London ? When screenwriter Peter Morgan set out to portray Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, he depicted a distant monarch, clueless and a little appalled over 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 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,” while the queen remained locked in chilly isolation in her Scottish castle.

What a difference a decade makes.

Much as the monarch 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 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 praying for his departure.

The queen, meanwhile, is appreciated for the very detached demeanor that has allowed her to remain on the throne of Britain through 10 prime ministers and 54 years.

Indeed, many Brits 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.”

“No longer does Diana appear as the unblemished victim, the standard bearer of feeling and truth against the massed forces of establishment repression.”

Margaret Lucey, a mobile phone company employee from the middle England town of Newark, said she had traveled to London on the day after Diana’s death and placed flowers at Kensington Palace.

“It was like a crowd mentality,” she said. “And at the time, there was a very negative attitude toward the royal family, and (Diana) was seen as a victim.”

Since then, Lucey said, she has come to appreciate the “buttoned-up” approach for which the monarch was so criticized.

Colin Campbell, a retired electrical engineer from Nottingham, said Diana was “a nice girl” with her heart in the right place. “But the trouble was, she was not brought up in a royal environment,” he said. “Diana was too human. And in the British royal family, you cannot be too human.”

The film marks the first critical depiction of a sitting monarch in mainstream British drama, and its portrayal is widely perceived here as spot on; the royal court’s reaction reportedly has been positive, though the queen, by all accounts, has not seen it.