The Media Establishment vs. Independent Women: In The Crown, Netflix Sells out to Elite Anti-Feminism

The two people who symbolize Britain’s most profound transformations over the past half century are women who, on the surface, could not be more different. Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocer, graduated with a chemistry degree from Oxford, entered politics when her Tory Party was out of power, brought it to lasting victory over three general elections as prime minister, remade Britain’s economic and social order to favor the free market, and helped America set the terms for the end of the Cold War. Diana Spencer, the daughter of a life peer with a barony dating back to 1603, forwent college, married and divorced the Prince of Wales and raised their two sons, helped push a seemingly unachievable multi-country ban on landmines, became the first global celebrity of the post-Cold War era, and prompted an outpouring of grief on her death not seen before or since. 

But these very different women resemble each other in what may be their most decisive characteristic: their relationship to what we, on both sides of the Atlantic, now call the “establishment.” Thatcher and Diana brought qualities to their country’s ruling quarters—ideological determination and grit; a romantic and real sense of human connection—that few had witnessed there before. For their differences, they were patronized and attacked, and they fought back: Thatcher transformed British politics against the active opposition of grandees in her own party; Diana rebelled against establishment enforcement, harnessed the public to her side, and nearly brought down the House of Windsor. These were not, at their most basic, women who compromised their beliefs or their personalities in the interest of fitting in. They lived by their own codes, ideological or stylistic. They went their own ways.

This has made them a challenge to The Crown showrunner Peter Morgan’s long-term project, one that’s widely agreed to have the backing and the reach to define historical reality: portraying royals through an establishment media which generally dislikes them but also finds institutional independence of any kind increasingly suspect. The way Morgan handles this challenge in The Crown is to remake the House of Windsor in a diffidently progressive image acceptable to his handlers while reducing the series’ two rebels to a driving harridan and a searching sexpot--very different characters than what the evidence tells us they were. Though the series touches on Mrs. Thatcher’s fight against the Tory old-guard and traces the Princess’s struggle to navigate a closed system, at the heart of the portraits of these women is either emotional zealotry or dangerous shallowness. Backlit by them, and the extraordinary public support they engender, the more day-to-day flaws of the royals seem normal, harmless, human—and their essential tolerance, relative modesty, and basic adaptability valuable besides.

Distorting Thatcher

The Crown’s personal-political undertones are most obvious when it comes to its ahistoric portrait of the Queen’s tensions with Mrs. Thatcher, traced across the fourth season in which the Iron Lady appears. Media commentary has explained these creative liberties as adding dimension to what was in reality a distant relationship—but the differences are explicitly political, and they reinforce the larger image the series drives home. One of the Queen’s involvements is to combat Mrs. Thatcher over apartheid in South Africa, which puts Mrs. Thatcher at odds with today’s humanitarian icon Nelson Mandela; another is to lecture Mrs. Thatcher about the value of continuity over change when Thatcher lets go of members of her cabinet who oppose her anti-statist reforms.  In this vein, it’s not an accident that, in the series, Elizabeth is more comfortable with Mrs. Thatcher’s ally and successor John Major—who, like other sympathetic Crown characters, is a muddling, uncombative and ultimately powerless figure riven with sympathetic insecurities (“I was lost for words,” he tells his wife at one point, “being asked [for help] by the queen herself!”)  That this is the same John Major who publicly asserted his loyalty to Mrs. Thatcher while privately helping depose her in 1990, in the name of tightening British connections to the European Union which drove decades of internal strife, goes unmentioned in the series.

With the portrait of Mrs. Thatcher herself, the devil is in the included details, which paint her as zealous to the point of inhumanity. In the first episode where we see the Prime Minister—after Prince Philip’s Uncle, Lord Mountbatten, is killed by a member of the Irish Republican Army—she offers the Queen condolences that sound like she's reading a speech; and as Mrs. Thatcher speaks the Queen’s face contracts, so far is this response from the subtle grief her family is enduring. In the next episode, the first in which we see Mrs. Thatcher at any length, she visits the Crown’s estate of Balmoral where couples are provided two bedrooms and refuses to allow her husband to use the separate bed when he wants to sleep and she wants to read: “Don’t you dare. I don’t want to catch any upper-class habits. Those who sleep apart grow apart….It’s precisely how bad habits start.” His response is that of the harried spouse: “But it’s just for one night…very well, dear, whatever you say.”

