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This England can't be neutral It's far more than a Boris-bashing sneerfest

Their relationship is warm and playful. This England/Sky UK Ltd

Their relationship is warm and playful. This England/Sky UK Ltd


September 28, 2022   6 mins

“Can you think of a novel that ever was written about the strictly contemporary scene?” George Orwell asked his friend Tosco Fyvel in April 1949. “It is very unlikely that any novel, i.e. worth reading, would ever be set back less than three years at least. If you tried, in 1949, to write a novel about 1949 it would simply be ‘reportage’ and probably would seem out of date and silly before you could get it into print.” One reason, he said, was that “one can’t see the events of the moment in perspective”.

The writer-director Michael Winterbottom begs to differ. Sky Atlantic announced his six-part drama about the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020, towards the end of the period it covers. Winterbottom’s original title was This Sceptred Isle but Sky, fearing that the allusion was too niche, requested a more broadly legible phrase from John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: This England. It began filming in February 2021, when the first picture of Kenneth Branagh, buried in prosthetics as Boris Johnson, was released. At the last minute it was delayed for a week due to the death of the Queen but it’s still a good six months away from Orwell’s three-year red line.

“Here’s a chance to engage with something which has that certain uniqueness — but engage with it now, as soon as possible after it happened, as opposed to trying to recreate a war story from 70 years ago,” Winterbottom said in a defensive interview with the New Statesman. He co-wrote the series with Kieron Quirke but had to delegate directing duties to Julian Jarrold for health reasons. He added: “It’s very neutral. Almost a diary. A record of something we all lived through.” Perhaps he was trying to pre-empt early-bird hatchet jobs like the one in the Mail on Sunday, which called it “yet another sneerfest by the TV-land Lefties” and accusingly introduced Winterbottom as “a staunch supporter of the Labour Party and close friend of actor Steve Coogan”. Oh no, not a friend of Steve Coogan! Nadine Dorries, still Johnson’s most loyal attack dog though no longer responsible for the culture brief, slammed “a self-regarding, metropolitan, theatrical class whose favourite sport is trying to take pot-shots at the Johnsons”. The Mail claimed credit for the addition of a disclaimer, “This is a fiction based on real events,” but Sky told me that this is “standard practice”.

Looking at Winterbottom’s freewheeling filmography, it’s easy to spring to conclusions about which lane he would choose for this story. Perhaps it would be what you might call Coogan Mode: antic, postmodern portraits of charismatic narcissists from Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in 2002’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People to a fashion mogul rather like Philip Green in 2019’s misfiring Greed. Or maybe the sober, polemical style of documentaries such as The Shock Doctrine and Eleven Days in May. But This England, which tracks the six months from the 2019 election to Dominic Cummings’ rose garden press conference and the end of the first wave, is neither of those. Barring an incomprehensibly ill-advised recurring dream sequence, it is cautious in a way that Winterbottom rarely is, fully conscious of its responsibilities to history. In aspiring to neutrality, however, it winds up proving that neutrality is impossible.

We have to start with Branagh, who read every word and watched every second of Johnsonia he could lay his hands on, and pays Johnson the compliment of taking him seriously. I’m no fan of prosthetics but he captures the burly, bearish demeanour, the blustery charm, the cosplay gravitas, the constant air of improvising his way out of a tight spot. He compulsively rifles through a mental wardrobe of ready-made quips, comfy quotations from Shakespeare and the Classics, and self-flattering allusions to Churchill. Criticised for boasting about shaking people’s hands in the early days of the pandemic, he protests that not to do so “would be like Churchill hiding in the bunker”. But whereas one national crisis transformed Churchill from an erratic, divisive politician into a great leader, this one exposed Johnson’s fundamental shallowness and reluctance to make big decisions. His failure is framed as having less to do with specific choices than with the question of character. He was a people-pleasing booster thrust into a once-in-a-century cataclysm that he couldn’t bluff his way through.

Yet Branagh’s Johnson is unexpectedly sympathetic, unless you’re Nadine Dorries. He has some witty lines. “Not dead,” he says when he’s in bed with Covid. “Or if I am, nobody’s briefed me.” His hospitalisation, easily forgotten now, is genuinely traumatic. His relationship with Ophelia Lovibond’s Carrie Symonds is warm and playful. While each episode is frontloaded with evidence of his arrogance, infidelities and glib provocations, he does at least emerge as a palpable human being.

