send up of British attitudes

The pre-war attitudes were looking pretty silly by 1944 and this skewers them wonderfully well. As Joan and Tom mentioned, post-war will be a time when third generation butlers will find other work and butlering will die out as a way of life. As we saw, a butler could be a superior officer to an aristocrat. And an upper class woman could be an office worker or a driver. (In real life, even a Princess Royal could be a mechanic.) War was mixing the social classes and nationalities together. London could end up, oh my goodness, like Paris! And not every foreigner is a Bluebeard or a black-hearted scoundrel. The message is very different from that of the 1902 play The Admirable Crichton where in the end, social castes prevail. That survived WWI but by WWII that was most definitely on the way out.

The pre-war part of the movie dripped with irony, such as the peace commission teetering on the brink of armed conflict over a misunderstanding about migratory birds. It's very funny stuff if you enjoy that sort of thing.