The Crown is entering its danger zone. The imminent third Netflix series of Peter Morgan’s lavish, painstaking dramatisation of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II surveys the years 1964 to 1977. With a dozen years having passed since Elizabeth’s accession at the series’ start, every member of her family has been recast with older actors. This is the new season’s first peril. Can it persuade us that since we last met Her Majesty two autumns ago, Claire Foy has aged into Olivia Colman?

Colman is an Oscar-winning actress, but Charles Moore, the Daily Telegraph journalist and biographer of Margaret Thatcher (with whom The Crown will have its sport in season four), has already expressed his doubts, writing that Colman has a “distinctly left-wing