BOYCOTT ‘HURTFUL’ TV CROWN SAY KING’S FRIENDS
As furious John Major condemns Netf lix drama’s ‘damaging and malicious lie’ that Charles urged him to oust the Queen ...
ROYAL drama The Crown was last night accused of fabricating a ‘hurtful’ smear against King Charles by depicting him secretly plotting to oust the Queen when he was Prince of Wales.
Friends called the portrayal of the new monarch as a disloyal schemer ‘false, unfair and deeply wounding’ and urged viewers to boycott the hit Netflix show. The new series, due to be screened next month, shows Charles lobbying Prime Minister John Major in a bizarre attempt to force his mother’s abdication.
But Sir John told The Mail on Sunday the meeting never happened and called the scene a ‘barrel load of malicious nonsense’.
Another well-placed source said: ‘All the dialogue is completely made up.
‘All the one-to-one conversations you see on screen are utter fiction and some scenes have been entirely created for dramatic and commercial purposes with little regard for the
truth. People should be boycotting it.’ Other sources said the Queen’s death just five weeks ago makes the episode particularly hurtful.
The first episode of the forthcoming fifth series is set in 1991, against a background of speculation about the future of the monarchy and Charles’s constitutional role.
The Crown’s writers suggest that Charles believed his mother, then 65, was repeating Queen Victoria’s mistakes by refusing to stand aside for a younger heir. But critics point out that Charles was in reality acutely aware that abdication was unthinkable and would devalue the institution.
Last year, politicians and royal experts backed a Mail on Sunday campaign to demand Netflix put a disclaimer on The Crown, making clear it was presenting fiction as fact. It
‘The Crown’s full of nonsense, but this is nonsense on stilts’
followed mounting criticism over the distortion of a string of incidents in the last series. The streaming giant has so far refused to add any such message to the start of episodes.
Broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, a friend of the King, said of the latest fabrication: ‘The Crown is full of nonsense, but this is nonsense on stilts.’
And royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith added: ‘The events depicted here are outrageous and totally fictional.
‘This programme is doing significant damage to people’s perception of history and their perception of the Royal Family. It has been packed full of malicious lies from the beginning but this level of abuse is now beyond the pale.’
In the contentious episode, due to be released on November 9, Charles is buoyed by a newspaper poll showing support for abdication among 47 per cent of the Queen’s subjects. That storyline is based on a genuine poll from 1990, but one with a crucial difference. In the real one, 47 per cent said the Queen should
‘An outrageous fiction doing serious damage’
hand over the Throne ‘at some stage’ in the future.
The Prince, played by Dominic West, is shown actively briefing against the Queen who he believes is too old and too out of touch.
Such is his determination to draw the Prime Minister into his conspiracy that he is shown cutting short a holiday with Princess Diana and William and Harry to race back to London.
Summoning Mr Major, played by Trainspotting star Jonny Lee Miller, to a private meeting, he asks him to keep their discussions secret.
In their exchange, Charles hints that the monarchy should follow the lead of the Conservative Party which a year earlier had ousted Mrs Thatcher in favour of the younger Major. He says: ‘What makes the Conservative
Party the successful electoral force that it is? Its instinct for renewal and its willingness to make way for someone younger.’
He draws a parallel between himself and his great-great grandfather, Edward VII, the son of Queen Victoria, who was Prince of Wales for almost 60 years.
Charles is depicted as saying: ‘It was said that Queen Victoria had no confidence in him, thought him dangerous, free thinking. He longed to be given responsibilities, but his mother refused. Even forbad him from seeing State papers.
‘Yet when his time came, he proved his doubters wrong and his dynamism, his intellect, his popular appeal made his reign a triumph.’ When Mr Major asks what he is driving at, Charles replies: ‘I am saying what a pity it was, what a waste that his voice, his presence, his vision, wasn’t incorporated earlier. It would have been so good for everybody.’
In the episode, entitled Queen Victoria Syndrome, Charles tells Mr Major that if he joins the Queen at an upcoming ball at Balmoral he will be able to judge for himself ‘whether this institution that we all care about so deeply is in safe hands’.
Sir Malcom Rifkind, Foreign Secretary under Mr Major, said the implication that the Prince was pressing the PM to encourage the Queen to make
Abdication storyline ‘is pathetic and absurd’
way for him was ‘pathetic and absurd’, adding: ‘At the time, the Queen was in her 60s – younger than the King is today. It’s pure fantasy which is what we have come to expect from this particular programme.’
David Mellor, who also served in Mr Major’s Government, called the episode ‘bunkum’.
He added: ‘To conspire with the heir to the throne to try to force a monarch he had sworn to serve to stand down is simply not something [Major] would ever have contemplated. No one in their right mind would have suggested it and no one as sensible as Charles would ever have imagined that this was possible or desirable.’
Later in the episode, Charles talks to Mr Major about the Queen wanting taxpayers’ money to repair the Royal Yacht Britannia. He tells the PM: ‘Sometimes these old things are too costly to keep repairing. I’ll leave you with that thought.’
Several of The Crown’s storylines are likely to prove deeply hurtful to Sir John, who is known to have been close to the late Queen. In one scene, during a private conversation with his wife Norma, he describes the senior Royals as ‘dangerously deluded and out of touch’ and the junior Royals as ‘feckless, entitled and lost’.
But a spokesman for the Majors said: ‘What you report as depicted in the script has never been their view, never would be their view, and never will be their view.’