Boris will star in a Partygate drama. And guess what, he’s phoning it in

This will be the first lockdown drama since the No 10 parties came to light. It stars the former PM in ‘voice only’. What could possibly go wrong, asks Tom Peck

Boris Johnson at a lockdown gathering in 10 Downing Street (PA)

Channel 4’s planned Partygate drama will, the broadcaster has announced, feature Boris Johnson in “voice only”. He will, in other words, be heard, but not seen. It is an editorial decision that asks a whole lot of tantalising questions.

Will it be some sort of gripping arthouse piece, set entirely inside the mind of a prime minister as he moves around his own house and garden, unwittingly attending parties he doesn’t realise are happening?

Or maybe it’s a children’s fairytale, where a man who pretends to be unable to see what’s happening right in front of him finds, all of a sudden, that nobody can see him either?

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe he just spends the period in question quite literally phoning it in.

The show, we are told, will guide us through Partygate through the prism of two fictitious special advisors, and will feature “dramatic reenactments of boozy parties in Downing Street”.

It will not be the first Johnson-Covid drama. Kenneth Branagh’s six-hour This England was filmed before any of the Downing Street parties came to light and so it features as its background mood music an unrelenting wave of frightened, lonely deaths – which is almost just as well. The sight of junior Downing Street press officers downing Jacob’s Creek out of plastic cups will arguably be even more depressing.

We will have to wait and see, but the concept rather brings to mind C.P. Taylor’s chilling 1982 drama, Good, which was on in the West End for most of last year, starring David Tennant.

Good tells the story of an affable young German scientist who imagines himself to be one of the good guys, just sort of going along with things, while all the while gradually descending into direct responsibility for some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War.

Partygate, one has to concede, is not quite so serious by comparison, but it will be intriguing to see how an entire office full of people – including the prime minister and the chancellor – came to convince themselves and each other that they weren’t doing anything wrong, right up until the moment at which the police turn up. I can see it now:

“Are you sure we should be having a cheese and wine party in the middle of a pandemic lockdown we ourselves introduced?”

“Well, maybe not, but come on, we’ve all been working really hard, haven’t we?”

“But, if we’re not doing anything wrong, why is the boss sending round these emails to remind us to make sure we hide what we’re doing from the TV cameras?”

“Hang on, why are we out here in the Downing Street garden, doing exactly what Matt Hancock is in there, on live TV, telling the whole country they can’t do?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“But the boss is going.”

“So what?”

“Well if you don’t go then he’ll know you think he shouldn’t be doing it.”

“There doesn’t appear to be anyone else in this Co-op loading up a suitcase full of wine?”

“Well no one else is running the country, are they? Just us.”

“Oh come on! It’s Cleo’s leaving do!”

“My wife’s a surgeon and she had her leaving do last week. It was on Zoom.”

“Oh come on. Most of us have had Covid-19 anyway!”

“Yes and some of us nearly died.”

“Alright fine. Do what you like. Honestly, if you don’t want to act like the rules don’t apply to you, why would you even want to work here anyway? Sometimes I think you think you’re just the same as everybody else.”

The whole thing could be cathartic, in its way. The program makers say it’s all based on “extensive research” so who knows, maybe they’ll have found a way to make it all make sense. And if not, well, at least we won’t actually have to look at Boris Johnson (ever again being far too soon).