By Brittani
Barger 22nd November 2020
https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/wales/why-we-should-stop-painting-camilla-as-a-villain-152607/
For decades, many have painted the Duchess of Cornwall
as a villain cast opposite of Diana’s hero. It is past time for that narrative
to stop.
I was
struck by how the Duchess is being, again, painted as the villain while
watching the latest series of The Crown. We see her as the other woman, running
around with the Prince of Wales while he was married to Diana. It is important
to remember that these two loved each other from the beginning, and it was the
Royal Family who would not allow them to be together. If they had had it their
way, they would have been married to each other from the beginning. Now, I’m
not condoning an extramarital affair, but there is more to this story than gets
reported.
Has she
made mistakes? Yes, but I beg you to find someone on the planet who has not
made a mistake in their life. You won’t be able to find one.
Camilla has
been a member of the Royal Family for 15 years now. She has kept her head down
and gotten to work, never complaining. The Duchess works with many organisations
including the Animal Care Trust, BookTrust, Children’s Hospice South West,
Cornwall Air Ambulance Trust, Elephant Family, and the Royal Osteoporosis
Society. Overall, she supports over 90 organisations where she is either the
patron or president.
Since
becoming a member of the Royal Family, the Duchess of Cornwall has become one
of the most loved members, especially by the press. She is always so friendly
and warm to the media who she knows is at engagements to do their jobs. She
smiles and helps them get good photographs for their stories, knowing that the
causes she’s championing will be focused on, as well.
Camilla
always has a smile and jokes with those, including the press, around her. She
will hop into a new ambulance helicopter named after her and share a laugh with
the service personnel there, just like she will put on a virtual reality
headset to give it a spin. The Duchess of Cornwall is relatable and is
passionate about the causes close to her heart and those close to the hearts of
other members of the Royal Family.
She’s also
the only member of the Royal Family who personally responds to the majority of
those who write to her, personally signing letters sent to well-wishers.
She has
worked tirelessly to gain the Royal Family, press and public’s approval. It has
not been an easy road, but after decades, I think it is time that the Duchess
of Cornwall gets a break. It’s time that the media and Hollywood stop painting
her as the villain. She does so much good for the UK and has been a fantastic
ambassador for the Royal Family and the United Kingdom since she married the
Prince of Wales.
We should
also take into consideration that Camilla helped to raise Diana’s boys after
Diana’s tragic death in a 1997 car crash. Camilla married the Prince of Wales
in 2005 and had been a part of Princes William and Harry’s lives for years.
Both William and Harry have now married and have children of their own; for
Princes George and Louis, Princess Charlotte and Archie, Camilla is the only
paternal grandmother they will ever know (they will undoubtedly know of ‘Granny
Diana’ but they can’t know her in person). From interactions we’ve seen of
Camilla with the children, we can see the love she has for them and the love they
have for her. I’m sure Diana is happy that Camilla is there to show her
grandchildren and children love and be there for them since she can’t. Camilla
and Diana may not have gotten along, but the most important thing to Diana was
her two boys. Nothing would make her happier than to look down to see them
having a stable mother figure in their lives who cares about them, and the same
can be said about her grandchildren.
Now it
should be noted that I’m a fan of Diana, and I’ve found her inspirational. As a
child, she was THE princess, the one who made me believe that princesses were
not just in Disney stories. However, I’m not blinded by her; I know she was not
perfect. She made mistakes, and we can’t act as though she was a saint, just as
we can’t act as though Camilla is a villain.
The Crown's fake history is as corrosive as fake
news
Simon
Jenkins
The popular TV series about the royal family is
reality hijacked as propaganda, and a cowardly abuse of artistic licence
Mon 16 Nov
2020 17.13 GMT
When you
turn on your television tonight, imagine seeing the news acted rather than
read. Someone looking like Boris Johnson furiously screaming at his fiancee,
Carrie Symonds; Dominic Cummings vomiting into a can; and the Queen told to
piss off. Afterwards the BBC flashes up a statement saying all this was “based
on true events”, and hoping we enjoyed it.
