Anyone who has met the Queen will know how intelligent she is
Peter Morgan, writer of the much-admired series The Crown, has been sounding off about his royal subject and the institution of monarchy, branding the Queen as “of limited intelligence”, a “countryside woman” who would rather be looking after her horses and her dogs than doing her job as monarch.
It would be fair to say that the Queen is indeed a countryside woman at heart. As a child, she once told a friend that when she grew up she would like to marry a farmer and have lots of horses and cows and dogs.
Morgan’s depiction of her as a woman of limited intelligence, however, is strictly limited in itself, and does not tie in with the comments of countless ambassadors and politicians who have had to deal with her on a one-to-one basis.
No one could describe the Queen as an intellectual – she does not read books, apart from form books relating to her racing passion, nor is she greatly interested in art beyond the Royal Collections.
However, this does not mean that she is limited: a succession of high-powered people has been impressed with her intelligent appreciation of foreign affairs and of domestic constitutional matters.
One former US ambassador to the United Kingdom, Raymond Seitz, described her as “a perfectly delightful person – natural, funny, interested, professional”.
American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, no mean judge of character, met the 16-year-old Princess Elizabeth and was impressed, writing that “she was quite serious and with a great deal of character and personality. She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States and they were serious questions”.
Winston Churchill met the princess for the first time at Balmoral when she was just two-and-a-half, afterwards writing about her to his wife, Clementine: “She is a character…she has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” Later, after the Queen’s accession to the throne in February 1952, he became her Prime Minister and firm friend (although admittedly their conversations were often centred on horse-racing).
The Queen has her areas of concern, too. The Commonwealth has long been close to her heart and she has taken a particular interest in its affairs, notably the politics of South Africa and Zimbabwe – a subject on which her views did not concur with those of her prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
The warmth of her reception by President Nelson Mandela during her 1995 state visit to South Africa after its readmission into the Commonwealth was an eloquent testimony to how he viewed her contribution to the ending of apartheid.
Were all these luminaries wrong?
Morgan apparently regards the monarchy as a threat to democracy and cherishes the prospect of its ultimate fall. Would he really rather have a Tony Blair/nick Clegg/david Cameron dictatorship? Or Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell?
Although I cannot see him making so much money out of films dedicated to these questionable democratic combinations, maybe with his undoubted skills he would succeed in doing just that. I would hope, however, that he would spend more time getting to know his subject.
Sarah Bradford is a royal biographer and the author of ‘Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times’