A must-see for Westminster obsessives: Riverside Studios’ Bloody Difficult Women reviewed

Bloody Difficult Women is a documentary drama by the popular journalist Tim Walker, which looks at the similarities between Gina Miller and Theresa May. It’s well known that Walker detests our current prime minister and he refuses even to allow the Johnson name to sully his script. So although Boris was a key player in the story, he doesn’t appear on stage. Nor does May’s husband, Philip. And her influential advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, are omitted too. Their names are mentioned constantly but we never meet them as characters. Slightly frustrating.

May herself comes across as weak, secretive and limited. Plainly she was never suited to high office. The script devotes much time to a shadowy Whitehall fixer, Sir Hugh Rosen, who hires young male civil servants and tries to seduce them. One of his good-looking studs puts a call through to Gina Miller and reveals confidential information from the PM’s office. If this were true, it would be a police matter but Sir Hugh appears to be a fictional creation and the story is invented as well. An odd thing to add to a factual drama.

Miller is drawn as a surly, belligerent and enigmatic crosspatch. Very hard to warm to. Politics always attracts people who want to provoke arguments rather than to win them and she embodies that type perfectly. Her father was the attorney-general of Guyana and she seems to have lived in his shadow. After leaving Roedean, she tried to emulate his success by studying law at the Polytechnic of East London but her legal career faltered. The play suggests that her campaign against Brexit was an attempt to outdazzle Daddy and leave her mark on history. We’re offered a glimpse of her domestic life with her long-suffering husband, Alan, who bankrolled her recreational militancy.