This England

The Bank has identified a risk from recent dysfunction in gilt markets, so the Bank will temporarily carry out purchases of long-dated UK government bonds from ...

The Government will continue to work closely with the Bank in support of its financial stability and inflation objectives. To enable the Bank to conduct this financial stability intervention, this operation has been fully indemnified by HM Treasury. These purchases will be strictly time limited, and completed in the next two weeks.

Though some episodes capture the human tragedy at the heart of the Covid pandemic, Sky's Boris-led lockdown drama is let down by some truly dross ...

Granted, it's nigh on impossible to exactly replicate his mess of straw-coloured hair or his droopy jowls, but this is something else: in certain lighting conditions, he better resembles Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise. It's always in the most emphatic register possible, delivered to the back rafters like the perennial theatre man he really is. [Boris Johnson](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/boris-johnson-resignation), the bumbling, foolish Boris we all came to know, being a character he played, at times, very well. [Christopher Nolan](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/oppenheimer-film-christopher-nolan)'s Dunkirk. For all of the 61-year-old's eminent talents, Branagh's Boris looks nothing like the real deal, underscored by the series' gambit for realism: we don't actually see the Boris impersonation for a good five or ten minutes, the earliest days of his Brexit ascent recounted by way of archival montage. Though he might not always get it bang on, Branagh is difficult not to admire because he really goes for it in every performance.

This England, the Sky Atlantic series which sees Kenneth Branagh portray former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has arrived to mixed reviews.

"Billed as 'a fiction based on real events', it combines an account of the government's reactive, insufficient and often careless handling of the crisis with a strange, intriguing and speculative character study of Johnson." "Branagh does a great job of impersonating Johnson's gait, mannerisms and mien (although he looks older around the eyes than the ex-PM), without really telling us much that's new about the man. "Those who are drawn by the Sky mini-series' focus on the goings-on at Number 10 will find a truncated story." "It used to be said that journalism provides the first draft of history," wrote Neil Armstrong. "The problem is that other dramas have told this story far better - think of Jack Thorne's terrific Help, starring Jodie Comer as a carer. Carol Midgley, writing in the Times however, opined the show was "brilliantly realistic", offering four stars.

Kenneth Branagh's impression of the former coward-in-chief is spot on, but Michael Winterbottom's Covid drama is leaden, artless and a disservice to all ...

To see such recent, terrible times again is so gruelling that, although I stand by my criticisms and have tried to control for the effect, it makes us resistant to engaging with it again. In time, hopefully, we will be able to observe the events from different perspectives, combine and recombine them as stories that aid understanding and dissipate our horrors, allow for questions and posit some answers. The entire project now has the air of only telling half the story and not telling the truth. Care home supervisors and members of the public whose sickening, ventilation and deaths we see are merely sketched in. It is hampered from the off by feeling both too soon and wildly out of date. That awful moist, blustering sound – a semi-croak, squeezed out of a tense throat by a man who can never relax because he has no foundations to rely on – is perfect.

As Boris Johnson (Kenneth Branagh) becomes Britain's Prime Minister in 2019, it seems all his dreams have come true. Then the Covid-19 outbreak changes his ...

It’s a portrait of a man who lives to be loved, learning what it means to actually be the most important man in the country. Even beneath the make-up, he conveys the cracks appearing in Johnson’s confidence well — a man who can’t cope with giving people bad news, whether it’s the nation or his own family. Alongside that is the juicy semi-fictional stuff, a look behind the scenes at the government’s calamitous reaction to the biggest health crisis in a century.

I saw abject failure, arbitrary death and utter helplessness. This is quite a different story, says former ambulance driver and academic Rod Dacombe.

