Versions of the truth over Diana in real life and on television

I HAD never seen the actress Gillian Anderson, once voted the world’s sexiest woman, as obvious casting for Margaret Thatcher. But perhaps Meryl Streep was too expensive even for The Crown, the magnificently lavish Netflix drama about the Royal family from the 1930s to the present.

It returns this weekend, with the action shifted forward to the 1980s, which makes it no longer history but nostalgia for most of us. But the fascination of the series has always been its ability to interweave what we remember with what we were never allowed to know. Its fictionalised accounts of Mrs Thatcher’s meetings with the Queen are a case in point; noone can say if Ms Anderson and Olivia Colman get anywhere near the truth.

But as we learned this week, the truth is apt to shift with the sands. What seemed like a given at the time is suddenly no longer so.

Just when we thought we had heard all there was to tell about Diana, Princess of Wales, the allegation resurfaced that the BBC had coerced her to admit on camera that there were three people, not two, in her marriage.

Her relationship with the Prince of Wales was the sub- plot playing out in the Royal household through the

’ 80s. As the Queen and the PM danced around the affairs of state, Charles was conducting affairs in the state rooms.

His relationships with women had long been obsessed over by the media. Despite – or perhaps because of – his natural gaucherie, he had been among the world’s most eligible bachelors. It was only when he settled down that he assumed the worthy but dull persona we know today.

From then, it was Diana alone that fascinated everyone, and when she pitched up in Leeds in March 1982, eight months after her wedding and heavily pregnant, it seemed as though everyone had turned out in person to get a look at her. I remember the excitement on their faces as she stepped from her car. It wasn’t the sort of sceptical voyeurism we might expect today; it was as if a being from another universe had come amongst us.

I was part of the press entourage that day, bending an ear in case she let slip the news for which the world was apparently waiting: the due date of her first child. “May,” said an old boy at the hospice she was visiting. He wasn’t really sure what he had heard, but that was the word he thought had fallen from her lips, and the rest of us put two and two together.

That was the version of the truth that was written down that day. It was disproved only when Prince William failed to appear until June, and, of course, by the later revelations about the state of his parents’ marriage.

The circumstances in which we learned about that are only now becoming apparent. A documentary on ITV, whose screening just ahead of The Crown cannot be coincidental, alleged that the BBC reporter Martin Bashir had forged a bank statement which made Diana believe that the Palace was spying on her and impelled her to cooperate with the filmmakers.

It is a ticking time bomb under Broadcasting House. The Corporation now stands accused of having covered up the indiscretion, and the outcome of its newly- announced re- investigation will be indivisible from the negotiations over the future of the licence fee.

Mr Bashir is dangerously ill and unable to speak for himself, so we may never know how he really obtained his scoop. Our received understanding of what went on may be determined by the dramatic licence of The Crown and other, less honourable pieces. That was the way it was in Leeds in 1982 and it remains so today.

Dramas that are part fact, part conjecture are an unsatisfactory way of recording history, but when the head of state and her family conduct their affairs in a giant bell jar, what else is a dramatist to do?

There is already a generation for whom the ’ 80s are ancient history. For them, Margaret Thatcher is as remote a figure as Mary, Queen of Scots; it makes no difference to them if she looked like the actress from The X- Files, or indeed one of the Spice Girls. Their view will be shaped by TV, for better or worse.

Diana’s interview with Martin Bashir is the shining exception to this. For the only time in the 20th century, we heard the unvarnished truth at first hand from the one Royal in a position to speak it. That it may have been coerced out of her adds a whole new level of dramatic irony.

I remember the excitement. It was as if a being from another universe had come amongst us.