The royal
family series The Crown has garnered plaudits for its acting and brickbats for
its inaccuracies, almost all of them derogatory towards living or recently dead
individuals. The new series, on Netflix, appears to have upped the fabrication
and the offence. The scriptwriter, Peter Morgan, admits: “Sometimes you have to
forsake accuracy, but you must never forsake truth.”
This sounds
like a dangerous distinction. Helen Mirren’s portrayal of Elizabeth II in The
Queen (2006) was uncomplimentary but a plausible recreation of events around the
death of Diana. Olivia Colman’s sour-faced parody of the monarch on Netflix
left us guessing which parts were true and which false. It was fake history.
The words and actions of living individuals were made up to suit a plot that
could have been scripted by Diana’s biggest supporters.
The
historian Hugo Vickers has already detailed eight complete fabrications in the
new series, all caricaturing the royal family in the worst possible light. They
are:
1. Lord
Mountbatten wrote a letter to Prince Charles the day before his death.
2. The
royal family laid protocol traps to humiliate Margaret Thatcher on a visit to
Balmoral.
3. Princess
Margaret ridiculed Princess Diana for not being able to curtsey.
4. Prince
Charles called Camilla Parker Bowles every day in the early years of his
marriage.
5. Princess
Diana threw a tantrum on a visit to Australia and forced the plans to be
changed.
6. Princess
Margaret visited two of the Queen’s cousins, who had been placed in a “state
lunatic asylum” to avoid embarrassing the monarchy.
7. The
Queen was responsible for leaking her view of Thatcher as “uncaring”.
8. The
Queen was repeatedly shown wrongly dressed for Trooping the Colour.
These are
on a par with the “revelations” in an earlier series, one implicating Prince
Philip in the Profumo affair and another hinting at infidelity. The intention
was clearly to give a shudder of shock to viewers lulled into assuming it was
all true.
The royal
family can look after themselves, and usually do. I am less sure of history,
and especially contemporary history. The validity of “true story” docu-dramas
can only lie in their veracity. We have to believe they are true, or why are we
wasting our time?
False
history is reality hijacked as propaganda. As Morgan implies, his film may not
be accurate, but his purpose is to share a deeper truth with his audience: that
the royal family were beastly to Diana, and out to get her. Will we next be
told they really killed her? Will we have another Oliver Stone falsifying the
circumstances around the killing of President Kennedy in JFK?
We all know
Shakespeare took liberties with history. There are still writers who struggle
to correct his spin, as Richard III knows to his cost. Most historical
novelists go to great lengths to verify their version of events, as Hilary
Mantel does. So did Tolstoy, in War and Peace. We accept that distant history
has time to set its house in order.
That is why
modern history must be different. It is too close to what should be sacred
ground – bearing witness to passing events. There cannot be one truth for
historians, and journalists, their apprentice draftsmen, and another truth
called artistic licence.
When
millions of viewers are told that both Diana and Thatcher were humiliated by
the royal family at Balmoral, we should not have to rely on someone like
Vickers to reply that this was utterly untrue. The correction will pass
millions of viewers by.
The fib is
far more fun. Yet it was curiously unnecessary, since there were plenty of
occasions, as in Mirren’s interpretation, when royalty can be shown behaving
badly. Morgan could have made his point truthfully.
Laws of
privacy, defamation and slander have been built up over years to protect
individuals against ever more surveillance and intrusion into personal lives.
Most people support them, and increasing numbers use them. The Crown has taken
its liberties by relying on royalty’s well-known – and sensible – reluctance to
resort to the courts. This is artistic licence at its most cowardly as well as
casual.
Fake
history is fake news entrenched. To the legions of global cyber-warriors,
fakery is legitimate hacking. To the trollers and spinners of lies, to leftwing
conspiracy theorists and rightwing vaccine deniers, it is retaliation against
power.
