The Crown, season 2, episode 10 review: a terrific retelling of the Profumo Scandal
As Philip Larkin famously noted, sexual intercourse began in 1963. The previous nine episodes of The Crown would suggest he got that wrong, but with the Profumo Affair now threatening to bring down the British Government, the question of sex is suddenly, ahem, thrust into the spotlight.
Peter Morgan unpacks the whole sorry state of affairs, which originated when John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, had a liaison with wannabe model Christine Keeler, beautifully. The episode begins with a grouse shoot, a symbol of old England, before Harold Macmillan (Anton Lesser) addresses the press in his tweeds in front of his stately home, his self-confidence shaken. This is what we would now call a PR disaster, but even then Macmillan’s anachronistic stance was seen as unwise.
As ever, Lesser is terrific, giving the sense of a man who knows his days are numbered. Of course, his personal life is far from sacred, with monstrous wife Dorothy (Sylvestra le Touzel giving a magnificent display of the human capacity for cruelty) continuing her affair with Lord Boothby and gamely telling him that he should go and see Beyond the Fringe where he is held up to ridicule.
In a surreal, but very effective sequence, we see Macmillan attend the famous revue, starring Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Here, he is spotted in the audience and suddenly all his insecurities are laid bare. He imagines that the whole audience are laughing at him.
An interesting later encounter sees a surprisingly unsympathetic Queen (Claire Foy) let her disappointment be known when Macmillan resigns on the grounds of ill health. She notes that in a little over 10 years as ruler, she has had three Prime Ministers: “All of them ambitious men, clever men, brilliant men. But not one of them lasted the course… A confederacy of quitters.”
Of course, Morgan is using this surprise outburst of asperity to show that the Queen is a woman let down by weak men. While sex in high places has been made public, her own husband’s infidelity proves that high-profile people can still enjoy low-profile shenanigans. Prince Philip (Matt Smith), has now come home to roost, his days of libidinousness seemingly behind him. In a scene at Balmoral, one of the key scenes of the entire series in fact, he doesn’t so much confess to his wicked ways as recalibrate his devotion. “You are the essence of my duty,” he says, which sounds very unlike the sort of thing the gaffe-prone Duke would actually say.
But no matter, it’s a tender, deeply moving scene and Foy is on magnificent form, showing just enough vulnerability beneath that veneer of tweedy stoicism. It’s a wonderful illustration of how consistently good she has been throughout the series – a sensible big sister who deals with every crisis in the most pragmatic of ways. Foy’s eyes constantly dart around the screen, as if she is trying to conjure up some inner resolve.
And let’s not forget Vanessa Kirby’s magnificent Margaret, here relegated to a nicely bitchy cameo. As she orders major building work at Kensington Palace, so the other Royal inhabitants, the “vicious circus”, as she puts it, complain about the noise and inconvenience. Margaret is not kind. “As a refugee of your husband’s low-ranking family, she’s [Princess Marina] lucky to be here at all,” she tells her sister.
You might expect the end of The Crown to strike a jubilant note perhaps, or at least pretend to let the Windsors play at happy families. But Morgan nicely sours it in a tremendously acerbic final scene. As the brood assemble for an official photograph to mark the births of Prince Edward and Sarah Armstrong-Jones, so Cecil Beaton recites John of Gaunt’s speech with more than a hint of irony: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
As everyone says cheese, Prince Philip looks incandescent with rage.
