The Palace Papers by Tina Brown

Author:Tina Brown [Brown, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

There was a lesson in this. Charles was more than just a faddish dilettante. He tried to show Britain that he was a worthy—and humane—monarch-in-waiting.

IV

Danny Boyle, the director of the London Olympics opening ceremony, never thought in a million years the Queen would say yes. Boyle, a brilliantly subversive talent whose 2009 hit Slumdog Millionaire won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, was determined that London’s opening ceremony would be the polar opposite of the overpoweringly martial display of Chinese nationalism at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He wanted a pop-up pageant of British history that was emotional and human, with rough edges that could tolerate any surprise, one that would tell the hidden, not the obvious, stories of the country’s greatness—from suffragettes and Caribbean immigrants who arrived aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 to fill post-war labor shortages, to the unsung nurses of the National Health Service, embodied by the eight hundred medical volunteers who danced onto the stage in one of the high points of a madcap evening. Boyle’s message was that in postcolonial Britain, culture and creativity rule the waves. In the eighty-thousand-seat Olympic stadium in east London, a green and pleasant land grazed by real farm animals gave way to the ominous rising chimney stacks of the Industrial Revolution belching fumes as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the ingenious British civil engineer who built the Great Western Railway, strode out in the form of actor Kenneth Branagh to declaim Caliban’s speech in The Tempest: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises.”

Shakespeare, Captain Hook, and thirty Mary Poppinses descended from the sky through raindrops holding black umbrellas and carpet bags. A huge inflatable Lord Voldemort towered over the stadium, waving a magic wand, and Sir Paul McCartney led a sing-along of “Hey Jude.” Boyle turned his back on the jingoism of two world wars and the fight against fascism in favor of joyful cultural celebration and a silent tribute to the wars’ fallen dead.

“Could they put in more Churchill?” was one of the refrains of the puzzled Cameron administration traditionalists in the planning meetings. Another was, “Where are the kings and queens?”

There was only one. Whether real or a body double, Boyle knew that the opening act of the Olympics demanded the iconic presence of the reigning monarch—seen as never before. At first, he wanted the Queen to arrive on the tube, but security would be too big a problem. One of his team suggested filming Her Maj in the flesh at the Palace, and then having her drop into the stadium played by a body double. Boyle being Boyle, he upped the ante by adding to his wish list that the Queen be joined by another Britain-defining cultural icon, James Bond. As Bond, Daniel Craig’s role would be to show up at the Palace in a helicopter to rescue the Queen from a security threat that jeopardized her safe arrival at an undisclosed event. “Her Majesty,” aka stuntman Gary Connery, would leap from the aircraft dressed

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