This England’s Boris Johnson is so realistic as to be almost troubling

Rarely is he far from a Shakespearian aphorism, said gazing out of a window or over the phone, a reminder that it was always a performance – both to himself and others

One suspects he is more realistic in his private moments than public (Phil Fisk/ Sky UK Ltd)

While This England was being filmed, a play opened at the Old Vic called The 47th, which casts Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2024 presidential election as a Shakespearian tragic comedy in full iambic pentameter.

This England, Michael Winterbottom’s six-part dramatisation of the first wave of Boris Johnson and of Covid, has its similarities. Kenneth Branagh’s Johnson is so realistic as to almost be troubling, and one suspects is more realistic in his private moments than public. Rarely is he far from a Shakespearian aphorism, said gazing out of a window or over the phone, a reminder that it was always a performance, both to himself and others.

It will, unsurprisingly, ignite a rather wearisome debate about the dramatisation of very recent events. For many, This England will present an opportunity to go through six full hours of television drama and point out what didn’t actually happen, who wouldn’t actually have been at what meeting, who actually reports to who and who wouldn’t actually have said or done this that or the other.

To dramatise such recent events is to make people imagine you are actually undergoing an act of journalism. Winterbottom is attempting no such thing. The writer of The Crown, Peter Morgan, has an often repeated line about “truth” not necessarily being the same as “accuracy.”

The dramatic climax of James Graham’s play, Brexit: The Uncivil War came when Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, and Craig Oliver (Rory Kinnear) went for an impromptu pint together and, in effect, argued out their ideas. Westminster journalists furiously point out that this drink never actually happened. But the play was based, in large part, on books and blogs written by the two men, and it hardly seems a crime against truth – if not accuracy – to place each under the scrutiny of the other.

Very large numbers of people will feel they know the Covid story, in its early and most traumatic months inside out. Surely never has a nation been more glued to the news, not merely through sheer terror but also because there was absolutely nothing else to do. But the monotony of life also blurs the memory. Even as recently as 2020, the days, weeks and months have blurred into one.

Branagh’s Johnson is certainly the dramatic heart of the story, his fortunes seem bound up with his nation’s, his reaching for the Shakespeare book of quotations as much about his own suffering as everybody else’s. This will doubtless annoy many, who consider Johnson not so much as emblematic of a country’s flaws as utterly responsible for them.

Johnson’s detractors (of which I could hardly not call myself one), may not find it easy to accept a more nuanced truth about the impossibility of the choices he faced. In February and March, the public tend to be furious that he didn’t overrule his scientific advisers, who didn’t agree among themselves but who generally felt that lockdowns were a delaying tactic, and why delay to winter pain that might be less in spring. And then, later on (after this drama ends), they are equally angry with him for overruling advice to have a second, and third lockdown (which he eventually did).

The realities of Johnson’s life in this period are well known but made ever more staggering by their being made real. Covid was sidelined at a crucial period while he retreated to Chevening for twelve days to do all the admin for the divorcing one wife and the lining up another, who’s already pregnant, the announcements of that delayed by Johnson’s desire to tell his grown-up children first, but who never answer the phone to him.

He then gets admitted to intensive care himself, and having been out for a matter of days, becomes a father (for at least the sixth time).

There can hardly be any doubting that the country required, if not deserved, a more suitable leader in its darkest hour, if only merely one who didn’t have family problems with more than one family, a book several years overdue for which the £500,000 advance is urgently required and a dog defecating everywhere.

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Winterbottom will almost certainly be charged with having been too sympathetic to Johnson. The obvious fact of a pandemic is that almost all global leaders must face down the same challenges, and grim and humanising as they are, it remains a bald fact that most comparable leaders fared far better than he did. His crowning achievement was a two-week headstart on the vaccine rollout, which was quickly caught up and surpassed elsewhere. (Though it should not be forgotten that that two-week headstart mattered – it saved lives.)

Inevitably, the trouble with dramatising the very recent past is that alternative endings will always come along. There is no Partygate, no vote of confidence, no mass resignations, though there is Barnard Castle.

Mainly, it is a reminder that, actually, though the world lived it together, the vast majority of the world did not live its suffering, despite its massive scale. Losing a loved one to Covid was a misery heaped on a small minority of people. Most of us didn’t have to imagine the Covid wards struggling to cope, or, in the early days, the sudden collapse of young, fit and healthy people who died in their thousands. This would have been This England’s fate, even if it had not had its smallest ever leader sitting in the big boy’s chair.