Shocking: Channel 4’s Partygate reviewed

If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one. You could also argue that, in contrast to most of its characters, it didn’t really bring much to the party. And yet, in a rare challenge to the law of diminishing returns, the more it pounded away with its sledgehammer, the more effective it became.

Despite the programme’s commitment to a thoroughly researched veracity that extended to the use of on-screen footnotes, the framework for the pounding was supplied by two fictional characters. Grace Greenwood (Georgie Henley) was a shining-eyed true Johnson believer from Darlington, who couldn’t believe her luck at ending up with the cool kids in No. 10. Providing the worldliness was the terrifyingly poised Annabel D’acre (Ophelia Lovibond), who might as well have been wearing a tiara with the word ‘Entitled’ inscribed in diamonds.

Having got over her puzzlement as to where Darlington was, Annabel explained to Grace (and to us) how the Downing Street staff knew each other – mainly from Oxford. She also enlisted Grace’s help in buying extra booze for a party held in May 2020 when, as the programme made characteristically clear: a) Britain had recently announced the highest Covid death rates in the world; b) most people were assiduously following the lockdown guidelines; c) the police were breaking up the gatherings of any who weren’t; and d) one couple had just made themselves hazmat suits so as to hold their new granddaughter.

And this, on the whole, was how this one-off drama proceeded from then on. Scrupulously annotated scenes of drunken Westminster poshos dancing together were juxtaposed with news footage of the most extreme examples of the impact of Covid rules on ordinary folk.