Thirty years ago, the present king tried to usurp his mother, the Queen. He sought to conspire with the then prime minister, John Major, after an opinion poll hostile to the monarch appeared in the Sunday Times. Like all the scenes in Netflix’s The Crown, this is claimed to have been “inspired by real events”.
In truth there was no such plot, no conspiracy and no poll hostile to the monarchy. A fictional storyline was put into the mouths of living people and then introduced as “the story of the political and personal events that shaped the Queen’s reign”.
I carry no brief for the royal family. The institution has shown it can handle the strain of being the butt of inaccuracy and ridicule. For their part, the Crown’s apologists shrug and excuse it as entertainment, a sceptical portrayal of celebrities to be taken with a pinch of salt. It enjoys a licence to lie that is granted to all docu-dramatists: that they are “artists”. The show’s creator, Peter Morgan, has adopted a different defence. He admits to “forsaking accuracy but not the truth”. His consultant Robert Lacey seems to be stretching things when he writes under the headline, “Never a truer word was said of the royal family”.
The Crown’s approach to accuracy ill-conceals a different excuse, that depicting famous people on screen lends a plausibility to any plot, however weak. It titillates the audience with familiarity. So what if Prince Philip was still alive when The Crown implied, on no evidence at all, that he had been unfaithful to the Queen? It made a better story than if he had been a fictional prince.
At one level, making money out of being offensive or cruel to living people is commonplace. They are usually rich, and can always sue if they think they’ve been libelled. We might add that the British royal family brought it on themselves when they decided in the 1960s to project themselves as high-profile celebrities, in pointed contrast to the discretion of Europe’s other hereditary monarchs.
More serious is the abuse of the word “truth”. The series has had its poignant moments but it is blatantly biased against the monarchy. The royal biographer, Hugo Vickers, has noted that many of the falsified scenes are derogatory about the royal family. It claims to be a “fictionalised dramatisation” of reality but it cannot have seriously researched the truth, as did Hilary Mantel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. It did not follow Thucydides in declaring his war reports as “the closest possible fidelity on my part to the overall sense of what was actually said”.
People believe accounts of reality portrayed on television. Roughly a third of Americans believe Donald Trump’s claim that his presidency was “stolen” by Joe Biden. They have seen it on television, with confirmatory “evidence” on social media. That is why lies are so dangerous. Look also at Owen Matthews’ wise new book on Ukraine, as seen from Moscow’s standpoint, Overreach. It shows Russians strongly supporting Vladimir Putin’s view of the war as the result of Nato aggression. They have been told it relentlessly on television and so it must be true.
I accept that these are real people and not just actors peddling fiction. But a casual disregard for truth is the same wherever it occurs. Accounts of real, historical people cannot depend for their veracity on the vigour of the liar or the plausibility of the actor. The maxim remains the same, that a lie encircles the globe while truth is still getting on its boots.
I am sure Britain’s royal family will survive this reputational blitzkrieg. Biographers have already had a field day deconstructing The Crown, and if millions of viewers are misled, too bad. The status of truth is a more fragile casualty. Academic historians and (most) journalists do not see it as their task to distort or glamorise contemporary events by spicing them with lies. The policing of stories about living individuals is subject to a mix of libel law, literary reputation and journalistic ethics. Publishers hire lawyers and factcheckers. The mainstream media has long offered an editorial filter between events and their readers and listeners, one that remains appreciated by the latter. In litigation, truth is always a defence.
Social media has shredded that editorial filter. Regulation of information of all sorts is in its infancy. Much of the internet is not so much a global village as a global Hyde Park Corner. Journalism’s “first rough draft of history” is blowing in the wind.
That is why art cannot be licensed to rewrite history as it sees fit. The Crown should have opened with a screaming health warning: “The following events depicted in this drama did not take place … ”
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
