🗣 'As portrayed by Jonny Lee Miller, Major actually comes off better than he did in the 1990s, when he played himself.'
has given it. “Fiction should not be paraded as fact”, said the former PM, who must never have seen the stage version. But would any perceptive viewer think that’s what was happening? I doubt it.
Major’s criticism is based on a scene which dramatises his conversation with the future King Charles on whether the Queen might be persuaded to abdicate. We must accept his assertion that it is not a literal account of any actual exchange – but that’s not the point. The dramatic narrative, that a movement existed in the 1990s to modernise the monarchy, is well documented.
As portrayed by Jonny Lee Miller, Major actually comes off better than he did in the 1990s, when he played himself. Morgan depicts him as offering wise counsel to Charles, and resistance to the Queen when she suggests that the Royal yacht Britannia – the “battleship with soft furnishings” that had become a metaphor for all that was outdated about the monarchy – be refitted at the taxpayers’ expense.
Major’s worry is that The Crown will become a de facto history of its period, in the same way that he thinks the Henry VI saga must be a definitive account of the Wars of the Roses. And anyway, if history is to be written down, isn’t it better done by a master dramatist than a Conservative politician?Shakespeare was honest about his intentions. His aim, he says in his last performed line at the end of The Tempest, had been “to please”. Not to preach or educate; just please.
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