Health warning for ‘The Crown’: This programme could ruin your history
Oliver Dowden outside the BBC (WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto)
Netflix viewers are all agog to see what kind of official statement the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, will make before each future episode of The Crown to warn viewers that what they see on screen is not history.
Will Mr Dowden, who studied Law at Trinity Hall Cambridge, appear in person to inform Netflixers that what they are about to see is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The requirement that history books consist of unchallengeable evidence-based fact is a bit more than the market in modern theories of historical relativism can bear.
The Queen must be one of the few people still alive, and grown up enough during the weeks of 1940 covered in the 2017 film Darkest Hour, to know what utter nonsense much of it is. Churchill on the Tube reciting Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome” to a handsome young Afro-Caribbean actor fresh from Notting Hill? Really?
Historians of Tudor England might want Mr Dowden to insist that the BBC insert an official government history warning ahead of the next round of dramatisations of Hilary Mantel’s novels on Thomas Cromwell.
To misquote Macaulay: “We know no spectacle more ridiculous than the British Cabinet in one of its periodic fits of deciding what history is.”
Mr Dowden seems to have become a prisoner of the most obsequious of all the circles of courtiers who surround British royalty. These are the royal correspondents and the writers of books on the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Princess Diana, William and Harry and their wives and all the other royal princes, princesses, dukes and duchesses who, like knotweed, have grown and grown since the death of King George VI in 1952.
At least Queen Victoria had the grace to send her daughters off to marry European royalty or nobility, and her sons, other than the heir apparent, to be naval and army officers or Governor General of Canada. Until present times, it was safe to assume that disease and early death would keep down the numbers of royals. No longer. The present Queen’s children have all until recently stayed in England, as open prey to gossip and scandal, to little public utility.
Forget about the rivalry of the Queen and Mrs Thatcher, or the Diana-Charles-Camilla triptych, which have aroused the ire of the fawning royal correspondents and biographers, who are nearly as numerous as members of the royal family itself.
The very first episodes of The Crown are largely historical nonsense, portraying Lord Salisbury trying to get the Queen to fire Winston Churchill during the Great Smog of London in 1952, and the Queen telling Churchill he had decided on the coronation in 1953 in order to stay one more year in Downing Street.
There is not the slightest evidence for any of this, but without such dramatic interludes the life story of this conventional, conservative, country-loving, unintellectual, horse-riding, dutiful, church-going woman would be intolerably boring for TV viewers.
The real reason this fuss has arisen is not because, as Will Self has so ungraciously written in The New European, “the future King wished to be his lover’s tampon not just once or twice, but pretty much constantly”, but because this giant part of the state machinery remains so secret.
The whole apparatus of state power is placed at the monarch’s disposal, with the Prime Minister having to turn up weekly, like a loyal serviteur, to report on what is going on, as if the Queen did not receive boxes every day stuffed with the highest secrets of the state.
Anyone who has witnessed the quivering exaltation of the highly qualified top rank diplomats of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, when a royal turns up to be given double-plus red-carpet treatment, will know the extraordinary hold the royals have as the most central cogs of the British state machine.
Yet, unlike any other democratic state – where the head of state is as open to public scrutiny, especially public expenditure scrutiny, as a minister, mayor or MP – the secrets of the royals are better kept than those of the denizens of the Kremlin.
We are forced to savour the fake truth of Peter Morgan’s sumptuous Crown fables because we are denied our right to know anything at all about this essential department of state, other than their names, rank and the number of disastrous “liaisons” they have recorded.
The Crown is nursery level entertainment. Just as children want fairy tales, not history, the infantalised British public laps up the pap. The Oliver Dowden truth alert is pointless, especially from a Government headed by a man whose historic relationship with factual truth is gossamer thin, to put it politely.
The rest of the world will watch and enjoy The Crown without its history health warning and look with amazement at a people considered by their Government to be so thick that they cannot watch royal fiction without being warned by their Culture Minister that not everything on television is true.
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