Simon Heffer: The Crown is a parasite that exploits both the monarchy and a gullible audience

Dominic West as Prince Charles, left, and Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in season five of The Crown. Photo / Netflix

OPINION:

The next series of The Crown is about to be streamed, and whatever else is wrong with this essentially parasitical confection, its manufacturers cannot be faulted for their advance publicity. The media have been saturated with pictures of the Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki looking even more like the late Diana, Princess of Wales than the late Diana, Princess of Wales did. And word has leaked out that an entirely fictional storyline – though aren’t they almost all? – about the then Prince of Wales having a conversation in 1991 with his mother’s prime minister, John Major, about nudging him to nudge her to abdicate – opens a series that quickly moves on to Her late Majesty’s Annus Horribilis, 1992.

Indeed, the fourth episode concludes with Imelda Staunton, playing the late Queen, making the speech in which, shortly after the marital breakdowns of three of her four children and the burning down of part of Windsor Castle, she allowed herself a rare and entirely justified moment of public lamentation.

Elizabeth Debicki recreates an iconic look as Diana in season five. Photo / Netflix

Although the Annus Horribilis speech is based on fact, every private conversation in The Crown is a figment of the writer’s imagination. Dame Judi Dench, who knows a thing or two about drama, has recently said that each episode of the series should be prefaced by a statement that it is fictional, and just happens to use real people as its characters – without their consent, of course, at least until the Duchess of Sussex turns up in it.

In that sense, it is not only parasitical but exploitative, not just of its subjects, but also of some gullible members of its audience (especially outside Britain), who will believe that what they watch here is historical fact when it damned well isn’t. In that regard, possibly one of the most offensive scenes is the one between the then Prince of Wales and John Major, because it depicts the former especially as a scheming idiot. That scheming idiot is now our King and Head of State and, given the complete fiction of how he is seen to angle for his mother’s throne, he should sue for defamation of character, and put these weasels out of their tawdry business once and for all.

By 1991, when the episode is set, the Princess of Wales was the shining star of a Royal family that the tabloid press, and its cousins in the world of glossy magazines, had chosen to depict as having a light-entertainment function, rather than a constitutional one of serious public service. Sadly, the Princess existed in the Royal family on account of her marriage to the heir to the throne, and by this stage – 10 years into that marriage – their relationship had become a war zone. That tension is true enough and it is depicted in the series more or less truthfully.

West with Teddy Hawley as Prince Harry, Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana and Timothee Sambor as Prince William in season 5 of The Crown. Photo / Netflix

Complete fiction, however, is the Prince of Wales’s attempt to enlist the prime minister’s help to become king. The then Prince knew better than anyone on earth that the late Queen would never have abdicated (and nor did she). He would also have known that if he tried to get her prime minister to suggest to her that she might, that prime minister, who under our constitution is the Sovereign’s principal adviser, would have felt it his duty to report so appalling a conversation straight back to his boss, the late Queen, to whom he owed absolute allegiance.

The abdication conversation is based on something we know happened: a poll in The Sunday Times in the summer of 1991 showing that people thought the late Queen was old and stuffy but her son and heir young and modern. It was part of a campaign the owner of that newspaper, who was and is an avowed republican, ran in his titles to shake up the monarchy and prove it was not above criticism (but then it had not been since the early 1640s); and he was helped on that particular newspaper by an editor who shared his cynicism about the institution and was more than willing to do his bidding. One does not doubt that the opinion poll concerned was fairly conducted, but in any such poll, if you choose your questions carefully, you always get the answers you want.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a bad time for the Royal family; it was a head-on collision between them, and especially a younger generation that expected the respect due to their station without necessarily doing all they could to earn it, and a general public that had largely abandoned the idea of deference (though judging from the sense of public awe that accompanied the obsequies of the late Queen, that may not have been permanent).

The younger members, especially the Duke and Duchess of York (the latter of whose carnal antics are readily portrayed in the series; God knows what is to come about him) and Diana, Princess of Wales, became viewed by the mass media as members of a soap opera. However, members of the Royal family regularly do something that soap actors do not – they cost substantial sums of public money, in return for which, again unlike soap stars, they perform a range of public duties. Any sense of “entitlement”, therefore, plays badly with a public schooled by elements in the tabloid press to find it outrageous, all the more so if the entitled then behave badly.

Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker-Bowles with West's Prince Charles. Photo / Netflix

While the late Queen and her husband were treated with care and caution – until, later in the 1990s, hysterics started to hold them responsible in part for the death of their daughter-in-law with her cokehead boyfriend in a Paris car crash – other members of the Royal family were not.

There was a proxy civil war conducted by the press in which some members were pitched against others – notably the imperfections of most of them contrasted with the wonder of the late Princess of Wales. The mockery sealed the soap-operatic nature of the exercise and was unquestionably good for the circulations of some of these papers. Their readers did, indeed, find it entertaining; but good judgment was suspended in some editorial offices about the harm this might do not just to the family of the Head of State, but to the Head of State herself and to the international reputation of the country.

This has had a regrettable legacy, in that some elements of the press still do think that it is their right, on behalf of the taxpayers who fund most royal activities, to mock and exploit as they see fit. Those elements will point to their undiluted show of respect when the late Queen died as proof that they know how to behave towards someone who was beyond reproach: but then, with their circulations constantly in mind, they would not have dared do otherwise.

Similarly, for the moment, they have correctly judged that the new King and Queen Consort have the respect of the public, and are taking care not to run counter to public opinion: but then, with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to kick around, the target needed for royal-bashing is there if needed. And that is the paradox that the media, and Netflix, seem long ago to have discovered. As in any drama, there have to be goodies and baddies, and if the baddies aren’t obvious, then you do your best to create them. The Crown unquestionably does that, and in a fashion that ought to make its producers ashamed of themselves. This is our King, our country and our constitution, for pity’s sake.