Nobody died because the staff of 10 Downing Street threw office parties throughout the Covid lockdown, and yet it’s what finally brought down Boris Johnson’s government. More than mass casualties or millions in lost public money, the discovery that the people setting the rules didn’t feel those rules applied to them was what stuck in the collective craw. Channel 4’s furious docudrama Partygate pinpoints why that was the case.
Set between the outbreak of Covid in early 2020 and the spring of the following year, Joseph Bullman’s film has Johnson himself as a peripheral presence, played by a lookalike filmed from behind and voiced by Jon Culshaw. Our protagonists are the aides, advisers, PR people and junior civil servants around him – most of whom are named, real people.
