Gillian Anderson's attempt at Margaret Thatcher is 'a caricature' in speech and behaviour. Photo / Supplied
Gillian Anderson's attempt at Margaret Thatcher is 'a caricature' in speech and behaviour. Photo / Supplied
Comment: Happily we are – despite some current indications to the contrary – a free society.
As such, if somebody chooses to make and broadcast a popular entertainment series about our Head of State and her family, so be it.
Millions around the world have watched Netflix's The Crown, the fourth series of which was made available yesterday.
To most of those millions, it hardly matters that it is just entertainment; but to those whose Head of State Her Majesty the Queen is, things are subtly different.
Gillian Anderson's attempt at Margaret Thatcher is 'a caricature' in speech and behaviour. Photo / Supplied
Those who have carped at The Crown – of which I had watched not a minute until this series – have been put back in their box by others who say it is drama, and therefore it doesn't have to be accurate.
A screenwriter I know and enormously respect told me that the first two series were exemplary in the art of storytelling; and that may well be the case.
However: if you choose to base your drama on real events, and real events well within living memory, featuring people who are not only alive but still prominent in public life, one must accept that that entails an additional set of considerations.
When one reads surveys that show many young people believe Margaret Thatcher led this country during the Second World War, you understand why people who make entertainments such as The Crown feel they can create dialogue and scenarios as they wish.
Some who watch the series will imagine that what they are seeing is an accurate representation of history. It isn't, though that will matter only to a small minority who really mind when history becomes a travesty.
Also, there is the question of what this money-spinning wheeze has done for the image of our monarchy – something most people here purport to care about – and the international reputation of our country.
Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) was known to be grand, but hardly as grand as this incarnation. Photo / Supplied
The new series, which is clearly lavishly produced and photographed, has been described as "compelling" because of two new characters: Lady Diana Spencer, later the Princess of Wales, and Margaret Thatcher.
From what one knows – and enough has been written about it and little denied – the kicking the Prince of Wales gets for his behaviour towards his young bride is richly deserved.
The treatment of Mrs Thatcher is more disturbing. Gillian Anderson plays her as a caricature. Anyone who knew her – and I did for 25 years – will recognise the performance as an impersonation entirely lacking in insight – quite unlike that of Emma Corrin, who appears to be the Princess of Wales.
The writers, Simon Heffer notes, couldn't even get the Duke of Edinburgh's (Tobias Menzies, r) beloved pheasant shooting-season right. Photo / Supplied
Inevitably, the drama includes the notorious incident when Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace and entered the Queen's bedroom.
The Fagan story is, however, used to kick Mrs Thatcher, for he is portrayed as a victim of her economic policies. It was quite sensational enough without any of that.
In the imagined lectures Mrs Thatcher gives the Queen, she appears to be motivated by class hatred – of the "privileged" and, to use a word not current in English at that time in this sense, those with a sense of "entitlement". She was nothing of the sort.
"Creativity" is cited as a reason to take liberties; but some of these are just ridiculous. Much of the writing is a work of the imagination, and it is little surprise that, over the weekend, "royal insiders" have been quoted on the front pages conveying the Royal family's fury at the show.
Peter Morgan, its writer, cannot know what went on in Mrs Thatcher's audiences with the Queen, nor in any of the other private conversations depicted.
Some are simply preposterous: such as between the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales shortly before Lord Mountbatten's funeral, though Fagan's A-level Politics oral with the Queen is also a masterpiece of nonsense.
But some inventions are downright awful: the conversations between the Prince of Wales and his then-wife, and between him and his then-mistress, are depressing not least on account of the lengths to which the Prince, and his second wife, have gone to repair his public image since the disaster of his first marriage.
Still, we can't allow the writers' creativity and the ringing of the cash register to be impeded by minor considerations such as the stability of the British constitution, and the accuracy of the British public's perception of it.
