This time we look back at how cinema and television have depicted the office of prime minister and its historical and fictional holders.
Although politics play an intrinsic part in almost every aspect of daily life in the United Kingdom, the makers of films and television programmes have often been reluctant to depict their workings on screen. The power of cinema to shape public opinion had been realised during the Great War and the authorities were keen to prevent film-makers from imposing their views on the public. Consequently, with political feelings running high between the 1926 General Strike and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the British Board of Film Censors was encouraged to reject pictures seeking to promote ideologies that might tilt the balance of power. This didn't simply mean outlawing films from Communist Russia or Nazi Germany, however. Anything that could sway voters was frowned upon, hence BBFC president Lord Tyrrell being able to boast in 1937: 'We may take pride in the fact that there is not a single film showing in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.'
The First First Lords
The concept of a chief minister in English history dates back to Anglo-Saxon times. But, while there are plenty of familiar names on the list in Plantagenet, Tudor and Stuart times, we shall restrict this Cinema Paradiso survey to those who held the post after the Whig politician Robert Walpole became the first de facto Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1721. Apart from a witty exchange with a George I who doesn't understand English in Horrible Histories (2009), Walpole hasn't had much of a screen look-in. The same goes for his successor, the Earl of Wilmington. But the third PM, Henry Pelham put in an appearance in the guise of Roger Allam in Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), when Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is brought to the court of George II (Richard Griffiths).
The earliest serving prime minister to appear on the big and small screen, however, is Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle, who was played by GH Mulcaster in Anthony Kimmins's Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948) and by Sam Spruell in Channel 4's City of Vice (2008), which charted the early days of the Bow Street Runners, who formed London's first professional police force. Although cinema has overlooked William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, his son and daughter-in-law were played by Ralph Fiennes and Keira Knightley in Saul Dibb's The Duchess (2008), which co-starred Dominic Cooper as Charles Grey, who would go on to become the architect of the Great Reform Act in 1832 and have Earl Grey tea named after him.
Similarly, while the UK's first Scottish PM, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, has managed to avoid the limelight, the magnificent Luton Hoo estate he built has featured in two James Bond films, Irvin Kershner's Never Say Never Again (1993) and Michael Apted's The World Is Not Enough (1999), as well as Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) among others.
It's two for the price of one where William Pitt the Elder and William Pitt the Younger are concerned. They appeared in the form of Alfred Burke and Jeremy Brett in the 'Bloodline' episode of the ITV series, Number 10 (1983), which also featured two more PMs, with Patrick Newell playing Lord North and David Ryall essaying Charles James Fox. This excellent seven-parter depicted numerous incumbents, with the others being the Duke of Wellington (Bernard Achard), Sir Robert Peel (Peter Gale), the Earl of Derby (Kevin Brennan), Benjamin Disraeli (Richard Pasco), William Gladstone (Denis Quilley), Lord Salisbury (John Forbes-Robertson), Lord Rosebery (Jeremy Sinden), Herbert Asquith (David Langton), David Lloyd George (John Stride), Ramsay MacDonald (Ian Richardson) and Winston Churchill (Terence Harvey).
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we should return to Lord North, who will forever be known as the prime minister who lost the American colonies. Alongside Emil Hoch's performance in DW Griffith's silent epic, America (1924), North has also been portrayed by Terry Jones in the 1974 Monty Python's Flying Circus episode, 'The Golden Age of Ballooning', and by Nicholas Barber in the 2006 miniseries The Revolution. He was also memorably played by Felix Aylmer in Carol Reed's wartime flag-waver, The Young Mr Pitt (1942), in which Robert Donat played Pitt the Elder and Younger, while Robert Morley, Henry Hewitt and Alfred Sangster took on the roles of Charles James Fox and the short-serving PMs, Lord Addington and Lord Grenville.
Pitt (Paul Rogers/Julian Wadham/Benedict Cumberbatch) and Fox (Peter Bull/Jim Carter/Michael Gambon) crossed swords again in Curtis Bernhardt's Beau Brummell (1954), Nicholas Hytner's The Madness of King George (1994) and Michael Apted's Amazing Grace (2006), while Pitt also cropped up as Simon Osbourne alongside Pitt the Even Younger (Dominic Martelli) in Blackadder the Third (1987), which also saw Stephen Fry cameo as a pre-prime ministerial Duke of Wellington, whose victory at Waterloo failed to quell the domestic turbulence that had been moiling throughout the Napoleonic Wars. This reached its tragic peak in the 1819 Manchester massacre depicted in Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018), which sees Robert Wilfort play Prime Minister Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who entrusted Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth (Karl Johnson) with the powers to crush the seditious radicalism that was blamed for undermining authority.
