The Crown’s Margaret Thatcher conversation ‘nod to Boris Johnson’s Brexit debacle’
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In the Netflix drama, Mrs Thatcher asks the Queen to dissolve Parliament to prevent her from being ousted, due to the crisis in the Gulf. The Iron Lady argues: “We are on the brink of war. What kind of signal does that give to our enemies if we were to change leadership now? It would make us look hopelessly weak and divided.”
The Queen suggests Mrs Thatcher should consult Cabinet on this, but she retorts: “With all due respect, the decision to dissolve Parliament is in the gift of the Prime Minister alone.
“It is entirely within my power to do this if I see fit.”
The Queen advises that just because a power is available to use, that does not mean it should be.
She points out that Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet and party are against her, but also that the public polls are no longer in her favour either.
She says: “Perhaps the time has come for you to try doing nothing, for once.”
However, according to historian Dominic Sandbrook this conversation never happened.
He outlined the series of events that led up to Mrs Thatcher leaving Number 10 and pointed out that there was no time for her to have gone to Buckingham Palace to make this request.
Mr Sandbrook added that, above all, it was “unthinkable” that Mrs Thatcher would ask such a thing.
While this scene may have been “a colossal invention”, it seems to have parallels with Mr Johnson and his Brexit debacle last year.
On August 28, 2019, Mr Johnson asked the Queen to prorogue Parliament, which she then did.
Since Parliament was to be prorogued ‒ or suspended ‒ for five weeks and reconvene just 17 days before the UK’s scheduled departure from the EU on October 31, the move was extremely controversial.
Critics at the time believed the Prime Minister was trying to run down the clock before Brexit, thus not allowing sufficient discussion on his deal and forcing Parliament’s hand into accepting it without proper scrutiny.
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Mr Johnson defended the move, claiming it was a routine political process after the selection of a new Prime Minister and would allow the Government to refocus its legislative agenda.
However, the prorogation was later found to be unlawful by the Supreme Court.
Mr Johnson was accused of misleading the Queen, with a Scottish court of sessions judge claiming he had been “motivated by improper purpose of styming Parliament”.
However, Mr Johnson denied that he had lied to Her Majesty.
Mr Sandbrook discussed the scene in The Crown with History Extra.
He said: “This is total nonsense. There was no meeting with the Queen after Thatcher’s ministers told her to go.
“Actually, this distorts the true drama of events, which is that in the night her ministers told her to go, then the next morning they came to Cabinet and she told them she was resigning, reading the statement in tears; then, when it was over, she went to the Commons and destroyed Neil Kinnock in probably her most famous parliamentary performance.
“There was no time for her to go to the Palace amid all that.
“Above all, it’s utterly unthinkable that Thatcher would have asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament.
“It’s such a massive distortion of what happened, and of her character and her relationship with the Queen, that I’m amazed it’s in the series.”
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