King Charles’ nightmare comes true as The Crown trailer drops
In what couldn’t be worse timing, King Charles is having to face up to a nightmare – but he’s not going down without a fight.
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This week, the most famous thing in the UK was a lettuce. The Daily Star, in a stroke of tabloid genius, had been live streaming the iceberg, done up in a blonde wig, to see if it would last longer than embattled, and now ousted, Prime Minister Liz Truss.
On Friday, she finally fell on her sword, thus going down in the history books as the UK’s shortest-serving leader, having only managed to tot up a dismal 45 days. (The descendants of George Canning who only eked out 119 days in the job can breathe a sigh of relief, though he was brought down by tuberculosis and not idiotic economic policies and hubris.)
But she might not be the only casualty in London, with King Charles only 43 days into his reign, already looking like he too might be getting perilously close to coming unstuck.
His Majesty received the briefest of honeymoon periods after his accession in September, and there he was this week in the suburban wilds of Walthamstow, doing a not terrible job of charming teenagers.
But, just to get a bit Macbeth-ian, something wicked this way comes for Charles, after the trailer for the next season of The Crownlanded on Friday.
Maybe someone needs to start live streaming a Duchy Originals Oaten Biscuit to see if it or Charles’ approval numbers begin to crumble first.
There was never any mystery about what the fifth instalment of Netflix’s hit royal soapie would include, given we knew it would cover the tumultuous, tabloid years of the ’90s, most especially the disintegration of Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales’ marriage.
When it comes to thinking about the Wales’ union we arrive at the rarest of points – consensus. Popular culture, collective memory, public consciousness is generally in agreement: Charles was a philandering d**khead and Diana the victim of not only a marriage but an institution for whom she was a fecund means to an end.
This was all pretty much consigned to the history books and yellowing copies of New Idea, until showrunner Peter Morgan came along.
Now the events between, approximately, Charles and Diana’s 1992 separation and her death in 1997, are set to be reanimated like a tabloid zombie and will land on the world’s biggest streaming service just as poor old Charles is getting his feet under the regal desk. (Once he’s removed all the corgi chew toys from under there, mind you.)
What a way to start his reign — with the world about to get 10 hours of big-budget drama painting him as a selfish tw*t who couldn’t get enough of Camilla’s dog hair-covered embrace.
But here’s the really interesting thing: Charles looks like he’s not going down without a fight, with a number of signs emerging this week that suggest Buckingham Palace is gearing up to do battle with the TV series.
To start with, there has been a growing chorus of angry and very famous voices calling out The Crown.
First Prince William accused Netflix of “profiteering” from his mother’s life-changing Panorama interview, which was exposed last year as being unlawfully secured by the BBC’s Martin Bashir (he basically tricked the princess into doing it).
Next, onto the field came former PM John Major, who is played by Johnny Lee Miller in the new series, lambasting The Crown and calling it a “barrel-load of nonsense.”
Hot on his heels was Dame Judi Dench, who just happens to be a mate of Queen Camilla; shewrote a letter to the Times charging that the hit show was “crude sensationalism” and “cruelly unjust”.
The whole thing looks suspiciously like a well choreographed push-back.
Meanwhile, there was other royal staffing news with potentially significant consequences. On Tuesday it was revealed that Charles had hired former barrister and law lecturer Dr John Sorabji as assistant private secretary to “beef-up” his team.
Now why-oh-why might the king suddenly want a brilliant legal mind so close at hand?
What this looks like is the king getting his ducks in a row, suggesting that, unlike his mother Queen Elizabeth, his approach to further PR crises could be much more combative.
When the Queen was portrayed by Netflix as a bad mother, general cold fish and a woman whose husband had quite the loose zipper, she reacted by wholesale ignoring the tawdry mess and getting on with her day job of handing out OBEs to ageing Olympians.
Likewise, when Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, sat down with Oprah Winfrey to depict the royal family as racists, the late monarch responded by … going to bed.
It took the better part of two days for the Palace to finally put out a legendarily economical 61-word statement, thus gifting the world the phrase “recollections may vary”.
But King Charles? The way things are shaping up it looks like he has no intention of facing the coming Sturm und Drang by ringing for a cup of Horlicks and attempting to spoon Camilla with all the Jack Russels in between.
Because it is not just, of course, The Crown that the 72-year-old king has to worry about with Harry’s autobiography in the pipeline and the Sussexes filming some sort of documentary for Netflix.
In a new interview with Variety this week, Meghan briefly referred to the production (“It’s nice to be able to trust someone with our story — a seasoned director whose work I’ve long admired — even if it means it may not be the way we would have told it”) which has otherwise been shrouded in the sort of secrecy usually reserved for clandestine nuclear operations or the new iPhone.
While initially the show had been rumoured to be debuting this year, this week Deadline reported that Netflix has been left “rattled” after “coming under fire” and was postponing the release until next year. But then Page Six reported that, according to multiple sources, the documentary would still be landing before Christmas.
Really though, does it matter when it comes out? So far the duke has accused his family of cutting him off financially, of “total neglect” and spoken of “genetic pain”.
Based on Harry and Meghan’s TV track record, Charles should be sending a footman down to the Clarence House basement right now to check if the bomb shelter is still there. (And that it is not just full of the Queen Mother’s empties.)
Just imagine how much damage Harry could potentially do to his father and his stepmother’s image with a whole TV series and several hundred pages of book to fill?
(Don’t lose sight of the fact that Netflix is reportedly paying the couple an estimated $140 million and Penguin Random House has ponied up a reported $65 million for a three-book deal. For those sorts of cheques, you would think his paymasters will be expecting him to air a veritable laundry-worth of dirty linen.)
So, if this scenario comes to pass, and say Keeping Up With The Sussexes and Harry: From Duke to Dude both contain a juicy assortment of unflattering if not downright negative revelations about the House of Windsor, and especially the king, queen or his brother Prince William, then how might the Palace react?
Already the hiring of Dr Sorabji has been flagged on this front, with the Telegraph reporting that his “legal expertise will doubtless also prove useful when it comes to handling the publication of the Duke of Sussex’s forthcoming memoirs – and other potentially incendiary matters involving Harry and Meghan.”
Given that and the success the anti-Crownistas have had this week after the streamer caved and slapped a disclaimer underneath the trailer for the Emmy-winner labelling it a “fictional dramatisation,” then I don’t think it’s outrageous to think we’ll see a more pugnacious Palace fightback in the future.
Charles has waited his entire life to get to the throne – would he really be willing to let his plans for kingship be derailed in the name of prime time entertainment?
For both the billion-dollar streaming giant and the Sussexes, so far, their anti-Palace content has been met with tweedy, imperious silence, but this script could be flipped.
Which is to say, they have never really met with any sort of concerted opposition, a bit like a one-sided tennis match.
But a royal house armed to the teeth with some serious legal brains, righteous indignation and a new king with so much to prove? That could be another matter entirely.
Or to put it another way, KABOOOOM.
Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who had a well of decades of respect and public support to draw on, the king is on far less firm ground and must know that he can’t rely on her stiff-upper-lip playbook to survive the coming storm.
There is another thing that King Charles might do differently to his mother. Actor Matt Smith, the series’ original Prince Philip, earlier this month revealed that Her Majesty had watched some of The Crown on a projector that was set up for Sunday nights. Somehow I think Charles, Camilla and the dogs might give that particular pastime a miss.
Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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