THE prime minister tells the Queen she is buying a retirement home in the comfortable London suburb of Dulwich. The monarch’s reply is as sarcastic as it is snobbish: “That’s near Peckham, isn’t it?”

The Queen then makes another cutting remark about politicians who “come and go”, drawing a vigorous riposte from Margaret Thatcher.

The scene of barely suppressed hostility, set in 1986, is in a new Channel 4 series that dramatises a tense relationship between the two women.

Often blurring the line between fact and fiction, it shows their dealings as a series of confrontations. The Queen dislikes hardly being able to “get a word in edgeways” with her haughty premier, while her consort derides “that bloody grocer’s daughter”.

Thatcher, meanwhile, resents what she sees as royal meddling in the Commonwealth and the miners’ strike.

The Queen, a five-part series, intersperses interviews with real courtiers and politicians with dramatised scenes from the monarch’s career. The makers do not claim the portrayal of her meetings with Thatcher are entirely factual, but numerous conversations with people who know the two women, conducted by the producers, “inform” the scenes.

The approach will inevitably draw comparisons with the Oscar-winning 2006 film of the same name, starring Helen Mirren, which dramatised the Queen’s relationship with Tony Blair in 1997.

The frosty relationship between the monarch and Thatcher, who was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, was first reported by The Sunday Times in 1986. The article revealed the Queen’s concerns over the divisiveness of Thatcher’s social policies and the strain that her refusal to agree sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa was putting on her beloved Commonwealth.

In the television series, which begins on November 29, the Queen is played by five actresses at different points of her reign.

Those interviewed on screen include Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury; Lady Anne Glenconner, a friend of the royal family and a train-bearer at the Coronation; the actress Anna Massey, a friend of the Duke of Edinburgh; and Ronald Allison, former press secretary to the Queen.

The producers of the series say they “kept the palace informed about what we were up to at all times”. They sent more than 100 letters to friends and family of the Queen as well as staff and others. A spokesman said: “These conversations inform much of the dramatised sequences in the series.”

The third episode depicts the relationship with Thatcher. The monarch, played by Susan Jameson, lampoons the prime minister’s habit of referring to herself as “we”.

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