Invasive, fake, cruel... and how can they be privy to the PM’s dreams?

FOR the families and friends of the more than 200,000 people in this country who died from Covid, This England will be very painful viewing. That hurt will be compounded by the fact that so many scenes of the TV drama have been fabricated to fit a narrative that seems intent on diminishing

Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie in the eyes of the world.

Yes, the drama is compelling viewing. But as someone who served in Boris’s Cabinet and was a Health Minister throughout the Covid pandemic, I have to say that the sixpart series is dangerously tendentious.

Admittedly, the producers put a disclaimer before each episode, stating that the drama is fictional, based on true events. But the fact that scenes are interspersed with real news footage makes it very deceptive. Also, many scenes involving politicians and civil servants are eerily convincing.

Indeed, I can vouch for that. Some of the events depicted, for example in the Department for Health and Social Care, are unnervingly accurate in their details of Zoom calls and the positions in which staff sit at meetings.

But as for the treatment of Boris himself, the series is personally invasive and cruel. And every fiction writer knows it’s easier to present what you might want to have happened rather than present an accurate version of the truth.

Some of the most disingenuous scenes involve what can only be described as the fevered imaginings of the screenwriters, showing the Prime Minister tossing and turning in bed as he is tormented by dreams.

This is obviously invented. How on Earth could they be privy to

Boris’s dreams?

It is true that one of the common symptoms of Covid is vivid nightmares. I remember it clearly myself.

However, Sky Atlantic has used this as a way of callously inventing dreams that its producers want Boris to have had in order to cynically focus viewers’ inappropriate attention on to personal issues such as his relationship with his children from his second marriage, naming each one individually.

As for Carrie, she is a woman who prefers to be out of the limelight. She is immensely private and shuns publicity. During her time in No10, she was probably photographed, filmed and interviewed far less often than any other recent Prime Minister’s partner or wife.

Having been with her when the going has got very tough, I can confirm that her calmness comes into its own and she is a tower of strength, both to

Boris and those around her.

Ignorant of the truth, the makers of This England had to invent a storyline around her and have obviously not challenged duff information they were given from whichever attentionseeker they happily employed to embellish their story.

The fact is that the vast majority of the scenes involving Carrie never happened. The character portrayed is simply not the person anyone close to Carrie recognises or knows.

She would never ask anyone to run errands in an entitled manner as the series repeatedly suggests. There is an absurd plot line involving a secret friendship with a male friend that is pure – and poisonous – fiction. There are conversations, scenarios and

‘Sadly a Left-wing filter was placed over the camera lens’

apparent events that are just crassly made up.

All these fabrications are cleverly interwoven with factual content regarding key government meetings about the pandemic in which real life is replicated almost to the word.

Of course, Sir Kenneth Branagh, as Boris, is superb. Who could watch the actor in anything and not be totally captivated? I’ve been a Branagh fan since I saw him play Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1992.

Was his portrayal of Boris accurate? Sadly not. Branagh must have used material and been given information about our former PM that was inaccurate. A Left-wing filter was placed over the camera lens throughout filming – as is so often the case these days with TV drama.

It is a tragedy that such a jaundiced image has been presented in This England – particularly at a time when the eyes of the world are on this country. But I suppose I expected nothing less from a self-regarding, metropolitan, theatrical class whose favourite sport is trying to take potshots at the Johnsons.