The Crown Tried To Tackle A Controversial Piece of Royal History. It Failed Miserably.
What makes the Netflix original series The Crown one of the most interesting series on television? Not just the performances, although those are uniformly excellent. Not the sumptuous production design, or even necessarily the direction or writing. What makes The Crown a unique viewing experience is that it is simultaneously a television drama and also an exercise in indirect brand management by one of the most influential families in the world. Although the series is not overtly produced by or influenced by the British royals, it has been on the whole a great success for their image at a time when they sorely need it. It had even navigated potential minefields in the history of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in a way that felt honest, yet retained audience sympathy for the Royals as a whole. Which is what made the fifth episode of the newly released third season, “Coup,” such a surprising failure of storytelling.
Queen Elizabeth does not idly allow it to be reported that she watches and enjoys the series, nor would she likely take so much time out from her schedule to watch the series merely for fun. And pleased with it she should be, for Morgan’s writing generally does an excellent job of portraying her as a human figure, which entails showing flaws, but also on the whole keeping the portrayal sympathetic. The storytelling failure of “Coup” was not that it deviated from its characterization of Elizabeth, but rather everything else that happened around her character as the series tried to tackle a thorny episode from her long reign.
The episode in question deals with a scandal that has been described as the British equivalent to Watergate, as it took place around the same time. When Harold Wilson’s Labour Party held office between 1964 and 1970, it was often rumored that plans for a coup d’etat against his left wing government were discussed among elements of the British armed forces, secret service (MI5 and MI6), business leaders, and even the royal family itself. Initially dismissed as a fantastical conspiracy theory, much of the so-called Wilson plot have now been brought into the open by multiple sources, including the memoir of former MI5 agent Peter Wright, and the BBC docudrama The Plot Against Harold Wilson, where participants in the would-be coup including retired military officers spoke on the record about the plot and their involvement in it. The coup was to remove Wilson (who was rumored to have been a Soviet agent), and install an emergency government led by Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle to Prince Phillip, portrayed in the series’ third season by Charles Dance.
In a series that deals so much in nuance and small details, the way that the coup was portrayed was about as subtle as a brick to the head. A scene where Mountbatten outlines the plot to a group of conspirators reads like the Wikipedia page outline of how the coup would have gone, not like human beings having a conversation. More clumsily, the series portrays Mountbatten’s decision to lend involvement in the plot to being frustrated by having little to do in his retirement (Wilson had forced him to resign as Chief of the British Defense Staff), rather than any political motivations.
The narrative misadventure culminates in Mountbatten being summoned to an audience with Queen Elizabeth, where she roundly tells him off for even thinking of participating in an anti-democratic plot. While much of the strength of The Crown comes from the fact that it invokes a voyeuristic feeling of getting a look into a secret aspect of history that took place behind closed doors, this time it fell flat. The poor dialogue in the scene between Elizabeth and Mountbatten is part of it, but part of it is that the scene is jarringly out of touch with the reality of how the royal family’s involvement likely played out.
As far as I know, nothing has been written directly about whether or not the Queen herself was a party to the anti-Wilson conspiracy. Likely nothing ever will be, at least not while she is alive. However, it has been reported that the Queen Mother did give “tacit support” to the plot, at the least. One wonders if she would have done so without at least some kind of approval from her daughter, the Queen. This fact is not mentioned in the episode, and conspicuously, the Queen Mother’s role in the third season as a whole has so far been greatly reduced from the first two.
The Queen also did have a role in a similar event that took place in Australia, the 1975 removal from office of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, like Wilson a Labour politician who made enemies of London and Washington Cold Warriors. Celebrated Australian journalist John Pilger has written about the “coup” that removed Whitlam from office, in which the Queen’s appointed Governor General, John Kerr, played a key role. That could not have occurred without at least the passive assent of Buckingham Palace.
All of this is not to say that Peter Morgan could have, or even necessarily should have, portrayed the Queen’s role in these events differently. That would likely have been impossible even if he had wanted to, given the lack of hard historical evidence on the record currently. But the way that Morgan did portray it went so far out of his way to eschew the show’s typical complexity in favor of a flashing red light that read “THE QUEEN DID NOTHING WRONG.” It smells unmistakably of protesting too much, and could backfire by drawing unnecessary attention to the Queen’s role in the event. As anyone who has seen Prince Andrew’s disastrous recent BBC interview on the subject of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein can attest, sometimes damage control can double the amount of fuel on the fires of a negative story. The Windsors should hope that missteps like this do not become a regular occurrence for them in the future.
