The drama of politics: Westminster on screen

Political life is an age-old subject for drama, but how well does it translate and is it believable?

I’ve started reading a book the existence of which I discovered while trawling the recesses of the internet for references for a previous essay. A State of Play: British politics on stage, screen and page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It by Steven Fielding is an attempt to explore how culture has absorbed politics as a subject and how fictional depictions of politics in turn influence the audience and how they perceive the real thing. Art imitating life, life imitating art. I’m only into the first chapter but I think I’m going to enjoy it. It’s wittily written and wryly observed, and promises to be very good and absolutely fascinating. Fielding has just retired as professor of political history at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, where he founded the Centre for British Politics; he also hosts a podcast called The Zeitgeist Tapes with journalist Emma Burnell, which is very much worth a listen.

I have been absorbed by politics from a very young (pre-teen) age, sometimes to an unhealthy degree. There was a time in the death throes of the 1992 Parliament when I could have told you pretty much who held every ministerial position in the collapsing Conservative government, and—in the days before the internet, I have to admit—I collected newspaper cuttings on reshuffles and the like with a dedication which seems fanatical now. I was, and am, a Conservative, but my strict youthful loyalty has been replaced now in my 40s by an almost fatalistic candour: as a commentator now (you can see all my writing here) I am, I hope, fair and realistic, and I certainly haven’t given the government a free pass over the past few years.

It should have been no surprise that I ended up working in the House of Commons, right in the belly of the beast. For 11 years, as a clerk, I could go almost anywhere in the building: at the green end, only the Members’ Chess Room and the Members’ Smoking Room were out of bounds (there was no smoking in the Smoking Room; I have no idea, obviously, if any chess was played in the Chess Room). That was not my intended career. Approaching the end of the longest period to which I could stretch out my status as a doctoral student, I wanted to be an academic, but jobs in those days (2004/05) were not easy to come by. I imagine it has changed little.

So, I told myself, I must have a Plan B, even if it’s only for a short time. That stumped me. My youthful ambition to be a barrister had faded, as it dawned on me that the dressing-up and the Churchillian addresses to the jury were less prominent a part of the job than actually, you know, learning law. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I’d stuck at it, finished my first degree (I never intended to read law) and completed the conversion courses necessary to read for the Bar. Would I have been good at it? Would I have enjoyed it? Anyway, I digress.

Politics it was. For those 11 years, I was scrupulously impartial and apolitical. The Commons took that very seriously. You weren’t even allowed to join a political party. They were right to do so, of course, because our reputation and ability to serve all Members of the House effectively relied on MPs being able to place absolute trust in us to advise them to the best of our abilities. If a Member had suspected that we were being influenced even slightly by our own political beliefs, we would have been utterly compromised.

I love political dramas. I think I’m a relatively visual person, or, at least, I enjoy seeing a visual representation of what I have previously only imagined, so I’m always warily excited when books I love are adapted for film or television. Political drama, of the Westminster kind, is doubly fascinating then, seeing a fictional story play out in a setting with which I’m very familiar. It allows me, I think, to map the fiction on to fact, to compare one to another, and, perhaps, to imagine that the fiction is itself fact. As someone who has penned fiction (unpublished so far, alas) set in the corridors of Westminster, I may have a more vested interest than some.

This is not going to be a survey of film and television drama set in Westminster. I haven’t the time to do that properly, and after a few monster essays it will behove me to keep this concise and punchy. I just want to look at one or two, and offer some general thoughts about the genre.

A couple of weekends ago, I switched on BBC4, intending to watch just an introduction to the original House of Cards, with the author Michael Dobbs (since 2010 Lord Dobbs) talking about how the book on which the BBC’s series was based came about and how the adaptation developed. I had watched it when it was first broadcast, with brilliant timing, in November 1990, at the moment at which Margaret Thatcher had fallen from office after 11 years. Dobbs and the producers could not have hoped for better timing, and the nation was gripped. As I should have known would happen, I became utterly enthralled by the twisting melodrama and Ian Richardson’s towering performance as chief whip then prime minister Francis Urquhart. I started writing an essay about it, which sprawled into a huge portrait of the Conservative chief whip of the 1930s, Captain David Margesson.