However, the real problem is that the reality of the pandemic response is left in the wings. For many frontline workers, the experience of the last couple of years has proven too exhausting, too painful, to continue. The problem here is once again born out of the distinction between knowledge and remembrance. But for those with direct, personal knowledge of the pandemic, to memorialise Covid-19 appropriately would mean to confront abject failure, arbitrary death and utter helplessness. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? For many of us there is a disconnection between the ways in which the country at large is deciding to remember the pandemic and what it means to us. However, the longer term remembrance of that pandemic has been quite different. The way we shape our memory of the pandemic matters. I’m not saying that Winterbottom is disqualified from writing about these things because he doesn’t know what it feels like to break someone’s ribs during chest compressions, or hasn’t seen the expression on the faces of family members pleading for help when none is possible. The overall impression it gives is of a nation bravely coming together to defeat the virus, with any errors in policy (the series includes a focus on PPE procurement and delays to lockdown) unfortunate but understandable, given the circumstances. Among those voices was the writer Katherine Anne Porter, who nearly died during the pandemic and remained hospitalised for months. During the pandemic I deliberately killed six people.

Critics have praised Kenneth Branagh's portrayal of Boris Johnson but question whether new TV series is premature.

[Digital Spy](https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a41313699/ophelia-lovibond-carrie-johnson-boris-england/). “It’s like trying to write a diary entry a week later – you can’t remember the specifics,” she told [The Times](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/this-england-review-kenneth-branagh-boris-johnson-jglq3b7jt)’ Carol Midgley also lauded Branagh’s “barrelling, air-punching, at times uncanny” impression of the then PM. But “on these terms”, said the [The New Statesman](https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv/2022/09/michael-winterbottom-this-england-review-drama-odd-watch) agreed that Branagh perfectly mimics the former Tory leader’s “striding stoop and gibbon arm-swing”. It would be “arguably more impactful and artful”, Hibbs argued. “The rendering of the miserable past two years as a form of entertainment was an inexplicable decision,” he wrote, “and the botched execution is simply a by-product of that central commissioning error.” [BBC’s](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220927-this-england-review-boris-johnson-drama-is-too-soon) Neil Armstrong, “This England is a failure”. [The Telegraph](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/england-review-branagh-fails-get-boriss-skin-drama-dud/), the result of Branagh’s heavy prosthetic make-up “doesn’t look like Johnson” but rather “weird and creepy”, though he “does a half-decent job on the voice”. And Andrew Buchan’s voice as [Matt Hancock](https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/law/953521/what-next-after-homes-raided-search-for-matt-hancock-affair-leaker) “is so convincing it’s as though he’s in the room (lock up your wives!)”. “Special mentions” must go to Ophelia Lovibond as [Carrie Symonds](https://www.theweek.co.uk/98942/who-is-carrie-symonds-boris-johnson-wife) (later Johnson), Midgley added, and to Simon Paisley Day as [Dominic Cummings](https://www.theweek.co.uk/brexit/103073/who-is-dominic-cummings). [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/28/tv-tonight-kenneth-branagh-as-boris-johnson-is-television-at-its-most-triggering).

No Partygate, no dodgy party donors and no sex pests. If only the Covid wards had been as well sanitised as Michael Winterbottom's dramatisation of Boris ...

For many weeks there were no clear answers to any of the questions; but avoidable mistakes were made, and Johnson made them. It’s not exactly a campaign video for his rumoured attempt to make a comeback, but it is an unexpectedly balanced portrait. This England, it turns out, is a sort of dramatic alibi for Johnson’s manifest failings during the first, bewildering wave of Covid. Sir Patrick is blamed for persevering with the “herd immunity” approach, tolerating higher casualties, while the Chris Whitty character is treated much more neutrally. As the brief joy of “getting Brexit done” (albeit fraudulently) passes, Johnson is a man who gradually falls apart under the pressure of events and the instabilities in the court of infernal personalities he presided over in No 10. So as we see him bumble around Downing Street doing his thumbs-up boosterish schtick – a man clearly out of his depth but not actively malevolent – we are almost invited to feel sorry for the then prime minister. He doesn’t seem all bad – just not up to the job. Less happily, the drama pre-empts the public inquiry into the UK’s Covid response by dumping blame for its early failures onto Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, and, to a much lesser degree, on Cummings and on Johnson himself. (Hancock’s love affair is ignored, by the way, which is probably just as well.) [Partygate](/topic/partygate)” scandal has been omitted. In the case of This England, they’ve opted for the impersonations, with some uncanny likenesses. More, still, that considerable time and energy has been spent on turning Branagh into a passable physical replica of Johnson.

Kenneth Branagh gives a distracting, prosthesis-heavy portrayal of Boris Johnson in this fatally misjudged true life drama.

