David Hare refuses lese-majeste request

The uncomfortable relationship between the BBC and the Royal Family will not be improved by the revelation from the playwright David Hare that he was once asked by the corporation to provide negative comments for a programme being prepared for broadcast on the night the Queen eventually dies. Writing in the News Statesman, Hare says the incident occurred a few years ago - well before the recent embarrassment when a trailer for the BBC documentary about the Royals was edited to show the Queen storming out of a photo-shoot with Annie Leibovitz when she hadn't.

Hare says the BBC told him that everyone they had chosen to speak to had turned out to be an admirer, and, "in the fabled interests of balance", they needed the opposing point of view. "Oh," I said, "you mean you want me to attack the Queen on the night of her death?"

Hare declined, not because it was the Queen, he says, but because it was anyone. "In fact, as it happens, they asked me again, this time for Margaret Thatcher, and I said no a second time."

The former BBC executive Will Wyatt, asked to investigate the notorious photoshoot trailer episode, concluded in his report published in October that the "vital relationship" between the BBC and the Royal Household had been, "at the very least, placed under strain".