In The Crown’s interpretation, these personal experiences affected Mrs. Thatcher politically: a common read of the series’ Balmoral episode is the historically inaccurate one that her disillusionment with the place drove her to become even more anti-establishment than before. Then, two episodes later, The Crown makes the personal and the political explicitly converge. When Argentina begins the invasion of the Falklands, the series shows Mrs. Thatcher preoccupied with her son Mark going missing in the Sahara (actually, Mark Thatcher’s brief disappearance occurred several months before) and hints that her maternal emotions influenced her political stand, a defining one of her tenure. Several episodes on, Mrs. Thatcher’s personal desperation is finally shown to push her to the breaking point—as she tries (again a-historically) to cling to power against an intraparty coup by persuading the Queen to intervene in opposition to constitutional rules.

These are cartoons, but not ones in which anybody doing the cartooning will have to answer to reality. Mrs. Thatcher was, by generally-agreed on accounts, penetrating, feminine, a stickler for the law, attentive to form, mothering and bossy to staff, and very occasionally politically panicked—most of all before the 1987 election, which she ended up winning in a landslide. She was sometimes flirtatious, often imperious, and always formidable, and her relationship with her husband Denis was a deeply dependent one that worked both ways.  At no point was she driven out of control by her emotions or her ideology to wage war or wreck the constitution. At no point was the Queen’s relationship with her anything other than distant—and certainly the Queen was never “actively discourteous” to Mrs. Thatcher, as she’s painted being in the Balmoral episode. Applied to any other politician, The Crown’s mischaracterizations of an influential prime minister and of the Queen’s passive-aggressive relationship with her would be dismissed as deeply sexist ones.

Patronizing Diana

When it comes to Diana, it’s precisely the Crown’s sexist overtones which are most obvious, beginning in Season 4 and culminating in the final season. The trailer for the first part of that season begins and ends with a telling shot (based on a real-life one by paparazzi) that’s also been reproduced in photo promos. In it, Diana sits on the end of a diving board in a tight-fitting blue swimsuit, looking, as she admits in a voiceover, directionless: a fitful but looming threat against the Royal Family’s determination to uphold decorous, unthreatening order. In case there was any doubt about the message, comments in the trailer by the Queen spell it out: “All one wants is for that girl to find peace,” she says, in response to a dire warning about interest in Diana’s personal life and its effect on the monarchy; later, she says of Diana, “You’ve finally succeeded in turning this house upside down; it’s nothing less than revolution.” With one casual flick, the trailer implies, this reckless, feckless, lost girl could destroy a thousand-year reign: she’s an unmoored bird of prey, hovering moodily above a deep blue sea.

The first three episodes of the sixth season follow through on this portrait. Diana’s romance with Dodi Fayed, on gleaming planes and yachts and in tony manses and hotels, gets traced in sharp detail; occasionally we cross-shoot to the royals, portrayed in the comfortably fusty settings of the regime they dutifully uphold. And this portrait of shallowness next to seriousness extends to Diana’s work with landmines, featured in one episode in a single three-minute montage. Before visiting a minefield, she preps on the plane, sighing and glancing around; at the site, she uncomfortably waves what seems like a fly out of the way, adjusts her shirt, then briefly turns her attention to the wounded. Later in the montage, when she makes what in reality was an astonishingly dangerous walk across a half-cleared minefield, the images are cross-shot with Queen Elizabeth scanning tabloid coverage of Diana and musing that “one would almost feel sorry for her if one weren’t so cross with her.” This montage then gives way to a scene of Diana being overwhelmed by questions about her personal life at a follow-up press conference. All of this is a harbinger of what’s to come: by episode 4, the aftermath of Diana’s death, her main influence is shown to be about public perception not global policy, as she posthumously leads Elizabeth to show more humanity towards her people through a public address.

What the portrait elides is in many ways more instructive than what it includes. In the last two years of her life Diana was in a serious relationship with a Pakistani heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan, which friends called a love match, and using her influential contacts to plan for a synthesis of his medicine and her humanitarianism. (This relationship, which ended because of his concerns over publicity and tensions with his traditionalist family, gets small portions of two episodes of treatment in The Crown.) She was also using her long-honed skills with the press to garner attention for humanitarian causes, while looking to shed much of her glamorous royal baggage: in July 1997, she auctioned off her dresses at Christie’s in New York, in what one biographer describes as a “gesture to her new life and a boon to the charities she chose, the AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund.”