The other tentpole character is Dominic Cummings, played by Simon Paisley Day as a far more gaunt and sinister character than Benedict Cumberbatch’s flamboyant disruptor in Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War. (Confusingly, Paisley Day was Douglas Carswell in that earlier drama.) Cummings, in this telling, wanted to exploit the systemic failures of Covid policy to strengthen his case for a root-and-branch reform of Whitehall in his own image, pitting his fantasy team of hypercompetent mavericks against a caricature of the sclerotic establishment. “He wants everyone to be crap except him,” complains Matt Hancock. Of course, that would-be revolution stalled after Cummings’ road trip to Durham and died with his firing six months later but it was always less a coherent plan than the projection of a gigantic ego.

This England illuminates when it shows the tension between health strategy and political optics. We see Hancock’s obsession with hitting the testing target by the end of April driven primarily by concern for his own reputation. Shri Patel’s Rishi Sunak is a glib, headline-hungry lightweight and director of communications Lee Cain (played by Derek Barr) a petulant bully who stomps around yelling, “We need something to announce!” Focus groups appear to have been almost as important as SAGE. Government announcements, taken from real news footage, are met with a Greek chorus of unimpressed doctors, scientists and journalists. Winterbottom shows his hand in these scenes but who would now defend the handling of PPE procurement, or the decision to return elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them? Compared with Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s damning book Failures of State, This England might even be accused of being too generous. Matt Hancock, for one, should be pretty chuffed on balance, and not just because he’s played by the earnestly handsome Andrew Buchan.

The directors recreate the sense of how bewilderingly fast everything happened, especially in March, when the facts and calculations changed from day to day. Beyond the Johnsons and Cummings, most scenes are kept short, like shards in a collage of British life under Covid. The irony can be heavy-handed but no less true for that. Cutting from Johnson’s promise that “2020 will be a year of prosperity, growth and hope” to a tray of bats in Wuhan market? Well, that was the case. Juxtaposing the match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid on 11 March with a dying man? A report by MPs concluded that 37 people died as a result of that match, and 41 because of the Cheltenham festival on the same day. Cummings in Durham grimly watching Hancock on television reiterate the order to stay at home? The dates align. I remember all of that and you probably do, too, although there are some things we didn’t know at the time, like the rapidity with which the vaccine was designed in February 2020.

For most of us, the first phase of the pandemic was an unprecedented blend of anxiety and boredom. The lucky ones can look back on it as a strange hiatus, enlivened by Joe Wicks, Tiger King and sourdough loaves, so there is value in forcing viewers to focus on the unlucky. The director’s cut briskly from the corridors of power (and the corridors of Zoom) to ICU wards, care homes and houses across the country, where NHS staff faced an overwhelming tide and tens of thousands people died who might have lived if things had been done differently. The regular sound of coughs and the beeping of monitors provides the drama with a kind of sickly drumbeat. With this panorama of pain and grief, This England does similarly vital work to the Covid memorial wall, commemorating those who paid the price for bad short-term decisions and inadequate long-term planning at a time when the country is keen to move on. Whether the bereaved will feel that their anger has been represented on screen as well as their loss, I’m not so sure.

I think that This England has a strong answer to the question of whether it is too soon for a drama like this. It passes Orwell’s test of seeing the events of the moment in perspective. In fact, I was shocked by how much I had forgotten, or was unable to piece together sequentially. Exhaustively researched through documents and interviews, the series is a gift to posterity. The effort to tell it true and tell it whole is undeniable, yet I still got the impression of conscientious people working extremely hard to do what could not be done: withhold judgement.

“I personally have no point of view of whether things were done correctly, or incorrectly,” Winterbottom says in the press pack, but I can’t see how that could possibly be true, not least because he and Quirke have Johnson tell Cummings in the final episode: “I think we failed… We fucked up, Dom.” There is no such thing as neutral history, unless it is an unfiltered mountain of data. As soon as you begin to tell a story you have to make choices about what to include and how to frame it. There need not be partisan bias but there must always be judgement. While a historian can assemble evidence for competing accounts of an event, a dramatist must pick one version to show you and say, yes, this is how it was. In an effort to pretend that such decisions have not been made, the writers mute their impact.

