Commander of the British Empire called in to attack the Crown

 

Pompous Idiot of the week this week goes to Secretary of State for Digital, Media and Sport Oliver Dowden (Commander of the British Empire) who has sternly told Netflix that Season 4 of “The Crown” needs to come with a fiction disclaimer.

Over at the Daily Mail there is much disapprobation and a running series of articles to inform the serfs of which pieces of the narrative are True and False.   

We could, of course, analyse these one by one but the most damaging of these in the Mail’s eyes is the narrative of the series that Prince Charles carried on an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles both before, during and after his marriage.   

Of course there is no doubt that Prince Charles and Camilla had an affair – not since Charles was forced to admit this on television.  However, the official version of events by (for want of a better phrase) “Team Charlie” has always been that this only happened after his marriage had “irretrievably broken down”.

The problem is this doesn’t match up with what Princess Diana said in her Martin Bashir interview “there were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded” or what she told Andrew Morton via a third party while he was writing “Diana : her True Story”.  At the time Morton lied somewhat unconvincingly that he had based his book on what “friends” of Diana had told him.  This was a half truth.  Actually “Diana : Her True Story” was written by getting a friend to ask Diana the questions Morton wanted to ask her thereby enabling him to do a series of interviews without being corporeally conspicuous round any palaces.  The tape recordings are still extant and were used as the basis of the update 1997 tome “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words”.   

This tells a very different story to that of Team Charlie.  While it is clear that Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla was on-and-off it was still very much a continuous thread that ran throughout their marriage.  Now we could enter into a philosophical and moral treaties of a When Sally Met Harry type of whether a Parker-Bowles can just be friends with a Prince Charles but it’s pretty clear to the meanest intelligence that this was a lifelong adulterous love affair – not least because… Reader, she married him.

“Controversy over invented scenes, including the false suggestion that the affair between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles continued throughout his marriage to Diana, prompted the Princess's brother to add his voice to the calls for a disclaimer.”

Well, the best that can be said is that that there were a few windows of time when Prince Charles and Camilla weren’t carrying on.  But the thrust of the drama as presented which suggests that it was his long continuing affair with Ms P-B that was partly responsible for Princess Diana’s rampant bulimia is pretty much no more than the Princess herself repeated many times.

Of course the irony is that while The Crown racks up massive viewing figures from everyone trapped at home during the pandemic the real Royal Family are pretty much nowhere to be seen.  The Queen gave a special broadcast – as thrilling as her usual Christmas ones – from Windsor Castle earlier in the year and since then she and Prince Philip have hardly set a foot outside.  Well they went to Balmoral for the summer but … due to being very high risk they’ve been very nearly invisible.  As indeed have most of the others… so it’s harder than usual for them to set up a counter-narrative.

So we have Ministers concerned that Netflix is immune from Offcom and The Crown got government money for being cultural propaganda… etc  Funny no one complained about the other dramatisations that went before.  But then, of course, they were crap.  And, of course, Princess Charles would have a hard time with libel law as all this has all been covered in the public domain before and he’s out of time…