As played by Andre Van Gyseghem, Liverpool also figured in the model BBC series, Prince Regent (1979), which also featured Pitt the Younger (David Collings), Addington (David Chater), Grenville (David Neal), Fox (Keith Barron) and two PMs who made history for very different reasons. Spencer Perceval (John Gabriel) remains the only prime minister to have been assassinated, after being shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by disgruntled merchant John Bellingham on 11 May 1812. Coming to power a decade later, George Canning (Murray Head), lasted just 119 days in office and, in so doing, became the second shortest-serving of all British prime ministers.
The First Victorians
The distinction of serving the shortest term falls to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, whose second administration lasted for three weeks at the end of 1834, while he held the fort while waiting for fellow Conservative Sir Robert Peel to take office. Although he passed the important 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act, Wellington's fame rests primarily on his soldiering and Christopher Plummer played him as a man of action in taking on Rod Steiger's Napoleon Bonaparte in Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo (1970). Inheriting it from David Troughton, Hugh Fraser took the role alongside Sean Bean in several episodes of ITV's Sharpe franchise (1993-2008), while Jeremy Young donned the braided uniform in Ben Bolt's lavish adaptation of Stendhal's Scarlet and Black (1993), which starred Ewan McGregor, Alice Krige and Rachel Weisz.
The political phase of Wellington's career was presented by George Arliss in Victor Saville's The Iron Duke, C. Aubrey Smith in Alfred Werker's The House of Rothschild (both 1934) and Laurence Olivier in Robert Bolt's Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), which also featured John Mills as George Canning and Jon Finch as William Lamb, who would enter No.10 under the title 2nd Viscount Melbourne. The latter would be played by HB Warner alongside Anna Neagle in Herbert Wilcox's Victoria the Great (1937), which also features Felix Aylmer as Lord Palmerston, Charles Carson as Sir Robert Peel. Arthur Young as William Gladstone, and Derrick De Marney and Hugh Miller as the younger and older versions of Benjamin Disraeli. De Marney would return with Aylmer and Carson in Sixty Glorious Years (1938), which saw C. Aubrey Smith play the Duke of Wellington alongside such other Victorian PMs as Lord Derby (Frank Cellier), Lord John Russell (Lewis Casson), Gladstone (Malcolm Keen), Lord Salisbury (Harvey Braban) and his nephew, Arthur Balfour (Wyndham Goldie).
Devised for ITV by Daisy Goodwin and featuring Jenna Coleman in the title role, Victoria (2016-) has so far had its share of Downing Street denizens, with Rufus Sewell as Melbourne, Peter Bowles as Wellington, Nigel Lindsay as Peel, John Sessions as Russell and Lawrence Fox as Palmerston.
Another ITV historical with a glut of PMs was Claude Whatham's Disraeli (1975), which has Ian McShane in the title role being joined by Evan Ross as Russell, John Carlisle as Gladstone, David Wood as Derby, John Gregg as Salisbury and Antony Brown as Peel, who was not only the first sitting prime minister to have his photograph taken, but he also featured on the iconic cover of the 1967 Beatles album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Completing this phase of Victoria's reign, the avuncular Melbourne also been played by Paul Bettany in Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria (2009), while gunboat diplomatist Palmerston was essayed once again by Felix Aylmer opposite Anna Neagle in Herbert Wilcox's biopic, The Lady With a Lamp (1951), Gilbert Emery in William Dieterle's A Dispatch From Reuter's (1940) and James Fox in Ole Bornedal's 1864 (2014), which chronicled the events leading up to the Prussian invasion of Denmark that initiated the Unification of Germany. Notably, Arthur Young also reunited with Neagle as Gladstone in the Florence Nightingale biopic.
