Introduction
When I started writing the screenplay for
The Queen,
about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer , begged me not to put Tony Blair in it. They felt the presence of a politician, particularly one as divisive as Blair had become by 2004, would diminish it – make it feel more temporal, more journalistic, more TV. And so less filmic.
I consoled myself that there would still be plenty to work with: the death of a Princess, a Queen’s young deputy private secretary out of his depth, a Royal Family tucked away on the Balmoral estate, and people out on the streets of London baying for blue blood. But after three months, I had written just 35 pages and wanted to shoot myself. It was awful. I rang Frears and Harries and told them the script was a big fat royalist snooze. Would never work. Everyone gracefully accepted defeat, and Frears went on to direct another movie.
Privately, however, I was deflated. I felt I hadn’t given an interesting subject a fair shot. I retreated to the mountains of Austria and, without telling anyone, wrote my own version. With Blair. I didn’t care if it felt smaller. I didn’t care if it was journalistic, nor if it ended up on TV or radio. I wrote a draft in under three weeks. It was one of those experiences that comes all too rarely, where you hear the voices and write with total certainty. You’re not really writing – you’re channelling.
Looking back, I realise the reason I was suddenly so unblocked was because I had stumbled on something signifi cant : the relationship between our most senior elected public servant and our head of state. The first minister and the crown. Two human beings, in flesh and blood, but also the representatives of their offices. At some level, just by having them sitting opposite one another, even in silence, one was dealing with the British constitution, the bone structure of our establishment in its most elemental form.
Happily, Frears liked the script and committed to filming it. As I watched Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen at work, I started thinking more about the sovereign and the PM – and the weekly ‘audience’ at the heart of their relations hip, and what a unique opportunity it presented a dramatist. Because the meeting is so shrouded in confidentiality , imagining what was discussed felt more valid, somehow, than proving it. I resolved, as far back as 2006, to write something.
In reality, depending on the chemistry between them, the audience can either be no more than an informal briefing – a courtesy, where the PM brings the sovereign up to speed with what happened in the past week and what is expected in the following one – or it can be a great deal more. Some of the pairings have been reluctant; some eagerly looked forward to. Some of the sessions last barely twenty minutes with no refreshment; others stretch out to an hour or two – with drinks. Some PMs are grateful for the breaks provided by foreign travel; others are sure to have their audience by phone even when abroad.
So when did they start? I wrote to Professor Vernon Bogdanor, the closest thing we have to a formal constitutional expert in this country where no formal constitution exists. ‘I am not wholly clear when they began,’ he said. ‘I do not think they existed before the war. But during the war, the practice arose of the King and Churchill meeting for regular lunches. That was a consequence of the particularly good relationship they had built up – after a shaky start. The regular meetings have now become so much of a convention they could be regarded as part of the constitution – in a typically British unplanned way. Were either the PM or the sovereign to discontinue them, this would, I think, be regarded as a breach.’
So there it is: the private audience has come in through the back door. And yet the meeting is not minuted or recorded. No one else is present. This is
When I started writing the screenplay for
The Queen,
about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer , begged me not to put Tony Blair in it. They felt the presence of a politician, particularly one as divisive as Blair had become by 2004, would diminish it – make it feel more temporal, more journalistic, more TV. And so less filmic.
I consoled myself that there would still be plenty to work with: the death of a Princess, a Queen’s young deputy private secretary out of his depth, a Royal Family tucked away on the Balmoral estate, and people out on the streets of London baying for blue blood. But after three months, I had written just 35 pages and wanted to shoot myself. It was awful. I rang Frears and Harries and told them the script was a big fat royalist snooze. Would never work. Everyone gracefully accepted defeat, and Frears went on to direct another movie.
Privately, however, I was deflated. I felt I hadn’t given an interesting subject a fair shot. I retreated to the mountains of Austria and, without telling anyone, wrote my own version. With Blair. I didn’t care if it felt smaller. I didn’t care if it was journalistic, nor if it ended up on TV or radio. I wrote a draft in under three weeks. It was one of those experiences that comes all too rarely, where you hear the voices and write with total certainty. You’re not really writing – you’re channelling.
Looking back, I realise the reason I was suddenly so unblocked was because I had stumbled on something signifi cant : the relationship between our most senior elected public servant and our head of state. The first minister and the crown. Two human beings, in flesh and blood, but also the representatives of their offices. At some level, just by having them sitting opposite one another, even in silence, one was dealing with the British constitution, the bone structure of our establishment in its most elemental form.
Happily, Frears liked the script and committed to filming it. As I watched Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen at work, I started thinking more about the sovereign and the PM – and the weekly ‘audience’ at the heart of their relations hip, and what a unique opportunity it presented a dramatist. Because the meeting is so shrouded in confidentiality , imagining what was discussed felt more valid, somehow, than proving it. I resolved, as far back as 2006, to write something.
In reality, depending on the chemistry between them, the audience can either be no more than an informal briefing – a courtesy, where the PM brings the sovereign up to speed with what happened in the past week and what is expected in the following one – or it can be a great deal more. Some of the pairings have been reluctant; some eagerly looked forward to. Some of the sessions last barely twenty minutes with no refreshment; others stretch out to an hour or two – with drinks. Some PMs are grateful for the breaks provided by foreign travel; others are sure to have their audience by phone even when abroad.
So when did they start? I wrote to Professor Vernon Bogdanor, the closest thing we have to a formal constitutional expert in this country where no formal constitution exists. ‘I am not wholly clear when they began,’ he said. ‘I do not think they existed before the war. But during the war, the practice arose of the King and Churchill meeting for regular lunches. That was a consequence of the particularly good relationship they had built up – after a shaky start. The regular meetings have now become so much of a convention they could be regarded as part of the constitution – in a typically British unplanned way. Were either the PM or the sovereign to discontinue them, this would, I think, be regarded as a breach.’
So there it is: the private audience has come in through the back door. And yet the meeting is not minuted or recorded. No one else is present. This is
Similar Books