The rendering of the miserable past two years as a form of entertainment was an inexplicable decision, and the botched execution is simply a by-product of that central commissioning error. The production is handsomely mounted, and the attention to detail – aided by consultancy from The Sunday Times’ Tim Shipman – is superb. Figures such as Chris Whitty (Jimmy Livingstone), Neil Ferguson (Anthony Howell), Sarah Gilbert (Zoe Aldrich) and Jonathan Van-Tam (Tom Nguyen) appear, along with dozens more of the real-life protagonists. All sequences with Johnson (Branagh is decked out in prosthetics so terrifying that they could ward off trick or treaters) have the tenor of satire, just without the jokes. He paces and preens (not helped by a script that gives him lines like, “power is an aphrodisiac and absolute power is absolutely aphrodisiacal”) and the audience is constantly reminded that this is supposed to be BORIS JOHNSON. Branagh is a showy actor at the best of times, and in this he draws the eye away from much subtler performances: Ophelia Lovibond as Carrie Symonds, for example, or Andrew Buchan as health secretary Matt Hancock. But for all that the show relishes showing Johnson romping around Chevening reciting Shakespeare, the series is, at its core, a granular deconstruction of the behind-the-scenes decisions. For all that This England (Sky Atlantic) sets out to be a panoptic view of the early months of the crisis, there’s a blonde tousled elephant in the room. [Kenneth Branagh](/topic/kenneth-branagh) as [Boris Johnson](/topic/boris-johnson)!!! Chances are you do, firstly because it happened very recently (and is ongoing, according to the opinion of some scientists) and secondly because it was very, very horrible. With that in mind, here comes the show that precisely nobody was asking for: The collective trauma of the event was unprecedented since the Second World War.

Kenneth Branagh plays former British prime minister Boris Johnson in Michael Winterbottom's new six-part TV drama This England.

It is a great pleasure to speak at tonight's annual dinner of the Institute of Directors in Northern Ireland. I owe thanks to Gordon Milligan and his IoD ...

Taken in conjunction with the macroeconomic impact of ensuing market developments, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the fiscal easing announced last week will prompt a significant and necessary monetary policy response in November. That assessment will need to embody recent evidence of weakness in economic activity, as well as the impact of the Government’s Energy Price Guarantee on headline inflation and wage and price setting behaviour. I do not represent the views of the MPC as a whole. The relevance of recent market developments to our monetary policy decisions stems from how those developments influence our efforts to come to an appropriate balance between demand and supply. For a small, open market economy like the UK, changes in asset prices have an important impact on macro developments though a variety of channels: via the cost of financing; via the cost of imports; and via their impact on both aggregate demand and aggregate supply. With that in mind, let me now turn to the responsibilities of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), of which I am a member. On the MPC, we are certainly not indifferent to the re-pricing of financial assets we have seen over the past few days. By acting in the gilt market to facilitate the necessary reduction of leverage – or at least creating an environment where that reduction can take place – the Bank is preventing a self-sustaining vicious spiral of collateral calls, forced sales and disappearing liquidity from emerging in a core segment of the financial markets. The intervention announced yesterday by the Bank is intended to facilitate an orderly adjustment in the positions and structures that were threatening to generate dysfunction in that market segment. I originally hoped to spend the bulk of my time exploring the macroeconomic motivations underlying MPC decisions in the past few months. The work of the Agencies provides a bridge between the Bank and the households, businesses and communities it serves. I would also like to thank my colleagues Frances Hill and Gillian Anderson from the Bank of England’s Belfast Agency for putting together such a great agenda for my Northern Ireland visit.

This England kicked off on Wednesday evening, and it seems that viewers have been left pretty conflicted over what to make of the political drama.

The drama takes us inside the halls of power as Johnson grapples with Covid-19, Brexit, and a controversial personal and political life. Another wrote: "Thought the first ep of #ThisEngland was really good. The equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion. Taking to Twitter after sitting down to watch the series, one viewer said: "This England is proving really upsetting, watching the pandemic again is bringing back awful memories." MORE: However, it wasn't all bad news as plenty of other viewers were full of praise for the series, especially Kenneth's performance.