For clarity, I love Olivia Colman, we love her (if I have read this memo correctly) and she is a feminist. She was accused of having a “leftwing face” by the Telegraph columnist Charles Moore. “What the hell is a leftwing face?” she retorted, rightly. She does, however, have a feminist face, by which I mean there is a lot going on in it.
However, her assertion this week that the Queen – whom she plays, following a cast change, in the new series of The Crown – is the “ultimate feminist”, is incorrect. The more Colman explains her reasoning in an interview with Radio Times, the more incorrect it becomes. “She’s the breadwinner, she’s the one on our coins and banknotes. Prince Philip has to walk behind her. She fixed cars in the second world war. She insisted on driving a king who came from a country where women weren’t allowed to drive [King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, at Balmoral in 1998]. She’s no shrinking violet.”
I have nothing against the state bankrolling the royal family: most of its hierarchical significance would persist whether we paid for them or not and, given their accursed lives, they might as well get a bit of gold leaf out of it. But you cannot call this “breadwinning”. Earning more than your husband is not, in itself, a feminist act. And there is nothing wrong with even a nominal head of state appearing on all its banknotes, but the feminist act would have been to say: “I shouldn’t be the only woman on any of the currency.” Who knows, maybe she would have done if Caroline Criado-Perez hadn’t beaten her to it. But she was 91 when that happened.
Fixing cars in the second world war is neither feminist nor unfeminist: it would have been feminist to continue to fix cars once the war had ended.
On King Abdullah, OK, that’s fair. But whether or not she is a shrinking violet is impossible to adjudicate, since she has styled the discretion of the monarch as meaning you never say anything. Rumours circulate occasionally that she has strong views; that she was furious; maybe once every other decade, she dislikes a prime minister; but it’s impossible to trace an ideological through-line that isn’t just projection.
I am not trying to act feminist-gatekeeper; I just hold in low regard the new norm, where every woman who is a household name is, de facto, a Badass Broad, or a Gutsy Woman, or an Ultimate Feminist, simply because people have heard of her. It’s infantilising. As, indeed, is the monarchy itself.