Ben and Bill
The first prime minister to serve three terms, Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby was played by Owen Nares in Thorold Dickinson's wartime flagwaver, The Prime Minister (1941), which starred John Gielgud as Disraeli, Nicholas Hannen as Peel, Frederick Leister as Melbourne, Stephen Murray as Gladstone and Leslie Perrins as Salisbury. However, the role of the novel-writing Jewish MP for Buckinghamshire will always be synonymous with George Arliss, who followed a 1921 silent performance for director Henry Kolker by becoming the first Brit to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in Alfred E. Green's Disraeli (1929), an adaptation of a Louis N. Parker play that managed not to mention any of the Tory's political rivals. He would later be played by Alec Guinness in Jean Negulesco's underappreciated charmer, The Mudlark (1950), and Antony Sher in John Madden's Mrs Brown (1997), with Queen Victoria in the latter pair being respectively portrayed by Irene Dunne and Judi Dench. Moreover, Disraeli even features in a cutaway gag in the 'One If By Clam, Two If By Sea' (2001) episode of Family Guy, in which he chides Peter Griffin for not knowing who he is.
It would be nice to think that Hilda Brabban had Gladstone and Disraeli in mind when she named her Flower Pot Men for the BBC's Watch With Mother series in 1952. The duo were voiced by John Thomson when Cosgrove Hall rebooted them for digitally animated collections like Bill and Ben: Here Comes the Sun (2008). But the Liverpool-born MP for Midlothian (for three of his record four spells at No.10) lacked the flamboyancy of his great rival and he has been depicted as a largely dour individual by Montagu Love in John M. Stahl's Parnell (1937), Ralph Richardson in Basil Dearden's Khartoum (1966) and Willoughby Gray in Richard Attenborough's Young Winston (1972), which also featured Simon Ward as Churchill, Laurence Naismsith as Salisbury, William Dexter as Balfour and Anthony Hopkins as Lloyd George.
That said, Gladstone was very much played as the Grand Old Man by Roland Culver in The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (1981), the imposing BBC series that was noted for its Ennio Morricone theme and the performance of Philip Madoc as the Welsh Wizard (who remains the last Liberal prime minister), alongside David Markham's Asquith, William Hootkins's Churchill, Fulton Mackay's Andrew Bonar Law and Paul Curran's Stanley Baldwin. Coming just three years after the advent of projected moving images, Gladstone's funeral in 1898 was the first prime ministerial ceremonial to be captured by the newsreel cameras.
Despite holding the premiership on three separate occasions, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury has never been presented on screen as a man of substance. This may be because he found himself (in the form of John Gielgud and David Swift) presiding over the notorious Whitechapel slayings that were depicted in Bob Clark's Murder By Decree (1979) and David Wickes's Jack the Ripper (1988) or seeming rather beardy and buffoonish (in the guise of David Ryall and Michael Gambon) in Frank Coraci's Around the World in 80 Days (2004) and Stephen Frears's Victoria & Abdul (2017).
Sandwiched between Gladstone and Salisbury for just over a year in office, Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery is the first PM of the motion picture era, with Birt Acres capturing his horse, Sir Visto, triumphing at Epsom in The Derby (1895), while he was the star of the 1902 silent short, Lord Rosebery Addressing an Open Air Meeting. As Salisbury's nephew, Arthur Balfour struggled to avoid accusations of nepotism (hence the phrase, 'Bob's Your Uncle') and his cause was not helped by the unpopularity of the Boer War. However, he appears to have been the first prime minister to appear on film in live-action and cartoon form in the shorts, Mr Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain at Blenheim (1901) and Animated Portraits of AJ Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain (1903).
The Last of the Liberals
Scot Henry Campbell-Bannerman was the first First Lord of the Treasury to be officially called 'the Prime Minister' in 1905 and he remains the only PM to die at 10 Downing Street (albeit 19 days after he left office in 1908). He had been succeeded by Herbert Asquith, who is played with typical dignity by Tim Piggot-Smith in Justin Hardy's 37 Days (2014), a suitably sombre account of the efforts of the Liberal foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey (Ian McDiarmid), to prevent the outbreak of war in 1914. Mark Lewis Jones and Nicholas Asbury respectively play Lloyd George and Churchill in this BBC three-parter, while Grey was also portrayed by Ralph Richardson in Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), although there was no room in this musical reverie on the Great War for the two Liberal prime ministers who guided the country to eventual victory. They did appear, however, in Steven Poliakoff's The Lost Prince (2003), with Frank Finlay as Asquith and Ron Cook as Lloyd George.
