Fact-checking ‘The Crown’: Did Queen Elizabeth let a known KGB spy work for Buckingham Palace?

When season three of “The Crown” premieres Sunday on Netflix, the year is 1964, it’s election day, and Queen Elizabeth II is dealing with a problem that seems straight out of the future.

Over breakfast, Prince Phillip informs his wife that Harold Wilson, the likely new prime minister, is rumored to be a Russian mole.

“That’s ridiculous,” replies the Queen, now played by Olivia Colman. “Who did you hear that from?”

“A friend of mine at the lunch club,” the prince says. “He had a whole theory about Wilson being turned on a trade mission to Russia.”

The queen doesn’t tell Prince Phillip to bugger off, but she does say that MI5 — the British counterintelligence service — would know if that was true, stopping his election in its tracks. 

“Unless they never expected him to get this far,” the prince replies. “No one did.”