If you tune in hoping for the clear assignment of blame, then you will be disappointed, whatever your priors may be, but perhaps that task should be left to the official inquiry. This England does what a drama can do, which is to convey how it felt across the country to live through that unreal period when the world seemed at once to stop and to unravel. Muttering Shakespeare to himself in the dark, Johnson sees himself as a tragic hero, but the tragedy was ours.


Dorian Lynskey is an author, journalist and UnHerd columnist.

Dorianlynskey

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Andrew Horsman
Andrew Horsman
2 years ago

This sounds like another piece of controlled propaganda masquerading as entertainment, to reinforce the “if only the government had been more comptenent and acted more swiftly to lock down and test, track, and trace everyone, not so many people would have died” story. So that when the next, “inevitable” “pandemic” breaks, the “game changing” treaty (to quote the WHO’s communist leader) that is now being negotiated will kick in, requiring governments and people to do any kind of abhorrent, inhumane things to each other, and transfer even more national resources to large corporations in exchange for ineffective and improperly tested pharmaceutical products, all in the name of a safetyist ideology hostile to individual agency, conscience, and liberal democratic values.

I haven’t seen the show, and not do I want to see it, but I’d be willing to bet that it doesn’t feature small children abandoned to domestic abuse in the grotesque “lockdowns”, and nor does it feature the vaccine-injured, whose grief, pain and suffering continues to be routinely ignored by the captured mainstream media and gaslighting medical professionals alike. I will very happily stand corrected if this in fact not true.

Ian Smith
Ian Smith
1 year ago
Reply to  Andrew Horsman

The entire social media, press and TV who supposed to be impartial all have a political agenda now!!! All media is propaganda and steps should be taken to stop this biased approach to brainwashing!!! Democracy should be left down to the people and people alone without media interference!!!

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
2 years ago

Nevertheless, we all know that a drama explaining Johnson’s behaviour as anything other than unprincipled would not get made. The greatest single economic and cultural problem this country faces is the absolute solidarity of a cultural elite amongst whom the expression of even mildly heterodox opinion guarantees career death.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

“solidarity of a cultural elite”. Surely that should be self-styled cultural elite?

Aaron James
Aaron James
2 years ago

”“I personally have no point of view of whether things were done correctly, or incorrectly,” Winterbottom says in the press pack,”

and if he made a WWII documentary in 1947 he would have said – look at all this mess, death and destruction – everyone was just blowing stuff up and shooting things and people up, and I am not going to say if one side was right or not – It all just sort of happened, I am just here to show it, or what I wish to show of it (ie not the dissenters and all the new facts now available)

It was a plandemic to destroy the West – I am not saying the release of the lab made virus was intentional, but the the 100% synchronized global response was. This was to create an authoritarian system. The engineered coming depression, which the response and the current War are to create – they will finally allow true authoritarianism to be loosened on the world. This was a war against us, the citizens, and we lost.

Or so all the evidence shows – as the Insanity of the Lockdowns, money printing, debt creation caused inflation, the vaccines and mandates, global economy derailed all for Nothing – all for a treatable flu and then a small, regional, war promoted to a small WWIII to break the world economy further – all of that could not possibly just be bad decision making.

You cannot look at the grand Pyramids at Giza and say – that just happened because tens of thousands of people randomly began pushing stone blocks around – for no reason.

My wealth has been devoured – my pension wrecked, my money devalued – this was the wealthiest in the world harvesting the savings and wealth of the workers. Their wealth doubled.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
Reply to  Aaron James

“This was a war against us, the citizens, and we lost.”
Precisely, well said!
Vae Victis! Or as the Bible so prosaically put it, there will be much “Weeping and gnashing of teeth”, this winter.

Last edited 2 years ago by CHARLES STANHOPE
Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
2 years ago

Are you saying that the problems coming this winter are a result of mishandling of Covid? How? Do you think that the situation in Ukraine has had any influence?

Rick Lawrence
Rick Lawrence
2 years ago
Reply to  Aaron James

Pray tell. Who are “they”? Are we to believe the Chinese, the Russians, the WHO, some of our own Western governments, particularly Boris, were in cahoots? A very interesting conspiracy theory, unless you can provide names and facts. Short-terminism and naïveté more likely.

