It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt like the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy and yet the curtain just won’t fall. This week saw one of those rare electric nights of drama when a prime minister looks set to be toppled. At least, they used to be rare. In the first 25 years of my life I had only three prime ministers. The past chaotic decade looks to be about to produce its fourth. The axe hovered in the air for Johnson, but was prevented from falling – at least at the time of writing – by Nadhim Zahawi, the MP for Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, denying us the climax. The question many have is – why? What is the great mission the Prime Minister is defying convention and warping political reality in order to deliver?
One mission, we are told, is ‘levelling up’, and I like to think I delivered my own little bit of that in the past couple of weeks by penning a television drama set in the Red Wall village where I grew up.
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