Asquith may not have been a screen regular, but his son became one of the finest British film-makers of the inter-war years, while his great-granddaughter became an Oscar-nominated actress. They are, of course, Anthony Asquith and Helena Bonham Carter, who are both well represented on the Cinema Paradiso roster, as a quick search will testify. And, just for good measure, Anna Chancellor is Asquith's great-great-granddaughter on her mother's side.
The MP for Caernarvon Boroughs was the first prime minister to have been accorded a feature-length biopic. Norman Page took the title role in Maurice Elvey's The Life Story of David Lloyd George. But, while it was made to mark the coming of peace in 1918, it was suppressed after negative publicity in the periodical John Bull persuaded the PM to buy the negative and sole print for £20,000. The film was presumed lost before being rediscovered in the home of Lloyd George's grandson and it finally received its premiere in 1994.
Despite returning to the back benches, Lloyd George remained a potent force in the Commons. He and Churchill were played by Ian Bannen and Julian Fellowes in Jonathan Lewis's Irish independence saga, The Treaty (1991), while the same duo were essayed by Bernard Lloyd and Michael Cochrane in Christopher Menaul's A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia (1992) and by Windsor Davies and Hugh Simon in Robert Knights's Mosley (1998), a tele-study of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, that also featured Ralph Riach as Ramsay MacDonald and Roger Bierley as Neville Chamberlain. Most recently, Lloyd George was portrayed by Adrian Schiller in Sarah Gavron's Suffragette (2015), which also included a cameo by Ray Burnet as Churchill.
One Crisis After Another
After a prolonged period of Liberal rule, the Tories returned to Downing Street with Scot Andrew Bonar Law at the helm. Forced to quit through ill health, he has rarely merited mention in films about the period, although his name has passed into comedy folkore thanks to the legal firm run by the Polari-speaking Julian and Sandy in the BBC radio show, Round the Horne (1965-68), which was celebrated in Andy De Emmanoy's Fantabulosa!: The Kenneth Williams Story (2006), which featured Michael Sheen as Kenneth Williams, Guy Henry as Hugh Paddick and Stephen Critchlow as Kenneth Horne.
The decade also saw Labour come to power for the first time, with another Scot, Ramsay MacDonald, becoming the first socialist prime minister. The inspiration for the Hamer Shawcross character played by Michael Redgrave in Roy Boulting's 1947 adaptation of Howard Spring's novel, Fame is the Spur, MacDonald has also become a comic icon, thanks to the sketch in the 1970 'How Not to Be Seen' episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which follows archive footage of the PM entering No.10 by having Michael Palin (as MacDonald) perform a striptease to reveal him wearing stockings and suspenders.
Mentioned in passing, along with Baldwin and Chamberlain in Noël Coward and David Lean's superb snapshot of a nation, This Happy Breed (1944), MacDonald was also played by Terrence Hardiman in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) and by Robert James in Ferdinand Fairfax's BBC mini-series, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981), which also featured Robert Hardy in the title role, Peter Barkworth as Baldwin, Eric Porter as Chamberlain, Norman Jones as Clement Attlee, Tony Mathews as Anthony Eden and Ian Collier as Harold Macmillan. MacDonald and Baldwin were the first prime ministers to be heard on the radio and in talking pictures, as they dealt with such crises as the General Strike of 1926 and the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Baldwin also made history by becoming the only PM to serve three monarchs, as he found himself handling the Abdication Crisis that saw George VI ascend the throne renounced by his brother, Edward VIII, following the death of their father, George V. These events have frequently been recreated on screen, with Baldwin being portrayed by David Waller in Waris Hussein's Edward & Mrs Simpson (1978) and Charles Jarrott's The Woman He Loved (1988), Richard Johnson in David Moore's Wallis & Edward (2005), Anthony Andrews in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech (2010) and Geoffrey Palmer in Madonna's W.E. (2011). In other overviews of the period, Brian Hayes impersonated Baldwin in Days of Hope (1975), which can be found on Ken Loach at the BBC (2011), and also featured John Young as MacDonald and Leo Britt as Churchill. The latter was played by the Emmy-winning Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002), which co-starred Derek Jacobi as Baldwin, who was also played by Patrick Blackwell in an episode of David Croft and Jimmy Perry's sitcom, You Rang, M'Lord? (1988-93).
