The Crown: What was the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher really like?
Amidst tensions, cordiality and disagreements, The Crown portrays a much-talked about facet of the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher.
In season four, episode two, of The Crown, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, travel to the estate of the Queen of Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands. They quickly feel out of place amid the rural lifestyle of the upper class of royalty. The prime minister doesn't know the slightest thing about hunting, which is a problem, because the Windsors can't stop talking about it. When Denis comments that she understands why a nearby farm in distress allows paying guests to stalk deer on its grounds, the queen mother scolded her harshly for not understanding 'conservation'. The Thatchers prefer to sleep together in a bedroom, while the British aristocrats sleep separately. And when the prime minister accidentally sits in a chair reserved for the queen, Princess Margaret doesn't even try to mask her disdain. The Thatchers end up quitting early. "I am struggling to find some redeeming characteristic in these people," the prime minister tells her husband. "They are not sophisticated, cultured, elegant or anything close to an ideal." At the end of the episode, she is seen firing all members of the old establishment from her cabinet.
And that's only in an initial episode. Throughout the fourth season, the tension between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace is a central point of the plot, culminating in episode eight, where the two leaders disagree on sanctions against South Africa. Frustrated, Elizabeth II leaks her disdain to the Times, a huge scandal, since royalty is not supposed to influence politics, domestic or foreign. (That standard still exists today: Despite giving up their public roles, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, for example, received a pushback for encouraging American citizens to vote in the 2020 election.)
So was the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher really so fraught with class and ideological conflicts?
In her memoirs, Thatcher called the stories of coldness between her and the queen as exaggerated. "Although the press could not resist the temptation to suggest disputes between the Palace and Downing Street, I always found the queen's attitude towards the work of the government absolutely correct," he wrote. 'Of course, under the circumstances, the stories of confrontations between' two powerful women 'were too good not to make up. In general, more nonsense was written about the so-called 'female factor' during my time in office than about almost anything else. ' Thatcher also praised the queen's vast knowledge of political issues, saying that "Her Majesty brings a formidable understanding of current issues and extensive experience." So her claim that the family did not have "redemptive characteristics" is probably an exaggeration.
And those trips to Balmoral? It is true that, shortly after visiting Scotland in 1981, Thatcher fired three of her ministers. Among them were the noble Lord Soames and Sir Ian Gilmour. Also, yeah, she wasn't one of those out in the fields - tabloids say she walked in high heels, had to borrow wellies, and seemed puzzled by Balmoral's etiquette. (When she learned that they had a strict bedtime schedule at 11:15, she apparently said, 'To bed? What would we do there?') But it's an exaggeration to say that there is a direct correlation between that trip and the reorganization of the cabinet. Affected men had openly criticized Thatcher, and the prime minister wanted to consolidate allies and power: 'The consensus among the conservatives last night was that the prime minister, while significantly shifting the government's center of gravity to the right, strengthened his own position, 'The Times reported at the time. And while Thatcher may not fit in with Balmoral, her husband, Denis, did: It is said that she got along very well with the Queen Mother due to their mutual love of a strong drink.
Speaking of The Times, in July 1986, it did run a story with the headline "Queen in dismay at" Thatcher's indifference. " She caused shockwaves with assertions that the monarch believed "that a compromise must be reached between Thatcher and the other Commonwealth leaders" and that she felt Thatcher's approach might be "indifferent, confrontational and divisive." At the time, Buckingham Palace denied the report. But it didn't matter: the prime minister was said to be "crushed" by history. Later, it emerged that the queen's press secretary, Michael Shea, was the source, and members of parliament called for her resignation. She left Buckingham Palace the following year. Did Shea have the queen's go-ahead on the leak? It's unclear, but, as a trusted advisor, he certainly knew their thought processes.
At the end of the day, the two of them admired each other due to their mutual sense of duty and work ethic. "A senior Buckingham Palace official at the time recalls being surprised by how vigorously they talked together," Andrew Marr wrote in his 2012 book, The Royal Elizabeth. 'Another says,' The queen always saw Margaret Thatcher's point. She understood that it was necessary. '' After Thatcher was ousted from power in 1990, she was awarded the Order of the Garter and the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth, a scene shown in the final episode of The Crown.
A professional courtesy? Maybe. But consider this: In 2005, the queen attended Lady Thatcher's 80th birthday party, an invitation that, with her busy schedule, she certainly could have turned down.
