A.N. WILSON: How utterly tawdry for The Crown to haul Princess Diana from her grave for the ratings

If it wasn’t so cruel, I have to say that the upcoming series of Netflix drama The Crown was a farce – just a sick joke.

It depicts Diana Princess of Wales, played by actress Elizabeth Debicki, who returns as a ghost to both Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth II.

What possible reason could Netflix have for wanting to do this to viewers? The answer is transparently obvious. Ratings for the series have dropped.

When it started, we all took out pretty hefty Netflix subscriptions to watch the drama. Claire Foy playing the young queen was simply inspiring, and the scripts, written by Peter Morgan, stayed pretty close to historical truth.

But little by little, Morgan, a devout republican, began to stray from the truth in order to sensationalize the drama that, it was hoped, would attract larger audiences and perhaps stir up republican sentiment.

An early indication of how things were going was when he came up with the idea that Prince Philip was so badly behaved at Gordonstoun, his boarding school in Scotland, that his entire family had to fly over from Germany to deal with the situation.

Their plane crashed, he lost his beloved sister Cecile and his cousins ​​- and the inference was that it was all Philip’s fault.

Never mind that the real reason they flew to Britain was to attend the wedding of Cecile’s brother-in-law Prince Louis, Prince of Hesse, nor that it was a bereavement from which Prince Philip never fully recovered and the made-up story line was terribly disturbing to him.

After that, the cruel inaccuracies of The Crown multiplied, and we were treated to episodes in which Prince Philip threatened Diana with the possibility of her being killed if she did not toe the line; and where Prince Charles gave birth to the prime minister, John Major, and asked him to help dethrone Queen Elizabeth II in his favour.

No such conversation ever took place. Besides deviating further and further from history, the series recruited increasingly worse actors.

None of the women portraying the Queen herself could hold a candle to Claire Foy, and the bottom was reached by Olivia Colman, who didn’t look like the Queen or even pretend to talk, move or act like the Queen don’t step

But Diana, that extraordinary person, remains a blockbuster.

So after she reaches the point in the series when she dies, Peter Morgan can think of nothing better to do than exhume her and bring in her ghost.

I write as an ardent Diana fan. When she first appeared on the public stage, I, like most people in the world, was mesmerized by her beauty and youth.

But after things unraveled – especially when she appeared on a BBC Panorama program and spilled the beans about her marriage – I felt she was making a terrible mistake.

And, in the crude manner of our journalists, I began to write about her incredibly rudely.

The then defense secretary, Earl Howe, said she was a ‘loose cannon’, and he was probably right – although he got a lot of flack for saying it.

Then she came to the newspaper where I worked for lunch and a few of us were lucky enough to spend a few hours with her.

Over the years I have dished out many insults to public figures in newspaper columns and the general response to insulted dignity has been one of surly pomposity. There was none of this about Diana.

She immediately alluded to my various attacks on her as if they were nothing more than jokes, and laughed merrily at them.

She was not only a woman of melting beauty and overwhelming charm, she had perfect manners.

She won my round in two minutes and from that moment I became her unwavering champion.

Very few people in history have the quality she possesses to be able to communicate instantly with everyone. She had instant crowd appeal.

But everyone she met in person was also knocked for six by her charm. It wasn’t fake. She was one of those very rare people who can reach millions and we all miss her.

We can also see that her death still haunts her sons William and Harry. As children, they not only had to come to terms with the death of a mother, but of someone who was an idol to countless people around the world.

I’m not defending the often ridiculous way they’ve acted over the years. I’m just asking, what good is served by piling on the torture for them, just to increase the ratings for a tawdry, poorly written and poorly acted TV series?

To have a drama in which Diana returns to Charles as he sobs over her body in the morgue, and in which she holds hands with the Queen as she mourns her in Balmoral, is cruel – unspeakably cruel.

It’s also cheap. And anyone who looks at the good will be humbled by it.