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The trouble with the Queen and Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.
Season 4 of The Crown positions Margaret Thatcher as both foil and friend to the Queen Charles Moore
Uneasy lies the head that writes The Crown, I imagine. In undertaking to dramatize the story of the Queen from the 1920s to the early 21st century, author Peter Morgan set himself a huge and controversial task. The story has to portray the Queen's relationships not only with her family, but with other public figures — above all, her prime ministers.
Her first prime minister, Winston Churchill, was, as it were, grandfather to the very young queen. Her third, Harold Macmillan, was paternal. In the new fourth season, the Queen has been on the throne nearly 30 years and is on her eighth PM. For the first time, she finds herself with one the same age and the same sex. Britain was a man's world, yet both the head of state (born 1926) and the head of government, Margaret Thatcher (born 1925), were women.
When writing my biography of Thatcher, I came across the earliest known vignette of the two. In 1949, Margaret Roberts, aged 23, was taken to a horse race by her then boyfriend (not Denis). The future Queen was present. Bossily hijacking her boyfriend's diary, Margaret wrote in it, “I saw Princess Elizabeth, and she saw me!” From the start, there was a note of excitement and comparison, even competition.
Arriving for her first audience in Buckingham Palace in 1979, Thatcher is reverent. Gillian Anderson captures the careful precision of her dress, hair and voice and the exaggerated depth of her curtsy, which made courtiers laugh. This is the only convincing performance I have seen of Thatcher as prime minister.
In her appearance and manner at the weekly audience, Thatcher was demonstrating a combination of respect and social unease. As the first woman prime minister, she had unprecedented problems about what to wear. She could not ask — it is against the unwritten rules — what the Queen would wear. She feared upstaging or accidentally imitating her sovereign's wardrobe (the latter did occasionally happen). As the daughter of a provincial grocer, she also worried about how to comport herself in the royal presence. While she was in office, this worry never went away. Although in politics almost a revolutionary — something The Crown portrays well — she was also a stickler for correct form.
Only in Thatcher's retirement did everything become surprisingly cozy between the two women. The Queen paid her the unusual honour of attending her 80th birthday party. They moved chattily around the room side by side, grandmothers together.
The second episode is about that initial unease. Denis and Margaret arrive for their first prime ministerial stay at Balmoral and do everything wrong. Dressed for dinner, they enter the drawing room at 6 p.m., only to find the merry royal party just back from a hunt. The following day, the women accompany the stalking, Thatcher in her London suit. As they cross the glen, the Queen tells her the suit's conspicuous blue will make the stag see her. After vain struggles in the squelching peat, she is sent home to change.
This improbable scene shows the Queen being actively discourteous, which is wrong. At one point, Thatcher protests to Denis: “I'm struggling to find any redeeming features in these people at all.” That is similarly overexplicit. But the visit has the ring of truth — Thatcher was a fish out of water, and was laughed at for it. Her real-life way of expressing her desire to get back to her beloved work was less overt: at seven on the morning of departure from Balmoral, she was ready to be off in time to avoid another slow, full Scottish breakfast.
Once the show's narrative turns to political events, the details go haywire. Inaccuracies support Morgan's view that the drama should be seen as “an act of imagination.”
There are several significant fact-skewings in Series Four. I single out just one.
Thatcher wins the first ballot in the leadership challenge of 1990 by only four votes. Colleagues say she must go. No, she tells Denis excitedly, “I still have one card to play.” Off she rushes to beg the Queen to dissolve Parliament to save her from resignation. This is factual nonsense. Worse, it undermines the character the series has built. Thatcher was respectful of constitutional rules; so, of course, was the Queen. She would never intervene to save the neck of a prime minister who was losing her party's support, and Thatcher would never have asked her to do so.
Luckily, the drama rescues itself. The scene when the Queen thanks the departing Thatcher for everything she has done in office by personally awarding her the Order of Merit and pinning it on her is moving. Thatcher's heart is too full for her to speak.
All dramatic presentations of the Queen and Thatcher have a similar problem, I think. The authors naturally want striking words to be exchanged, so they make both women say too much. The truth is more typically, interestingly British — that each felt somewhat constrained in the other's company. Thatcher was never, ever rude to or about the Queen (at one point in The Crown she is shown trying to leave an audience early because she is so cross: Unthinkable).
As for the Queen, both her personal character and her constitutional role mean she rarely tackles things head on.
Olivia Colman, acting very watchably but not very queenishly, lacks the inscrutable mask of regality that is the Queen's stock-in-trade. The script sometimes makes this mistake, too. During Thatcher's fall, the Queen bursts out at her: “Perhaps the time has come for you to try to do nothing, for once.” Such words do not fit the restrained Elizabeth II — the woman whose favourite three real-life words of rebuke are, “Are you sure?”
But to return to Morgan's “act of imagination.” At the core of The Crown's portrayal of the Queen/Thatcher relationship is its odd, interesting parallelism. Two mothers, who both dote on sons (Andrew, Mark) whom the rest of the world tend to find underwhelming; two women who share seriousness, hard work, Christianity and patriotism and have grown up together in years, though apart in milieu; and two leaders whose roles and characters lead them to respond to national problems in completely different ways — the Queen quietly seeking continuity, Thatcher pushing ceaselessly for change.
This is a gripping story of woman-power, played out by two middle-aged ladies who never answered to the name of feminist.
The fourth season of The Crown will be on Netflix from Nov. 15. The final volume of Charles Moore's biography, Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone (Penguin) is out in paperback.
THE QUEEN QUIETLY PUSHES FOR CONTINUITY, THATCHER CEASELESSLY FOR CHANGE