So, you’ve watched the new season of The Crown.
You probably have a few questions, right? Like, did the Queen and Margaret Thatcher really have such a terrible relationship? Could you really cut the tension between Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street with a knife?
If you’ve binge-watched your way through a big chunk of Season 4, you might be wondering what exactly went down during this rather turbulent epoch. Crucially, if you’re unfamiliar with this particular era in British history, it’s understandably quite challenging distinguishing fact from fiction and reality from sensationalism.
Watching the newest season of The Crown, the relationship between the Queen and the newly elected prime minister is presented as strained and, at times, fraught with conflict. This projected tension is leaned into throughout the series, but most significantly in episode 2, “The Balmoral Test,” when the relationship’s nature is first established in the show, and episode 8, “48:1,” when events unfold to take it into tense territory. Of course, The Crown is not a documentary, it’s a drama — so we should expect some creative license with the truth. Some have commended Gillian Anderson for her portrayal of Thatcher; Charles Moore, Thatcher’s biographer, declared this season “the only convincing performance I have seen of Mrs Thatcher as prime minister.”
However, Dr Martin Farr, senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University, told me the show’s portrayal of the relationship between the Queen and Thatcher is exaggerated. “The primary priority of the palace is always to have clear and open channels of communication with Downing Street and a good working relationship with the prime minister,” Farr tells me. There is, of course, no smoke without fire. “What [The Crown] is actually doing is it is building on the impression that existed, has been perpetuated,” says Farr. “That impression isn’t really without any foundation.”
In The Crown, this apparent ‘tension’ is established early in Season 4, with “The Balmoral Test,” episode 2, in which a newly-elected Thatcher and husband Denis venture to the Royal family’s Scottish castle. Farr says the episode verged on being “pure caricature” and “quite mendacious” — especially the choice of costuming for the penultimate scene in which the Queen invites Thatcher to accompany her on a stag hunt.
“I noticed that they have Thatcher coming along to the deer stalking in her blue outfit, it’s one of the key signatures of her as a leader and her branding,” says Farr. “She was usually the only woman in a summit meeting or in an assembly somewhere internationally, usually surrounded by middle-aged men in suits. As the one woman, with big hair and colourful outfits, she really stood out.”
Would Margaret Thatcher have worn this stalking? Probably not.
Image: Sophie Mutevelian / Netflix
The use of the blue outfit in the stalking scene, when Thatcher appears in an impractical and not-very-outdoorsy-outfit for an animal hunt, could be seen as conveying an incongruity of another kind — perhaps to highlight the contrast between Thatcher and the Queen in how they choose to spend their leisure time. But Farr thinks it wasn’t quite accurate. “She wouldn’t have gone out [stalking] dressed like that.”
Personal disagreements between the Queen and Thatcher run through several episodes of The Crown for dramatic effect, however, Farr said that the only substantive policy disagreement between Thatcher and the Queen (that we know of) was over imposing economic sanctions on South Africa in opposition to apartheid, historic events which make up the core of episode 8 of The Crown, “48:1.” South Africa’s apartheid — “apart-hood” in Afrikaans — was a system of institutionalised racial segregation implemented by the National Party in 1948, which ended between 1990 and 1993 through a series of negotiations.
“I think it’s a gross exaggeration to say that there was any kind of tension.”
“That’s the only significant area where there’s disagreement because the Queen has a role in the Commonwealth, she’s head of the Commonwealth,” says Farr. “So listens to and then speaks to all of the other heads of government in the Commonwealth.” 48 of the 49 Commonwealth nations agreed on a programme of sanctions — except for Britain, because Thatcher bitterly opposed the move. Eventually, she was forced to capitulate and impose “weakened sanctions” in autumn 1986.
The most supposedly “testy,” as Anderson’s Thatcher puts it, of relations between the Queen and the PM in The Crown comes to light in this episode, through several meetings over the negotiations, but mostly over the story about their supposed rift that was leaked to the media by Michael Shea, press secretary to the Queen from 1978 to 1987, who is played by Nicholas Farrell in the series.
On July 20, 1986, the Sunday Times published a front-page story with the headline “Queen dismayed by ‘uncaring’ Thatcher.” The story claimed that the Queen believed Thatcher to be “uncaring, confrontational, and socially divisive.” Subsequent to the publication of the story, Buckingham Palace released a statement: “As with all previous prime ministers, the Queen enjoys a relationship of the closest confidentiality with Mrs Thatcher, and reports purporting to be the Queen’s opinion of government policies are entirely without foundation.” A hunt for the palace mole revealed Shea to be the source. The Queen was said to be mortified, while Thatcher was, per Moore’s authorised biography, hurt. Historian Dominic Sandbrook argues that the entire row, from Thatcher’s perspective at least, “probably wasn’t that big a deal” and the relationship certainly recovered.
The Crown‘s portrayal of the Queen and Thatcher’s reactions to the Sunday Times story and the ensuing meeting between the two is one of the most dramatic moments of the season. Episode 8 leans into the ‘showdown’ potential of opposing views between the monarch and the PM, equipping Colman and Anderson with biting (and notably fictional) one-liners to fuel the dramatic tension — the final meeting is such a tense back-and-forth the Queen literally rolls her eyes at one point when Thatcher produces the offending newspaper.
In a final flourish, at the end of the episode, The Crown‘s characteristic history-based end notes read, “The palace continues to insist that the Queen has never expressed an opinion or passed judgment on any of her prime ministers.”
Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II.
Image: Liam Daniel / Netflix
The Crown didn’t dive into every policy agreement or disagreement between the Queen and Thatcher, so it’s impossible to say how the show would have treated these moments. “In other areas, we can probably assume that because the policies were divisive in the country because of the miners’ strike and so on, we can assume that the Queen would rather there were harmony and amity in the country rather than division, probably,” said Farr. “But to go beyond that, and say there was hostility based on domestic policies or on their personalities, I don’t have any sense of that.”
In fact, when you look to events that transpired after Thatcher’s premiership ended, you could glean an altogether different idea about the nature of the pair’s relationship. The Queen and Thatcher met every week for 11 years and they kept in touch after Thatcher’s premiership ended, Farr told me. “The evidence is, the Queen attended Thatcher’s funeral, which she only did for Churchill. She attended Thatcher’s 70th birthday party, her 80th birthday party, and made her Order of Merit the day she resigned. She didn’t need to do any of those things,” said Farr. “So I think it’s a gross exaggeration to say that there was any kind of tension.”
Although not related to a specific historic event as such, throughout the season, you’ll notice a not-so-subtle peppering of remarks made by Thatcher that hint at her internalised misogyny. We witness her telling the Queen she believes women are unfit for positions of power, she refers to women as emotional. “Women in general,” Thatcher says during her first audience with the Queen in The Crown, “tend not to be suited to high office.” These moments aren’t far from the truth, it seems — and as the show depicts accurately, Thatcher built a decidedly all-male cabinet.
Cabinet’s all here.
Image: Des Willie / Netflix
“In terms of her view on gender, she was a bit unreconstructed,” says Farr. “She once said, for example, ‘What has feminism ever done for me?'”
“There were very few women in Parliament. But she had no women in her cabinet other than Lynda Chalker for a few years as Minister of Overseas Development.”
There’s no denying this season of The Crown is its most dramatic yet. But, the crucial word to remember here is “drama” — it’s a TV drama, not a documentary. So, take the portrayals of historical events with a rather generous pinch of salt.