A few years before, she had already sought advice from Henry Kissinger about using her star power for political ends: he advised choosing an uncontroversial humanitarian project. What’s most interesting about this piece of advice is that Diana didn’t take it: she took on the project of landmines, which earned her the ire of John Major’s post-Thatcher Tories who were still ruling Whitehall. “This is an important and sophisticated argument,” said one. “It doesn’t help…for a very ill-informed Princess to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is.” In this case, the “very ill-informed Princess” won, with the backing of Tony Blair’s Labor Opposition, Gulf War general Norman Schwarzkopf, and Bill Deedes—the imposing arch-conservative editor of The Daily Telegraph, Denis Thatcher’s close friend, and an ally of Margaret Thatcher. In this effort, Diana effectively put her personality in service of her politics and set the establishment on the run.

The triumph is more extraordinary considering where Diana came from. There weren’t just the facts that, starting when she was 20 and newly-married and pregnant, her husband was in love with another woman and irked by her star power. There were also plausible MI-5 surveillance, leaks, bullying, and betrayals from friends and in-laws as well as from her mother, grandmother, and brother. But she fought back. The woman whom the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum dismissed as “a typical product of an upper-class girls’ school” pushed against legal threats from the upper-class which normally caused “even the most robust litigants [to] fold.” The woman whom her husband publicly stated only liked shopping used public interviews to force him into divorce talks, then negotiated her exit from the Palace on mostly her terms. Her biggest supporters were members of the British public, between 67 and 92 percent of whom supported her unprecedented revelations about Royal life, 92 percent of whom thought she should be given a goodwill ambassadorial role by the British government.

All of this came at a cost. The reason Diana ended up in Paris with a wealthy playboy like Dodi Fayed was the protection his security afforded; the reason she needed protection was that she’d forgone her Royal security cohort on the reasonable suspicion it was filled with government informants. Maybe this is why so many people saw her death as a tragedy. They weren’t “a bunch of hysterics”—a description of them in The Queen, an earlier media effort of Peter Morgan’s. They knew abuse of power when they saw it; and they were grieving for the promise of a life made with real effort that seemed to have just begun.

The Establishment’s Anti-Feminist Turn

But Diana’s death wasn’t the only one to bring grief: sixteen years later, ordinary people grieved at Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral too, for some of the same reasons. People whom the Iron Lady’s free-market policies had freed from inflation and allowed to own their own houses stood crowd-deep outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, against the BBC’s warnings of possible violence, holding signs saying “But we Loved Her.” Thatcher, in this way, was like Diana: “No one was with [her] but the people.” But Diana was like Thatcher, too, in a more depressing way. Just as the Iron Lady’s successors re-oriented her free market reforms toward too-big-to-fail corporations, Diana helped start a global humanitarian trend that’s been turned to benefit a protected institutional elite.

This is the class, and their representatives in elite and popular media, which is promoting The Crown, and most likely this is not by accident. We don’t tend to equate global institutional bureaucracy with traditional inherited royalty, since one answers to “rational” principles and the other to Divine ones, but a major theme of Morgan’s work is their similarities. For both systems, survival, not connection to society, is paramount. Real choice, or choice unconstrained by the systems’ mostly arbitrary dictates, is a myth. Individuality is an abstraction. Character doesn’t count. This may or may not be the reality of the royals, seniors of whom were deeply politically conservative; others of whom reportedly object to The Crown’s portrait in the sharpest of terms, a stance in which they’re joined even by John Major. But it’s the kind of traditionalism most of our international establishment and its media organs will accept: people uncomfortable with change who, when push comes to shove, won’t fight it and who will even lend their credibility to it.

It's probably not a coincidence that this is the same essentially bureaucratic establishment, transfixed with inflicting change on citizens from the top-down, whose most powerful men are funding gender transition surgeries and supporting biological men’s right to compete in women’s sports. In this milieu of institutionally dictated definitions of what a person is, women like Margaret Thatcher and Diana Spencer, who embraced independent identities and fought entrenched authority, aren’t welcome.  But their independent story is the one that many people want to hear. It’s about the professional woman “who sits down at the table” and “walks away with the chips.” It’s about “how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail.” And it’s the story being told again by the women resisting our establishment today.