The New Yorker's drama critic wrote yesterday that this series "describes how the empire has crumbled" and the "crumminess" of Britain. Americans should be careful when gloating about crumbling empires and crumminess; but it shows how there is something in this entertainment for everyone seeking a way to bash Britain.
By mostly refusing to portray the Queen as anything other than saintly, dutiful and decent, the writers not only avoid alienating people from their product, but give themselves licence to diminish anything else.
The late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother appears to be based on her Spitting Image puppet; Princess Margaret was notoriously grand, but whether she was quite so offensively and insultingly grand as Helena Bonham Carter's representation of her is debatable: being dead, she cannot fight back.
The Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales spend much of the time appearing to do impersonations of each other.
However, if the Duke of Edinburgh could bring himself to watch The Crown, he would doubtless be most shocked by the spectacle of the man impersonating him shooting pheasants in August.
It is of a piece with what seems a wholesale disregard of detail throughout the series, which cause unintentional hilarity among anyone who knows what really happened, or happens.
Mark Thatcher went missing in the Sahara 10 weeks before the attempted invasion of South Georgia, not during it; ministers at Mrs Thatcher's cabinet meetings would not have addressed her or each other by their Christian names, but by their official titles; Mrs Thatcher was not so unworldly, stupid and vulgar that she would have thought dinner was happening at 6pm, rather than drinks; and the impression is given that the prime minister and the Queen did not know each other before Mrs Thatcher assumed office.
Since Mrs Thatcher had been a cabinet minister for four years, and Leader of her Majesty's Loyal Opposition for another four, the two would have met on official occasions.
The Queen would never have referred to "bloodsports" – a term of Leftist opprobrium – but to "field sports". Her prime minister would not spring a cabinet reshuffle on her; the writers have ignored the traffic that goes on between Palace and Downing Street officials, to ensure the Queen is never wrong-footed.
The Queen would not have asked a courtier whether it was "good news or bad" about an Australian election, because the Queen does not take sides in the politics of any of the lands in which she is Head of State.
As a young journalist, I accompanied Mrs Thatcher on two tours of African Commonwealth countries where she did not, even in private, express the views she unleashes about them in this travesty.
But then The Crown in this incarnation is often a vehicle for Tory-bashing: when Michael Fagan goes to see his MP about his hatred of Thatcherism, that MP is an imaginary Tory called Richard Hastings. Fagan's MP was, in reality, John Grant, a Labour MP who joined the SDP in 1981 – but that would not have served the purposes of the agenda.
There is also the implication that Mrs Thatcher's opposition to sanctions on South Africa was because of her son's business interests there; it was not, but because (as her character says) she did not wish to bequeath an economically devastated nation to the black majority rulers she knew would take it over.
The episode about sanctions includes the Queen asking Mrs Thatcher to sign a Commonwealth statement on the subject.
The Queen, whose grasp of the constitution was pretty sound in her early years as monarch, never mind in her 35th, would never have done such a thing.
There is no doubt that the Queen's view on the Commonwealth was more romantic than Mrs Thatcher's; but she understood that as a constitutional monarch she could act only on the advice of her prime minister.
And when the Queen asks two courtiers whether it would be a bad thing if word got out that she disapproved of aspects of Mrs Thatcher's policies and personality, disbelief is stretched to breaking point.
I recall Mrs Thatcher and the Queen touring the room together at the former's 80th birthday party in 2005: the fact that Her Majesty even attended the party, let alone appeared so delighted to be there, said more about her true relationship with Mrs Thatcher than any of this fiction does.
This brings us to the heart of the problem with this entertainment: that, thanks to the deficiencies in the teaching of history in this country, and the scarcity of teaching British history anywhere else in the world, too many will watch this and confuse fiction with fact.
That has consequences for how people think about the constitutional settlement in this country and how we are governed. Such things will be of no concern to the manufacturers of this high-rent soap opera – but they ought to concern the rest of us.
