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”.
