You may have half-forgotten – or at least tried to – the days when our then prime minister Boris Johnson’s favourite line in tricky media interviews was “we must wait for the Sue Gray report”. When the report into breaches of the lockdown regulations in Downing Street arrived, in its bureaucratic way, it was shocking to the public and devastating to the Johnson administration. The details may have faded from the mind, but Channel 4’s enthralling, emotionally draining Partygate is here to remind you of them in highly graphic form. It’s a matter of: you’ve read the report, you’ve seen the news coverage… now watch the play. If you can bear it. The producers only drew the line at turning the report into a musical. The docu-drama has got plenty of bangin’ party hits – Abba, Rick Astley, Bonnie Tyler – so maybe one day…
Partygate is an ambitious and mostly effective amalgam. The central character is Grace Greenwood (played with a delightful, nuanced sensitivity by Georgie Henley), a fictional No 10 special adviser who, eventually appalled by the events around her, turns whistleblower. Grace is from a fairly humble background (grandad worked in a steel mill), and grew up in the politically symbolic “red wall” town of Darlington.
She makes friends, sort of (they’re all vacuous and untrustworthy), with the perfidious Annabel D’Acre, one of the nexus of loathsome entitled stereotypes who apparently infested No 10 during the Johnson era – upper class, ex-public school, ex-Oxbridge, ex-Tufton Street think tank, ex-morality. Annabel basically corrupts and finagles Grace into the brash, braying, entitled habits of her new workplace. When Grace asks Annabel, as they get stuck into the prosecco, “Are we still in a meeting?”, Annabel gives her a meaningful look, and we sense Grace cross an ethical and legal line.
Grace also meets the other fictional and very much non-fictional chargers around the place. The non-fictional figures who feature – including Lee Cain, media adviser; Helen MacNamara, deputy cabinet secretary; and Carrie Johnson – are the ones named in the Sue Gray report and in various other seemingly well-documented accounts of their activities.
The drama brilliantly interweaves the permanent in-fighting, complacency and debauchery at the core of government with contemporary news footage, and juxtaposes it with heartbreaking real-life stories of Covid funerals and gigantic fines imposed in comparatively harmless rule breaches – £10,000 for the organiser of a snowball fight in a park in a Leeds, for example. The hypocrisy and amorality of the Downing Street gang is laid bare in painful fashion – and Gray’s restrained prosaic mentions of “altercations”, of the fact that “one individual was sick”, and of “numerous examples lack of disrespect and poor treatment of security staff and cleaning staff”, are portrayed in their full technicolour squalor. The booze raids on the local Tesco; bottles smuggled back in the special XL suitcase; the karaoke machine; dancing on the table; a couple shagging on the sofa in the cabinet secretary’s office; baby Wilf’s swing broken by a boisterous Hooray Henry; the empty coke bags lying around… it’s enraging, all over again.
Partygate wasn’t that long ago, and the anger should be raw: the betrayal of trust, the violation of an unspoken moral code of public service, as well as the law, and the trashing of a venerable historic building. Most of the overprivileged yobs and yobettes got £50 fines, at worst. No 10 was the most fined house in the country. And so we recall and confront the depressing truth: yes, the people running the country really were that ghastly, and useless.
The portrayals of idiot toffs are all exuberant and excellent (specialities honed on The Windsors by Hugh Skinner and Tom Durant-Pritchard), and special mention has to go to John Culshaw. His voice, dubbed on to a blond-wigged Johnson body double, uncannily captures the cynical essence of Johnson’s confected public persona, “Boris” (close friends and family call him “Alex”). At times, the fictional Johnson strides straight out of a reconstructed scene and straight into a real-life Downing Street press conference. It’s completely seamless. When Johnson/Culshaw utters the words “This is the most unsocially distanced party in the UK right now” at yet another casual law-breaking gathering, it is as if we’re there, spying on their illicit “fun”, a place where the rules don’t apply because “the boss” doesn’t mind. Wince-inducing.
There are a few bits missing, though. I’d have thought it only fair to make at least a glancing reference to Johnson’s crucial role in the Covid vaccine research and rollout, easily his greatest achievement. His own semi-deadly brush with the coronavirus – quite the story at the time – is also omitted. Nor does Dominic Cummings feature as anything more than a vignette, and of Rishi Sunak, who was after all fined for attending the infamous birthday party/cake ambush, there is no sign at all.
And I’m not sure Channel 4 is doing itself that many favours with Partygate, justified and accurate as much of it is. Not so long ago, Nadine Dorries was secretary of state for culture (I know) and she’d made it her mission to privatise and, thus, destroy it. Tories were, and are, convinced Channel 4 is institutionally biased against them, and they tend to be a vengeful lot. They’re paranoiac and wrong, but the timing of Partygate is, well, rather pointed – a reminder of a most shameful episode broadcast slap bang in the middle of the Conservative Party Conference.
I do hope, for the sake of Channel 4, that Boris and his nasty, fun-loving friends never make a comeback…
