The Crown: Season 4, Episode 2- The Balmoral Test

 "Well, I think we failed that test..."

That was a fascinating episode, and my fears about potential cosiness from the last instalment are starting to seem unfounded. The metaphor here with the stag- it innocently wanders across a stream into the land of the Royals, is stalked and ultimately shot- is not exactly subtle, but it's clever how the metaphor can be taken in different ways for Diana- enticed into their clutches and captured, and Thatcher- humiliated, and hurries off to symbolically shoot her Cabinet.

Thatcher and Denis are roundly humiliated at Balmoral, with the royals in genetal- Margaret especially- being inconsiderate and rude. Yet there's nuance to their snobbery. Thatcher is unable to relax, have fun, or do anything but work. She's stuffy, resentful, over-serious. One suspects that, tests or not, someone like Harold Wilson, who was most certainly non-U, would have charmed the lot of them. Yes, the snobbery is real, and the way this episode depicts the Thatchers' treatment (the accuracy of this is much-disputed, I believe, but this is television drama, not documentary) is both uncomfortable and hilarious to watch. But it's more complicated than that. 

More broadly, we see clearly how the very non-U Thatcher resents the aristocratic "wets" in her Cabinet, but she isn't necessarily in the right here. The "wets" stand for a time when Conservatives were actually conservative, and more concerned with running things than breaking them. I'm on the Queen's side during their spiky meeting towards the end. But one has to admire the way the script avoids didacticism.

Diana is young, innocent, only eighteen to Charles' thirty-three. Christ. And she's being manipulated throughout, very uncomfortably, into an arranged marriage in which she imagines she could ever be happy. She may pass the "test" with flying colours, being both U and fun-loving, but she's prey. Even Camilla is in on the whole thing. Philip, and pretty much the whole firm, are keen to rush Charles into a marriage he isn't sure he wants with a girl he hardly knows. The scene towards the end, as Diana gets papped for the first time, makes us shudder at where the next seventeen years are leading.