Blink and you'll miss EG Miller playing Neville Chamberlain in Orson Welles's directorial debut, Citizen Kane (1941). The man castigated for appeasing Adolf Hitler had died shortly after leaving office in May 1940 and he remains a divisive figure, with his famous speech at Heston airfield being mocked by John Cleese in a sketch inserted into True Stories: Peace In Our Time, a 1988 documentary marking the 50th anniversary of the Munich Agreement. Among the others to have played Chamberlain are Edward Jewesbury in Alan Gibson's Churchill and the Generals (1979), Jack Shepherd in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Into the Storm (2009) and Ronald Pickup in Joe Wright's Darkest Hour (2017), in which Churchill is respectively played by Richard Burton, Timothy West, the Emmy-winning Brendan Gleason and Gary Oldman.
Winston
The latter won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in a biopic that couldn't always be relied upon for its historical accuracy. However, Oldman captured the popular bulldog image of Winston Spencer Churchill, who is easily the most enacted British prime minister (as we have seen from the numerous earlier mentions). He was first played by CM Hallard in the Silver Jubilee anthology, Royal Cavalcade (1935). Otto Wernicke took the role in Hans Steinhoff's Nazi propaganda piece, Ohm Kruger (1941), while Churchill was played in four Soviet flag-wavers by Viktor Stanitsyn between 1949-52. Like the majority of films and TV shows about Churchill, these examined his contribution to the war effort. However, other phases of his long career were referenced in Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert (2015) and Charles Sturridge Churchill's Secret (2016), in which he was respectively played by Christopher Fulford and Michael Gambon.
He was seen in more familiar 'fight them on the beaches' mode when being portrayed on the big screen by Patrick Wymark in Michael Anderson's Operation Crossbow (1965), Orson Welles in Stipe Delic's The Fifth Offensive (1973), Leigh Dilley in John Sturges's The Eagle Has Landed (1976), John Evans in Sergio Martino's Casablanca Express (1989), Christian Slater in Peter Richardson's Churchill: The Hollywood Years (2004), David Ryall in John Henderson's Two Men Went to War (2002), Rod Taylor in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Bastards (2009) and Brian Cox in Jonathan Teplitzky's Churchill (2017). Churchill was also on 'finest hour' form in being depicted on television by Howard Lang in The Winds of War (1983), Robert Hardy in War and Remembrance (1988) and Bomber Harris (1989), Timothy West in Hiroshima (1995), David Ryall in Bertie and Elizabeth (2002), Colm Gormley in Titanic (2012) and Ian Beyts in The World Wars (2014).
Over the years, Churchill has also put in appearances in a number of unexpected places, including 'Allo 'Allo! (John James Evans, 1991), Agatha Christie's Marple: The Sittaford Mystery (Robert Hardy, 2006), Doctor Who (Ian McNeice, 2010-11), Peaky Blinders (Andy Nyman, 2013 & Richard McCabe, 2014) and Up the Women (Harry Peacock, 2015). In the right hands, however, he can be a scene-stealing presence, as John Lithgow demonstrated in winning a Primetime Emmy for his performance opposite Claire Foy in The Crown (2016), which has also found room for such other PMs as Clement Attlee (Simon Chandler), Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam), Harold Macmillan (Anton Lesser), Alec Douglas-Home (David Annen) and Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins).
Shuffling the Pack
Despite Labour securing a landslide victory in the khaki election of 1945, Clement Attlee has never been seen as box-office material. Indeed, while David Schofield took the role in Darkest Hour, he has mostly been seen on the small screen in the form of Patrick Troughton in Edward & Mrs. Simpson, Patrick Stewart The Gathering Storm (1974), Alan David in Goodnight Sweetheart (1999) and Bill Paterson in Into the Storm. However, he does have the distinction of being the only PM to have been played by one of his own descendants, as Richard Attlee was cast as his grandfather in Alex Holmes's 2004 docudrama, Dunkirk, which also featured Simon Russell Beale as Churchill.
