film to be made about royal reaction to Princess Diana's death

[Don Rizzle]

Film drama to plot No 10's royal battles
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
 
 
 
TENSIONS that flared between new Labour and the British royal establishment in the days following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales are to become the subject of a film.
It is expected to show Downing Street officials referring to Balmoral in Scotland, where the royal family were staying at the time of Diana’s death, as “Planet Zog”. Senior courtiers complain of “floral fascism” as mounting piles of bouquets to Diana symbolise the pressure for change on the royal family.

 
 
Stephen Frears, the director of the film, and Peter Morgan, the screenwriter, are the team who made The Deal, last autumn’s Channel 4 film about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

In the days after Diana’s death in 1997, nearly four months after Labour gained power, the Queen resisted pressure to return to London and stayed at Balmoral until the day before the funeral.

The isolation of the Deeside castle — one of its greatest attractions for the royal family — became a symbol of their apparent resistance to change. Seven years ago, the drama will reveal, anybody who telephoned the castle would have been answered by a servant giving the phone number as “Ballater 213” — even though an all-digit number had been allocated 25 years earlier.

“It’s very much about the relationship between Blair and the Queen,” said Morgan. “Also about old Britain, being the royal family, dragged kicking and screaming into reacting to the death of Diana, and the new Britain of the new Labour prime minister.”

Despite the royal family’s much-criticised reaction, the drama will be less sympathetic to Downing Street, which is shown as trying to make political capital out of the princess’s death.

“In a way what was going on in London with the flowers and crowds and the tears was madder than what was happening in Balmoral,” said Morgan. “Certainly it seemed insane to those up in Scotland.”

The Queen is expected to be played by Helen Mirren. Michael Sheen, who played the prime minister in The Deal, will play Blair.

Morgan sees the death of Diana as one of three great 20th-century crises for the royal family. The first, he argues, was the decision to change the family’s name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor at the height of anti-German feeling in the first world war. The abdication crisis in 1936 was the second.

The film will open immediately after Blair’s election victory in May 1997 and his first audience at Buckingham Palace. Viewers will see him being told how to meet and talk to the Queen. Soon afterwards he is seen at Balmoral in mid- August as he and Cherie spend two days with the royal family. Cherie is heard to suggest that Blair sees the Queen as a mother figure. His mother had died when he was at university.

The script reveals stiff resistance at Balmoral to a royal reaction to the outpouring of public grief after Diana’s death. Many people criticised the royals for apparently not caring by failing to return to the capital and for not grieving in public. Courtiers, meanwhile, had pleaded for the royals to be given privacy after losing such a close family member.

The resistance of the palace was symbolised by the initial refusal to fly any flag at half-mast at Buckingham Palace. Anji Hunter, who ran Blair’s private office, will be shown as a pivotal figure in discussions with the Earl of Airlie, lord chamberlain of the Queen’s household. In the end Airlie relents and the Queen allows the Union Jack to be flown at half-mast above the palace.

The most unbending resistance to the modernisers comes from the Duke of Edinburgh. Even so, Blair does succeed in coaxing the royal family into accepting that there was a new public mood. “The age of deference was over,” said Morgan.

The film will be shot early next year. Much of it will be based on information from officials and courtiers, including previously undisclosed details of three telephone calls made between Blair and the Queen in the five days after Diana’s death.
 
 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1078234,00.html

sounds interesting, however i'd like to see someone persue the theory that the royal family were behind diana's death