Beware The Crown’s blurring of fact and fiction in this age of dangerous untruths | Simon Jenkins

It might be ‘only’ a TV show, but the boundaries between history and make-believe need to be clear

Thirty years ago, the present king tried to usurp his mother, the Queen. He sought to conspire with the then prime minister, John Major, after an opinion poll hostile to the monarch appeared in the Sunday Times. Like all the scenes in Netflix’s The Crown, this is claimed to have been “inspired by real events”.

In truth there was no such plot, no conspiracy and no poll hostile to the monarchy. A ficti...