To
documentary makers for whom ordinary facts are not colourful enough, not
sufficiently damning, fake history carries the magic trump card: artistic
licence.
Come the
great new dawn of social media regulation, someone will build a structure of
monitoring and mediating access to the world’s screens. Heaven forbid the
equivalent of a board of film censors, but some regulation there must be. All
we need is a simple icon in the top corner of the screen. It should read: F for
fiction.
• Simon
Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
‘The Crown’ Stokes an Uproar Over Fact vs.
Entertainment
Dramatic liberties in the latest season of the Netflix
series, covering the turbulent 1980s, are annoying Britons who wrote of that
period, even among those who disparage the royals.
Mark
Landler
By Mark
Landler
Nov. 26,
2020
LONDON — On
a Saturday night in July 1986, a band of bureaucrats in raincoats — one
contingent from Buckingham Palace, the other from 10 Downing Street — converged
on a newsstand in a train station to snap up The Sunday Times, fresh off the
presses with a bombshell headline: “Queen dismayed by ‘uncaring’ Thatcher.”
It’s a
dramatic flourish from the latest season of the “The Crown” — except, according
to Andrew Neil, the paper’s editor at the time, it never happened. “Nonsense,”
he said. “All first editions are delivered to both” the palace and the prime
minister’s residence, making a late-night dash to buy the paper superfluous.
Mr. Neil,
who published the famous scoop about tensions between Queen Elizabeth II and
Margaret Thatcher, said the invented scene had allowed Peter Morgan, the
creator of the hugely popular Netflix series about the British royal family, to
depict 1980s London as a place of “squalor and vagabonds.”
Through
four vivid seasons of “The Crown,” Mr. Morgan has never denied taking artistic
license with the saga of the royals, playing out their private joys and sorrows
against the pageant of 20th-century British history.
Yet “The
Crown” is now colliding with the people who wrote the first draft of that
history.
That has
spun up a tempest in the British news media, even among those who ordinarily
profess not to care much about the monarchy. Newspapers and television programs
have been full of starchy commentary about how “The Crown” distorts history in
its account of the turbulent decade in which Prince Charles married Lady Diana
Spencer and Mrs. Thatcher wrought a free-market revolution in British society.
The
objections range from the personal (the queen’s brittle, coldhearted treatment
of her emotionally fragile daughter-in-law, which the critics claim is unfair)
to the political (the show’s portrait of Thatcher-era Britain as a right-wing
dystopia, in the grip of a zealous leader who dares to lecture her sovereign
during their weekly audiences). Historians say that is utterly inconceivable.
“There has
been such a reaction because Peter Morgan is now writing about events many of
us lived through and some of us were at the center of,” said Mr. Neil, who
edited The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994.
Mr. Neil,
who went on to be a broadcaster and publisher, is no reflexive defender of the
royal family. Suspicious of Britain’s class system, he said he had sympathies
for the republican movement in the 1980s. But he grew to admire how the queen
modernized the monarchy after the upheaval of those years, and has been
critical of renegade royals, like Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan.
The events
involving Mr. Neil did happen: The queen became frustrated with Mrs. Thatcher
when she refused to join the 48 other members of the British Commonwealth in
backing sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. This highly
unusual clash spilled into public when The Sunday Times published its
front-page report, attributed to palace officials, which said the royal family
viewed Mrs. Thatcher as “uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive.”
But Mr.
Neil disputed several elements of “The Crown’s” retelling, not least that
Buckingham Palace made the queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, the scapegoat
for the incident. The show depicts his being fired for having leaked the story,
even though it suggests that he did so at the queen’s behest. There is no
evidence of this, Mr. Neil said, but it fits Mr. Morgan’s “left-wing agenda.”
