Did Tony Blair really get heckled during his Women’s Institute speech?

While he may not get as much focus as some previous prime ministers have in the series, episode 6 'Ruritania' examines the relationship between Blair and the Queen in detail, assessing the reforms he made to the monarchy.

The episode also dramatises one of the prime minister's less successful speeches, when he was heckled when talking to the Women's Institute in 2000. But how true to life is this moment?

Read on for everything you need to know about Tony Blair's speech to the Women's Insititute.

What happens in The Crown season 6 episode 6?

In The Crown season 6 episode 6, Ruritania, the Queen is seen making a successful speech to the Women's Institute (WI), which is greeted warmly.

However, nationwide and internationally, Prime Minister Tony Blair's popularity is seen to be surging, while the royal family's is diminishing.

The Queen brings this up with Blair in one of their meetings and asks him what he would do to turn things around for the monarchy.

Blair goes away and comes up with a host of suggested reforms, including cuts to staff and spending and ensuring primogeniture, meaning no longer would a male heir be considered the successor even when they have an elder female sibling.

The royal household conducts a review and agrees to some of his suggestions, but not others. The relationship between them seems frosty.

The Queen is later informed that Blair will be giving a speech to the WI. The Queen remarks that she wouldn't have thought they were his crowd, but says she has always had to admire his unerring judgment.

However, the crowds soon turn against him, slow-clapping his speech as he promotes radical change, and later heckling. The Queen is seen watching the speech on television.

She later tells him in one of their audiences: "He can charm America, indeed the whole world, but comes up short with the Women's Institute."

She tells him he was political with them, when the WI prides themself on never being that.

Did Tony Blair really get heckled when giving a speech to the Women's Institute?

Yes, Tony Blair was heckled during a speech he gave to the Women's Institute.

In June 2000, Blair took to the stage at the Women's Institute's national conference, but the audience of 10,000 women did not respond well to his speech.

Blair was at first welcomed to the stage, but he had been advised ahead of time by the WI that he should make sure the speech remained non-political.

The heckling began when Blair started to list examples of government action to extend opportunity and was followed by slow clapping when he started talking about NHS reform.

The WI's chair appealed for calm, but when he started talking about interest rate cuts and got further heckled, he responded, saying: "Well, I'm glad we're having a good debate, anyway."

His response was reportedly tut-tutted, with audience members saying it was a party lecture and not a debate. There were more shouts when he started talking about collective responsibility and gave his support to the WI's campaign to save rural post offices.

Then-Conservative leader William Hague would go on to remark on the response to the speech in the Commons, saying: "It is the mark of an out-of-touch prime minister that you don't know why you're out of touch."

What has Bertie Carvel said about Tony Blair in The Crown?

Speaking to RadioTimes.com about his role in The Crown season 6, actor Bertie Carvel discussed the presence of Tony Blair among the other stories.

"This season is not, as I might have hoped, a biopic of Blair's time in office," Carvel explained. "You get snapshots. Episode 6 is very Blair-focused. I think it's a really interesting microcosm of the Blair years, but it doesn't try to cover everything.

"And much as I was standing ready to do my episode on the Good Friday Agreement and my episode on the Iraq War and my episode on whatever it might have been, Peter touches those things with quite a light brush, I think, and focuses on private conversations really.

"I really enjoyed that I get to do quite a lot of public Blair stuff in episode 6, but then it's also always brought back to those audience room scenes which are highly private, confidential and entirely imagined by Peter [Morgan, show writer and creator], because constitutionally we're never meant to know what happens in that closed room, which is really the premise on which the whole series is hung."

Discussing the differences between Blair in the series and Queen Elizabeth II, Carvel added that "whereas Blair is the arch-moderniser and the radical, he's also one who, I think, has some sympathy with the institution of monarchy. He's not some sort of kind of bull in a china shop coming in trying to wreck the institution - he's trying to steer his monarch and give her good advice.

"So they're both playing both roles. And it's interesting, I guess Peter uses it to have a debate about what the monarchy should be, and hopefully, the audience will make up their own minds."

The Crown season 6 is available to stream in full on Netflix now. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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