Why is the BBC peddling Lady C’s poisonous poppycock about the Queen Mum?
One day someone will write the true story of the Queen Mother’s life. Casting aside the saccharine versions which have appeared since her death in 2002, the new biographer may choose to explore her snobbery, her manipulativeness, her spendthrift ways and her contempt for her doughty son-in-law, the Duke of edinburgh.
The writer might even address the well-founded notion that, far from the Queen Mother hating her brother-in-law edward VIII for putting her husband on the throne, in fact she relished every moment of being Queen.
And why not. There’s no harm in telling the truth, especially when it relates to someone who was so crucial to the survival of Britain’s monarchy after the Abdication crisis which unfolded 80 years ago.
But the truth it has to be. not a version of someone’s fantasy of the might-have-been — which is what we are told to expect from Royal Wives At War, a docu-drama to be broadcast tomorrow night.
The BBC has focused its attention on the well-known enmity between the Queen Mother and the woman who brought her to the throne, Wallis Simpson, later Duchess of Windsor. The programme includes dramatised — but entirely fictional — scenes featuring actress Gina McKee as Mrs Simpson, and emma Davies as the Queen Mother.
This is the same national broadcaster that, with blatant disregard for the nation’s special love of the Queen Mother, refused to televise her 100th birthday celebrations in 2000, claiming it would clash with an episode of the Australian soap neighbours. Instead, the event was picked up by ITV and watched by a record 11 million viewers.
Claiming to be based on ‘authoritative sources’, tomorrow’s programme undertakes to shed new light on the battle between elizabeth and Wallis, promising ‘a knife fight between two tough women’.
Of course, for a time, back in the 1930s, Wallis Simpson did hold sway over elizabeth. Then, after the Abdication, it was the other way round. But although they became two of the most famous women of the 20th century, they barely met, hardly ever spoke and were always careful to keep out of each other’s way.
Hauled in to add credence to the show’s dubious claims are John Julius norwich, one of Britain’s most distinguished men of letters, and the biographer Hugo Vickers. Ranged against them are Princess Diana’s famed biographer Andrew Morton, and Lady Colin Campbell — most recently seen as ‘Lady C’ in I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! even before transmission, the programme has been dismissed as ‘rubbish’ by one senior historian.
Central to the show’s claims is that the Queen Mother, when young and single, wanted to marry edward (then known as David), the Prince of Wales, rather than his less glamorous brother Bertie.
LADy COLIn asserts: ‘She tried to marry David. He wasn’t interested in her. He liked them slender, sleek and svelte, like Wallis.’ The programme then shows Gina McKee as Mrs Simpson, saying: ‘[She] was sweet on David. naturally he wasn’t interested. What could a silly little girl like her offer him, a man of the world? I had the prize and she had second best.’
This contention is presented as fact, yet there’s not a single shred of historical evidence to support it. The Realpolitik of royal marriages a century ago meant the future King was expected to wed the daughter of a european royal house or, at the very least, the daughter of a British duke.
elizabeth, a couple of rungs down the social ladder as the daughter of an earl, was on the lookout for a husband of her own rank and had been dating Viscount ‘Grubby’ Gage. She and David were never in the same league.
When elizabeth and David met in 1918, he was at the tail end of a romance with Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower, daughter of the Duke of Sutherland. His father King George V, hopeful of better things, intervened to squash that relationship, so David headed into the arms of Freda Dudley Ward, the wife of a Liberal MP, who remained his mistress for 16 years.
Both affairs were well known and talked about in society circles, and it would have been crystal clear to elizabeth that the Prince had his hands full, romantically speaking.
All that ever happened between David and elizabeth was that, at the end of World War I, they danced together a few times, though in 1923 a newspaper hinted that the pair were shortly to announce their engagement. But the paper had the wrong man — it was David’s brother Bertie who had proposed.
All this information is available to anyone interested in the lives of royalty. To come up with something new, to find the truth about elizabeth’s feelings for the Prince of Wales, you have to have access to the Royal Library at Windsor.
Here might be found — if evidence ever existed — details of elizabeth’s romantic ambitions towards the man who was to become her brother-in-law. But when Lady Colin Campbell wrote a biogaphy of the Queen Mother in 2012, she did not consult the Royal Library.
Had she done so, she would not have found the evidence upon which her claims are based, nor anything to support the astonishing claims repeated in a book that the Queen Mother was thought not to be the daughter of the earl and Countess of Strathmore, but of their French cook.
CeRTAInLy, in later life the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, bitter at being sidelined after the Abdication, used to call the Queen Mother ‘Cookie’. But that came from Wallis one day describing the Sovereign’s wife, with her rounded figure, as ‘that fat Scotch cook’.
So, taking rumours and presenting them as fact, the BBC has created a programme likely to offend those who believe the Queen Mother almost single-handedly saved the Monarchy in the months and years after the Abdication.
It has embarrassed its contributors, Viscount norwich and Hugo Vickers, who himself wrote a distinguished biography of elizabeth and is listed as the show’s historical consultant.
The leading historian Andrew Roberts, who did not take part, says: ‘The relationship between these two women is dramatic and extraordinary, without the BBC inventing rubbish of this kind.’
And Tory MP Andrew Bridgen described the show’s line as ‘more like a script from eastenders’.
Without doubt, there are many facts still worth revealing about the Queen Mother — for example, how she wore the trousers in the royal marriage and told Bertie (a King and an emperor) what to do.
It’s true, as the BBC docu-drama claims, that she fought hard to keep the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in exile for the rest of their lives. But in fairness to her, she’d learnt of a letter David had written to his mother, Queen Mary, complaining that Bertie had behaved badly to him ‘because of the influence of that common little woman’.
no wonder elizabeth spiritedly retorted: ‘What a curse black sheep are in a family! The mass of people do not forgive quickly the sort of thing he did to this country, and they HATe her!’
nearly 80 years ago, with the Abdication looming and courtiers and Cabinet ministers trying to work out what on earth would happen next, alternative plans were drawn up for the occupancy of Buckingham Palace which did not include Bertie and elizabeth.
Bertie’s reluctance to shoulder the burden of kingship — he cried on his mother’s shoulder at the prospect — was matched by an unglamorous public image and a personality that was both nervy and bad-tempered.
What’s more, there were some who did not like elizabeth’s ‘grandstanding behaviour’. Wouldn’t it be better, the argument ran, if the throne went to the youngest brother, the Duke of Kent?
These are stories the BBC might have examined — fascinating but as yet unexplored avenues concerning what happened around and after the Abdication, which set elizabeth and Wallis at loggerheads for the rest of their lives.
Instead, licence-payers will be treated to a basinful of fiction presented as fact. Her Majesty would not be amused.
Royal Wives At War, Friday, BBC2, 9pm.