In the newly released season 5 of The Crown, Morton appears as a character while writing the biography Diana: Her True Story

PHOTO: GETTY

When The Crown moved to the 1990s, it became inevitable that one key moment would have to be covered in detail: how Princess Diana told the story of her unhappiness in the royal family.

She turned to journalist Andrew Morton, who she’d heard from a friend was writing a book about her. For Morton, who used mutual friend Dr. James Colthurst as a go-between as he wrote his June 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, it was surprising to hear some of the things that Diana told him, he recalls today.

“She talked about a woman called Camilla [Parker Bowles]. I’d never heard of her. Talked about bulimia nervosa — I’d never heard of it — and she talked about suicide attempts,” he tells PEOPLE in this week’s magazine. “I was staggered.”

Morton, like millions around the world, is absorbing the Netflix drama — in which he’s now a character (played by Andrew Steele).

“I found Elizabeth Debicki’s depiction of Diana unnervingly accurate and authentic. She had her speech pattern and mannerisms down pat, and I found the scenes very moving as it brought back a raft of deep-seated memories from that tumultuous time in the early 1990s,” Morton says.

Dominic West as Prince Charles and Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in season 5 of The Crown. NETFLIX

Morton says that while the show is based largely on reality, some elements were changed.

“There are a few exaggerations for dramatic effect, such as it was my office that was broken into — not my house. James Colthurst, the intermediary, was indeed knocked off his bike as he rode around Parliament Square of all places,” he recalled. “Diana was indeed concerned, and we had her sitting room at Kensington Palace swept for bugs. These incidents happened after I had been warned that the security services were looking for my mole.”

The author also has some thoughts as to why some establishment figures, like former Prime Minister John Major (played in The Crown by Jonny Lee Miller), have been so vociferous in their denunciation of some of the series’s key storylines.

“The establishment are genuinely worried that this series will have an impact on the coronation of King Charles. Well, I’ve got news for them: it won’t. It will just make the interest in the King and the royal family more intense around the world,” he predicts. “Everybody knows what went on now, and they’ve accepted it. Diana’s dead. They’ve accepted it. I mean, this is now history.”

NETFLIX ; JAYNE FINCHER/GETTY

“Camilla as a queen was the elephant in the room since Diana’s death. And, you know the Queen wasn’t keen for Camilla to be Queen, even though she was a friend of the Parker Bowles family,” Morton says. “I think they are concerned, but I don’t think they need to be because while some people won’t accept her, by and large, they seem to done.”

Critics of the drama are “blaming The Crown for something that’s actually happened. It’s like denying history,” he adds. “There’s no getting around it. This is the reality of it. I mean, obviously they would like it not to be articulated, and for us all to be turned the other way, and for the emperor to have no clothes and for nobody to point it out. But that’s not the way it is.”

Andrew Morton. REUTERS/ALAMY

Morton, 68, who divides his time between Pasadena, California and London, explores Diana’s relationship with her mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth in a new book capturing and celebrating the late monarch’s extraordinary reign, The Queen: Her Life. It is excerpted in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, out Friday.