'The Crown' Takes on Margaret Thatcher's Legacy—How Well Does It Do?

There is a gulf between them, according to the show, one of class: one woman born into privilege; the other owing her position to merit, effort and drive. The tone is set in the second episode at the Scottish royal castle of Balmoral where Mrs. Thatcher and her husband Denis struggle with the arcane customs of the royal tribe. They even tip the staff like they were in a hotel!

Of course, the two women are alike. They are both used to getting their own way. Each admires her father, has a husband who supports her, indulges a wayward son, is guided by a Christian faith and is motivated strongly by duty.

But it’s easy to see why a screenwriter would home in on their class differences—we’re talking about Britain here, after all. “The Crown” dramatizes the royal family’s place in a country that is becoming less deferential, supposedly more meritocratic and ever more obsessed with celebrity.

“The Crown” is set in a context that isn’t always obvious to the viewer. It often invents events and conflates others to illustrate its themes. Making a drama, its producers have no duty to produce a history. So here’s a short guide on how to read between the lines. Spoilers ahead.

Gillian Anderson captures Mrs. Thatcher’s voice really well. In the real world, it was seen by many as an electoral handicap. A year before Mrs. Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, the historian Alan Taylor declared to his wife that Mrs. Thatcher wouldn’t achieve power “as she has such an awful voice.”

The daughter of a lower-middle-class family in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham wouldn’t have grown up speaking like that. (I grew up not far away.)

“She was a complex, improbable and paradoxical figure; a grocer’s daughter with an accent not entirely her own,” the British Conservative politician Julian Critchley wrote in 1994 with the condescension typical of many in her party.

Her diction emerged from a journey via elocution lessons as a teenager, Oxford University where she studied chemistry, and as she moved upward in party ranks.

Only rarely did Mrs. Thatcher slip. Once in the House of Commons, she shouted across the aisle that an opposition politician was “frit,” a Lincolnshire dialect word I recognized, meaning scared.

Early on, we see Mrs. Thatcher preparing her cabinet for cuts in government spending, and we know she loves a fight. But we don’t learn much about the mess she inherited.

In reality, the government was paying off a recent emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund and the economy was plagued by strikes and high inflation. State-owned enterprises dominated important sectors of the economy.

She embarked on a broad agenda to push up interest rates, cut public spending, roll back the state, cut welfare benefits that she saw as increasing dependency, sweep away regulation and fight the trade unions. She fulfilled more of this agenda than seemed possible at the time.

To her supporters, she transformed Britain from the sick man of Europe into a dynamic economy led by private enterprise. To her detractors, she was the politician most responsible for the widening social divisions in British society that endure today. Compliment or insult, this was “Thatcherism.”

In real life, Mrs. Thatcher didn’t think much of women in politics, as is suggested in the first episode. She appointed just one female cabinet minister in 11 years in office. But she sacked dozens of male government ministers, harshly criticizing those who weren’t up for a fight, whom she dismissed as “wets,” those who were poorly briefed and the privileged patricians of the Conservative Party, whom she battled on her way to the top.

The 1982 conflict was a watershed for Mrs. Thatcher from which she never looked back. In episode 4, we see the birth of the crisis with the arrival of a handful of Argentine scrap-metal merchants at a disused whaling station on the British dependency of South Georgia.

After the Argentine military junta invades the Falkland Islands—population 1,800 and disputed British territory—she dispatches a naval task force 8,000 miles over the objections of some in her cabinet. Victory unleashes a spasm of patriotic fervor, seen in the next episode about the Buckingham Palace break-in, which helped her to a convincing 1983 election victory over hapless opposition. Among those who opposed British military action was her ally in almost everything else: Ronald Reagan.

Michael Fagan’s break-in and his bedside conversation with the queen about social injustice is the plot device used to suggest that all isn’t well among the masses. We are shown Fagan’s miserable life, and he is given a platform to tell a sympathetic monarch about the injustices perpetrated by a government that has just blown billions in the Falkland Islands. In fact,   Fagan, who is still alive, has told interviewers   that he talked about his life but not Mrs. Thatcher’s policies.

But the Thatcher era was a period of conflict in Britain that intensified in 1984 when she confronted the National Union of Mineworkers—the symbol of militant organized labor that had defeated past Conservative governments—over a plan to close many of the country’s coal pits. After a bitter strike that lasted almost a year and months of violence on the picket lines, she crushed the union. Many coal miners never worked again.

An entire episode is devoted to series creator Peter Morgan’s interpretation of the pair’s clash over South Africa. Their difference in opinions over the value of the Commonwealth was real: it was and remains important to the queen who headed it and is still the head of state in 16 Commonwealth countries, including the U.K. Mrs. Thatcher disdained it as a forum for autocrats and prioritized the business opportunities that would have been lost by sanctions against South Africa. In reality, we don’t know the queen wanted sanctions. It is a reasonable inference from her love of the Commonwealth.

As in the episode, the Sunday Times did in July 1986 report sources close to Buckingham Palace as suggesting the queen believed Mrs. Thatcher was “uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive.” Michael Shea, the palace press secretary, did leave—though not until 1987—and he didn’t receive the knighthood he might have expected.

The final episode does a disservice to Mrs. Thatcher by depicting a request to the queen in 1990 to dissolve parliament as a way to thwart a leadership challenge. Apart from being false, it is a strange plot device because it isn’t clear how dissolving parliament would have saved her leadership, given the challenge was an internal party matter, not a parliamentary one.

By then, she had won a third general election in 1987 and the economy was booming. But she was becoming increasingly isolated and convinced of her own rightness. Her demise followed an effort to impose a poll tax that would fall equally on every adult, provoking widespread rioting.

The queen observes that Mrs. Thatcher left “a very different country now to the one inherited by our first woman prime minister.”

That is a conclusion with which few would argue, whatever their political stripe.