LONDON — When screenwriter Peter Morgan set out to portray Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, he depicted a distant monarch, clueless and a little appalled by the massive outpouring of grief after the death of her former daughter-in-law, Diana.
"I wrote about a cold, emotionally detached, haughty, difficult, prickly, private, uncommunicative, out-of-touch bigot," Morgan told Britain's Evening Standard not long after the film, "The Queen," hit theaters.
Newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair was the man with his finger on the public's trembling pulse, dubbing Diana "the people's princess" and positioning himself as the lightning rod for the thousands who stood weeping outside Kensington Palace, while the queen remained locked in chilly isolation in her Scottish castle.
What a difference a decade makes.
Trading places
Much as the character herself foresaw in the film, the queen and prime minister appear to have traded places in the public's estimation in the 10 years since that memorable week after Diana's death.
Blair is struggling through his third term and battling public hostility over the Iraq war, corruption scandals and failures in the reforms that were supposed to be the heart of his New Labor movement. Even his party is eager for his departure.
The queen, meanwhile, is appreciated for the very detached demeanor that has allowed her to remain on the throne through 54 years and 10 prime ministers.
Indeed, many Britons look back on that emotional week after Diana's death with a sense of perplexity resembling a collective hangover.
"It did seem at the time as though the queen had missed the post-Diana mood, or had underestimated it, and had been defeated by her daughter-in-law, even in death. But now I wonder," Minette Marrin wrote in the Sunday Times not long ago after seeing "The Queen," which has garnered six Oscar nominations.
"This film is evidence of how shallow the Diana effect has proved to be. No longer does Diana appear as the unblemished victim, the standard-bearer of feeling and truth against the massed forces of establishment repression.... No longer does the queen appear unfeeling or unsympathetic."
Margaret Lucey, a mobile phone company employee from the middle England town of Newark, said she went to London the day after Diana's death and added flowers to the heap at Kensington Palace.