In that essay I dwelt at some length on the series, which I think remains brilliant, a little hokey, perhaps, and certainly pushing the bounds of credibility, but sharply scripted (by Andrew Davies) and featuring sensational turns by Malcolm Tierney, Colin Jeavons, Miles Anderson, Alphonsia Emmanuel, Diane Fletcher and, especially, the young Susannah Harker, in her mid-twenties and just starting out on television. (Of course I fancied her; I was a freshly minted teenager.) And Richardson was iconic, his wolfish grin and catchphrase “You might think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” becoming famous. (I haven’t seen the American version with the now-problematic Kevin Spacey. I’m sure it’s very good, but I sort of resent its existence, though I hope it has made Lord Dobbs a few quid.)

After that, though it had been screened in 1986, when I was far too young to appreciate it, I came across the adaptation of the accursed Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals, and, for all the author’s shortcomings, it smelled right. His tale of four ambitious politicians, two Conservative, two Labour, was, whatever else, a gripping story and it had authenticity at least partly born of Archer’s insider status in politics (he had briefly been an MP, for Louth, then deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, a post Dobbs would later hold). It was solid drama, and Jeremy Child was especially good as the aristocratic, flawed Charles Seymour, while Tom Wilkinson was strong as Raymond Gould, one of his Labour opponents.

I’ve enjoyed other examples of the genre. Party Animals, a 2007 BBC effort, captured perfectly the shady world of special advisers and parliamentary aides, of which the public was starting to become aware thanks to the New Labour government. Matt Smith, in his first major TV role, was fantastic as the Labour researcher Danny Foster, while Andrew Buchan played his elder brother; there was superb appearances by Shelley Conn, Andrea Riseborough (sigh) and Clemency Burton-Hill (a friend of a friend who has had a wretched time the past few years).

There were the Dobbs sequels To Play The King and The Final Cut, of course, each one a little less credible than the last, but still enormous fun. Michael Kitchen gave a fantastic performance as a more-or-less undisguised King Charles III, though we would never have guessed then that it would be another 29 years before the real version ascended the throne.

More recently, John Preston’s A Very English Scandal reminded us all of quite how surreal the career of Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe had really been. Hugh Grant inhabited Thorpe with exceptional accuracy, despite bearing practically no resemblance to the man himself, and Ben Whishaw was bewildered and vulnerable as the sinned-against-or-sinning Norman Scott. The story was considerably more grand guignol than anything Dobbs or Archer could have devised, yet it was all true. If any readers are unfamiliar with Jeremy Thorpe and his fall from grace, I heartily recommend either Preston’s book on which the series is based, also titled A Very English Scandal, or, for something more sober and exhaustive, Michael Bloch’s excellent 2014 biography Jeremy Thorpe.

(Thorpe is an absolutely fascinating figure. He was good-looking, stylish and, if we’re honest, a little flashy but he was extravagantly talented, and would have risen far in either of the major parties. Watch him here debate in the Oxford Union on EEC membership in 1975. He was a mesmerising speaker, and his background was utterly of the Establishment, Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, where he had been president of the Oxford Union in Hilary term 1951. He beat Dick Taverne and William Rees-Mogg to the post. His decline into the horrible grip of Parkinson’s in the 1980s, however terrible his crimes, was tragic.)

All of these dramas were at the eye of the Westminster storm. Their casts could hardly be faulted, and they were generally scripted with verve and gusto. But. But but but. I have a problem which bothers me still and will bother very few people outside Westminster. Knowing Parliament intimately, I feel every departure from reality keenly. The rhythm of the House of Commons is baked into my bones, and of course I don’t expect television dramas to present a word-for-word replica of how things actually work. It would be not only incomprehensible but also often dull. No-one wants to watch a backbencher introduce a Ten-minute Rule bill, because it isn’t interesting, and adds nothing to the story. Equally, the writers can be completely forgiven for not representing the parliamentary trench warfare of a bill in what when I joined were called standing committees (they are now public bill committees, which sheds a little more light), and I see why they elide some parts of the procedure of the House’s business.

Unfortunately, though, I notice these things and fight the urge to mutter at the television “The clerk will now proceed to read the Orders of the Day”, or “Not a question, sit down!” I am very guilty of shouting at the television anyway; when I watch live coverage of the House, I unconsciously take on the role of a pseudo-speaker and yell things like “Order!” and “That’s enough” and “Not a matter for the chair”. I know it’s no-one’s fault, and it’s very much a “me” thing rather than a “them” thing. It is simply an occupational hazard for anyone who knows a lot about the subject of a drama. When I was a postgraduate, I was taught for a while by the great Tudor historian John Guy, who told us his partner had refused to accompany him to see Elizabeth, the 1998 biopic of the Virgin Queen starring the wonderful, luminous Cate Blanchett, because she knew he would complain all the way through about various inaccuracies. (There are many: don’t get me started on the appearance of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, in a scene when he’d been dead for some years, or Kathy Burke’s awful, insulting, inaccurate portrayal of Mary I, my beloved Mary.)

