When I asked the BBC’s former chief political correspondent John Sergeant for advice about my play Dead Sheep in 2014 he told me colourfully but gently that I was wasting my time. John, a former colleague, had a point. Who’d be interested in a play about Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher, especially as Thatcher’s story had already been explored in dramas like The Iron Lady, The Long Walk to Finchley and The Audience?
But I felt those productions had missed a trick, for understandable dramatic reasons, in treating Howe as a jealous, pompous, bit-part player. I had always thought there was much more to him. His relationship with Thatcher was also the most effective way, I believed, to examine the flaws and qualities of the woman who moulded modern Britain.
Howe was Thatcher’s chancellor and foreign secretary. People thought he was a comically bad public speaker, hence the play’s title: “Being attacked by Geoffrey Howe,” said Labour’s Denis Healey, “is like being savaged by a dead sheep.” But when Howe and Thatcher fell out over Europe, he made one of the greatest political speeches of all time. It destroyed her.
He was supported by his wife, Elspeth, a formidable woman who loathed Thatcher. And vice versa: an observer called them “wasps in a jam jar”.
That’s a great recipe for drama. And comedy. The mouse that roared. A decent man caught between two powerful women. An agonising conflict of personal and professional loyalties.
So I ignored John. If I don’t write it, I thought, one day someone else will.
There was another wind at my back. The more I researched, the more struck I became by the parallels. In the 1980s, when the play is set, the Tories were divided over Europe. In April 2015, when Dead Sheep premiered at London’s Park theatre, the song remained the same. Then as now, it was about sovereignty, identity and economics.
That gave me opportunities. Hence a scene in which a louche, Eurosceptic Alan Clark berates Geoffrey over his support for the EU. Geoffrey warns Alan the Tory party could split in two over the issue. “What?” sneers Clark. “A breakaway party for Eurosceptics? Don’t be ridiculous.” Not a screamer on the page perhaps but on stage it got laughs every night.
We were offered a three-month national tour after the run at the Park and, after a succession of failures (I’ve had more TV ideas turned down than Alan Partridge) I felt lucky for once. Then, in June this year, the cards fell totally in the play’s favour.
As a remainer I was shocked and upset when Britain voted for Brexit. But then, being a selfish, opportunistic bastard, it dawned on me that the political cloud had a silver lining. Dead Sheep may have been relevant in 2015 but in 2016 it was uncannily so. A Tory PM makes a fatal miscalculation over Europe? Tick. The PM is betrayed by an ally? Tick. A Tory wife machinates exquisitely at the heart of it? Tick. There’s more. In Dead Sheep a blond, charismatic, maverick Tory wants to be PM. Sound familiar?
The play needed plenty of post-referendum tweaks. Ian Gow, Geoffrey’s friend, now says in the play that leaving Europe would be impossible: “Too complicated, for a start. Undoing all those laws. Like the political equivalent of reversing a vasectomy.” It’s been a writer’s dream: reworking a script with the benefit of hindsight to make the echoes louder. Thatcher now quotes Churchill about Britain being “of Europe, but not part of it. Interested but not absorbed.” And she showboats more: “History will prove me right one day, Geoffrey. The majority of the people are with me on this.”
The Guardian’s Michael Billington commended the original production but felt it should have shown Thatcher’s sexual side (as admired by Alan Clark in his Diaries). On reflection I agreed. Now, Margaret (Steve Nallon, who previously impersonated her on Spitting Image) flirts with her blunt press secretary Bernard Ingham, a Yorkshireman, in a way that is – I hope – entertaining and instructive. “Did you see the way President Mitterrand looked at me, Bernard? He likes women, you know.” Bernard turns puce as Margaret moves close and coos: “I am a woman, you know.”
This whole process has made me realise something I never fully appreciated: drama’s advantage over current affairs. As a longtime TV and radio reporter I’ve made countless shows that claimed to give “the full story” but didn’t. Drama, I’ve discovered (rather late in the day) fills the human gaps in the story and so completes the picture.
There’s one piquant quote that hasn’t made it into the new version. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” it is said. “It rhymes.” You’re telling me.
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Dead Sheep is at Cast, Doncaster, until 10 September; Westcliff Palace theatre, Southend, on 12 September; and continues its UK tour until 28 November
