trick of this video. It doesn’t need to speculate or exaggerate; it just has to line up Edward VIII, Fagan, Camillagate, Fergie’s £500,000 sting, Harry’s costume, and the Oprah interview back to back and let the runtime do the talking.