When he stood down as the Tory leader in 1955, Anthony Eden took up the reins. Despite being a competent Foreign Secretary during the war (he is played by Samuel West in Darkest Hour and Anthony Calf in Upstairs Downstairs, 2010), Eden was brought down by the diplomatic disaster dramatised by the BBC in Suez 1956, a 1979 Ian Curtis drama that cast Michael Gough as Eden and Richard Vernon as his successor, Harold Macmillan. But, while Supermac reassured the public that they had 'never had it so good', he has tended to catch the imagination of satirists and dramatists more often than screenwriters. By contrast, successor Sir Alec Douglas-Home is almost a phantom presence on screen, even though his playwright brother, William Douglas-Home, scored a hit with The Chiltern Hundreds, which was filmed by John Paddy Carstairs in 1949, the same year that Derek N. Twist's All Over Town featured Sarah Churchill, the ex-PM's daughter, who notably co-starred with Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen's Royal Wedding (1951).
As the compilation It's Mike Yarwood (1984) demonstrates, arch rivals Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were easy prey for impressionists, with ace mimic John Sessions playing Wilson in Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham (2010) and Heath in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady (2011). Stephen Moore also cameo'd as Wilson in Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked (2009), while small-screen Harolds have included Kenneth Cranham in The Lavender List, Robert Pugh in Longford (both 2006) and Philip Jackson in the 2009 Channel 4 series, The Queen, which also included the Tory triumvirate of Eden (Robert Bathurst), Heath (Lloyd Maguire) and Margaret Thatcher (Lesley Manville).
Although he got to share a retirement home with predecessors Wilson, Macmillan and Douglas-Home in the first series of Spitting Image (1984-96), Labour leader James Callaghan has been largely sidelined by film-makers. Steve Nallon famously voiced Mrs Thatcher for ITV's satirical puppet show, as well as appearing on KYTV (1989-93). Among the others to poke fun are Janet Brown in John Glen's 007 outing, For Your Eyes Only (1981), and Angela Thorne in Anyone for Denis? (1982). More serious portrayals have come from Sylvia Syms in Thatcher: The Final Days (1991), Patricia Hodge in The Falklands Play (2002), Louise Gould in The Alan Clark Diaries (2004) and Andrea Riseborough in The Long Walk to Finchley (2008), which also featured Samuel West as Ted Heath. He was played by Nigel Le Vaillant, while Michael Maloney was cast as John Major in James Kent's Margaret (2009), which starred Lindsay Duncan. But the Oscar-winning turn by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady stands head and shoulders above all others.
The latter saw Robin Kermode play John Major without the grey skin familiar to viewers of Spitting Image, who also took pops at Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Their jockeying for the leadership of the Labour Party was cannily dramatised by Peter Morgan in Stephen Frears's The Deal (2003), which boasted fine performances by Michael Sheen and David Morrissey. Sheen would play Blair again for Morgan and Frears in The Queen (2006) and for Morgan and Richard Loncraine in The Special Relationship (2010). James Larkin took over for Peter Kosminsky's David Kelly biopic, The Government Inspector (2005), before Damian Lewis and Robert Lindsay respectively stepped up to the plate in Confessions of a Diary Secretary and The Trial of Tony Blair (both 2007), with the former also featuring Tony Slattery as Brown, who was played in the latter by Peter Mullan, alongside Alexander Armstrong as David Cameron.
Welshman Ioan Gruffudd played Blair in Oliver Stone's W, (2007), while Frenchman Mathieu Amalric based PM Dominic Greene on the former prime minister in Marc Forster's Bond movie, Quantum of Solace (2008). Brown figured in Alex Holmes's Coalition (2016), which saw Cameron portrayed by Mark Dexter, who also provided the PM's voice in Toby Haynes's Brexit (2019). Jonny Sweet had taken the role in John Dower's When Boris Met Dave (2009), which traced Cameron's friendship with Boris Johnson (Christian Brassington) back to their Oxford days. Theresa May resided among the Dreaming Spires a good decade before the Old Etonian duo, but it remains to be seen how much longer the PM played by Gillian Beavan in The Windsors (2016-) will remain the occupant of No.10 Downing Street.
Interested in more historical biopics and figures from politics? Check out our Political Dramas section and find even more suggestions for your next film night.