“He gets to
depict Thatcher as pretty much an ally of apartheid while the queen is the sort
of person who junks loyal flunkies when things go wrong, even when they are
just doing her bidding,” Mr. Neil said.
The
brickbats are not just from the right.
Simon
Jenkins, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian, regards members of the
royal family as artifacts of celebrity culture irrelevant to a country
grappling with real-world challenges like Brexit. “They are practically
defunct,” he said. “They are like anthropomorphized figures of a head of
state.”
Yet he,
too, is angered by how “The Crown” portrayed the events of the 1980s, when, as
political editor of The Economist, he wrote about how Prince Charles had been
drawn to the now-defunct Social Democratic Party. (He based the report on an
off-the-record interview with the prince.) Mr. Jenkins said that because this
season of “The Crown” deals with contemporary history and people who are still
alive, its liberties with the facts are less a case of artistic license than an
example of “fake news.”
“I find it
offensive when people dump standards of veracity in relating contemporary
history,” Mr. Jenkins said. “If I did that as a journalist, I’d be hauled up
before the press council while these people get prizes.”
Like
others, Mr. Jenkins pointed to an episode-by-episode analysis by Hugo Vickers,
a royal historian, which found whoppers large and small in the series and has
become Exhibit A for its prevarications.
Not
everybody faults Mr. Morgan for filling in the missing pieces with conjured
scenes, even if he jumbles the facts in the process. (Mrs. Thatcher’s son,
Mark, was not lost in the desert during the Paris-Dakar auto rally just as his
mother was preparing to go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands;
hostilities broke out a few months after he was found.)
Charles
Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph who wrote a three-volume
biography of Mrs. Thatcher, praised Gillian Anderson’s performance as the prime
minister, putting it on a par with Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning turn in the
2011 film “The Iron Lady.” Even a much-criticized episode in which a snobbish
queen plays host to a fish-out-of-water prime minister and her husband, Denis,
at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, struck him as having “the ring of truth,”
despite some embellishments.
“The Crown,” Mr. Moore said, is trying to have it both ways, selling itself to audiences as a true story while clearing out the extraneous debris of facts that would gum up its dramatic narrative. “There is this thing called the tyranny of fact,” he said. “But as we get to modern times, it gets harder to avoid.”
Mr. Morgan
declined to respond to the criticisms, though he told The New York Times this
month that he was mindful that this season would be held to closer scrutiny.
The producers mined the copious news reports of the period, as well as
biographies of Charles and Diana, which contained firsthand accounts of their
misbegotten union.
What is
depicted in the family’s private moments, however, is “an act of creative
imagination,” Mr. Morgan has said.
Behind the frustration
with “The Crown” is a recognition that, right or wrong, its version of the
royal family is likely to serve as the go-to narrative for a generation of
viewers, particularly young ones, who do not remember the 1980s, let alone the
more distant events covered in earlier seasons.
“They’ll
watch it and think this is the way it was,” said Dickie Arbiter, who served as
a press secretary to the queen from 1988 to 2000. He took issue with parts of
the plot, including a scene in which aides to Charles question Diana about
whether she is mentally stable enough to travel alone to New York City.
“I was
actually at that meeting,” Mr. Arbiter said. “No courtier would ever say that
in a million years.”
The biggest
problem, said Penny Junor, who has written biographies of Charles, Diana and Mrs. Thatcher, is that
“The Crown” is a prodigiously effective piece of entertainment. That, she says,
poses a particular threat to Charles, who arguably comes off worst in the
series and who is likely to ascend the throne before memories of his grim,
hunched portrayal have completely faded.
“It is
wonderful television,” Ms. Junor said. “It is beautifully acted — the
mannerisms are perfect. But it is fiction, and it is very destructive.”
Mark
Landler is the London bureau chief. In 27 years at The Times, he has been
bureau chief in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, White House correspondent, diplomatic
correspondent, European economic correspondent, and a business reporter in New
York. @MarkLandler
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