There is one major fault which makes me cringe. The sets used for the House of Commons are almost always inaccurate, distractingly so for me. Granada Studios had a permanent set, built in 1986 for First Among Equals, and it looked wrong but I couldn’t fathom why. All right, the lighting was wrong: when you’re inside, the chamber is actually very bright, or has been since 1989 when television cameras were admitted (the Lords had beaten them to it, starting coverage in 1985; they had undertaken an experiment in 1968, in black and white, and for hardcore Parliament watchers, it is a fascinating insight into a bygone age.) But there was something else.

It took me a long time to twig, but the Granada set only has four rows of benches on either side, while the actual chamber has five. It seems a tiny thing, but it changes the proportions entirely, and makes the set look completely wrong. Then, again understandably, dramas use whatever camera angles suit the scene best, which of course they are bound to. But, again, in the real House of Commons there are fixed cameras and their angles are carefully restricted.

I know. Willing suspension of disbelief. And this is an issue that only affects me because I have spent a long time in and around the chamber. In my defence, my particular point of view is the only one I’m able to have, so it will by definition colour the way I see political dramas.

The wider set is difficult too. Everyone knows vaguely what the Palace of Westminster looks like, that outrageous, ornate, neo-Gothic extravagance of Sir Charles Barry’s, with the finer detailing by the obsessive, crazed A.W.N. Pugin. But, the chambers aside, there are few spaces in the building which will have much resonance for the viewing public (except, perhaps, Westminster Hall after the late Queen Elizabeth II’s lying in state), so directors look for somewhere to film which has a similar atmosphere: tiles, high, vaulted ceilings, ornate staircases. Manchester Town Hall, of a similar vintage to Westminster and completed in 1877, has been used for interior shots in House of Cards, State of Play, The Iron Lady and A Very English Scandal among others. It has the right feel and a similar style, but, if I may nitpick again, it is far too vertical: there are too many staircases. Westminster is actually a low building. Much of the business is done on the principal (ground) floor, with committees meeting on the first floor (and occasionally the second). So there are very few “walk and talk” moments in Westminster which take in several staircases.

A partial solution is emerging. The authorities at Westminster are now alive to the commercial prospects of the Parliamentary Estate, and in 2014 Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst, Natalie Press as Emily Wilding Davison and Carey Mulligan as the fictional activist Maud Watts, was the first ever film allowed to shoot on the estate itself. By 2021, nearly a quarter of a million pounds had been raised from fees for filming, which, even in Parliament, is not negligible. Provided filming never interferes with the work of either House, this seems a sensible way of sweating the assets and giving filmmakers the opportunity to use authentic locations.

I don’t want this to sound querulous or pettifogging. I mention these things simply because they may interest readers and are, probably, particular to me. But on the whole I love a good political drama, however often I have to bite my tongue. If I won some obscenely vast amount of money on the EuroMillions or similar (I know I fulfil the joke about the old Jewish man praying to God: “Meet me halfway, Abraham, buy a ticket!”) I would build exact replicas of both chambers and hire them out for nominal sums but exercise tyrannical control over the filming. Failing that, I shall have to learn to cope.

A final thought: what story is yet to be dramatised but is ripe for a filmic adaptation? The Falklands War and the fall of Thatcher have been done. The Second World War is almost old hat. I would be the only person to watch a drama based on the failed attempt to reform the House of Lords in 1968-69 (see the Cabinet Office white paper House of Lords Reform and the Parliament (No. 2) Bill). But when I wrote my biographical study of David Margesson, it inevitably dwelt heavily on the so-called Norway debate in May 1940 (actually a debate on the adjournment under the title Conduct of the War). It has everything: a defined timescale (two sitting days), jeopardy (will the National government survive and will Chamberlain hold on as prime minister?) and the most delicious cast: Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, David Lloyd George, Leo Amery, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, Arthur Greenwood… it screams “film me”. So, if there are any producers or investors out there, do just drop me a line.