Last edited 2 years ago by Rick Lawrence
harry storm
harry storm
2 years ago
Reply to  Aaron James

re: “a small regional war” promoted to WWIII.
1-Who is “promoting WWIII”?
2-Any war involving Russia and one of its recently freed neighbours can’t be considered “a small regional war.”
Hyperbole.

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

Any TV program that presents an historical event without injecting any point of view is, unavoidably, reportage in the form of a documentary. It sounds, however, like the creators of This England have tried to fairly present the facts, injected some of their own opinions, but not in a heavy-handed way, and left plenty of room for viewers to draw their own conclusions. That seems fair to me. I’m in the US and I don’t know if or when this series will be available here, but I’d like to watch it.
Society will make its mind up about how the covid pandemic was handled over several decades. The result will be a sort of averaging of books, movies, tv shows and plays. US movie makers were still making movies about Vietnam forty years after the event when many of the participants were dead and only military historians still cared.

Brett H
Brett H
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

“It sounds, however, like the creators of This England have tried to fairly present the facts, injected some of their own opinions, but not in a heavy-handed way, and left plenty of room for viewers to draw their own conclusions.”
Classic statement of modern times. You haven’t seen it but you understand certain aspects of it from reading, surely not just this one, an article.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I was going to avoid it but might give it a go after reading this, though I don’t hold a lot of hope for genuine balance.

It is interesting that the author makes explicit reference to it as an important part of the historical record, just as the makers of these propaganda pieces constantly tell us they’re only fiction and everybody knows that.

The Crown is disgracefully partisan, denigrating every Tory PM, culminating in the Thatcher episode which plays out to some appalling lefty anthem.

It is also a calculated hit job on Charles. I think the episodes relating to Dianna are still to come (I gave up taking any notice after Thatcher).

What fortuitous timing.

Gordon Arta
Gordon Arta
2 years ago

‘How bewilderingly fast everything happened’. Yes it did. And how even more ‘bewilderingly’ everybody with an opinion, and usually b all else, interpreted what was happening in totally different ways. Yet ‘tens of thousands people died who might have lived if things had been done differently.’ Really? It’s equally true that tens of thousands more might have died if things had been done differently. Pre-pandemic planning was nothing to do with Johnson; look up Jeremy Hunt and PHE. PPE procurement had to be a short -tracked shotgun approach, because global demand far outstripped supply. The simple fact is that every government, and every government critic, got it wrong because there was and is no ‘right’. Johnson’s a fashionable target, because it’s safe and easy to take pot shots at him. Much more difficult is to set out what we should be doing now to prepare for the next one. And that includes undoing the damage that the media’s sowing cynicism and distrust is now doing.

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago

1

Last edited 2 years ago by polidori redux
MI6 UK
MI6 UK
2 years ago

Kenneth Branagh should have called “This England” My Londongrad and had Russian puppets playing Larry the Cat and Dilyn The Dog and of course emulating the puppet master Carrie. Why?
 
First ask yourself why hasn’t MI5 thoroughly investigated Russian interference in British politics? Why should anyone believe Johnson put his country before himself or believe his anti-Russian rhetoric? In 2016 when campaigning for Brexit he accused the EU of provoking Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. Indeed, Johnson/Cummings delivered Brexit beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. Combine Brexit with Trump’s divisiveness and no wonder Putin concluded the USA/EU/UK/NATO club was a crippled anachronism.
 
There is some curious fact based research published on the web by Bill Fairclough (ex-spook codename JJ and author of The Burlington Files autobiographical espionage series) about Boris Johnson et al called Britain’s Dismal Dossier on Russian Political Infiltration. He puts forward hard evidence to support the facts that many past British Prime Ministers (and one US President) have been compromised by Russian intelligence usually prior to becoming political bigwigs. Dozens of other Tory Party supporters including Cummings, MPs et al with Russian leanings are named in the article. Any of them, Trump, Johnson and Cummings included, could have been unwittingly manipulated. After all, flattery is a narcissist’s best friend.
 
In fact, Kenneth Branagh could have made hay while the sun shines with this research. Google TheBurlingtonFiles and in the News Section select the article for July 21, 2021. You might also want to read Bill Fairclough’s biographical novel Beyond Enkription – it’s a must read for espionage cognoscente.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
2 years ago
Reply to  MI6 UK

So Johnson is compromised and a Russian lackey, whilst simultaneously running the government that has been most hostile to Russia and given the Ukrainians the most assistance than anybody bar the States?