Boris, Sherwood and the politics of the past

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. I’ve been relieved and grateful for the response to Sherwood on BBC1. It’s ostensibly a crime drama (because we don’t have enough of those) loosely inspired by two killings in my old mining community in north Nottinghamshire, leading to – at the time, back in 2004 – one of the largest manhunts in British history as the two suspects fled into the old Sherwood Forest. One of these outlaws was – appropriately, given the folklore of the surroundings – armed with a crossbow and a quiver full of arrows. But almost anything and everything is political, especially in these towns where the quiet hum of the past can be felt throbbing beneath the earth of the undug coal, and heard echoing on streets leading to empty fields where once the pit-heads stood.