Having taken on Royal family, Netflix has the Tories in its sights in Anatomy of a Scandal

When Netflix portrayed royal life in The Crown, the Government suggested a disclaimer stating that the story was fiction.

But now the streaming service is tackling the Tories, and ministers may wish that a similar disclaimer could be added.

Anatomy of a Scandal is a drama featuring a bunch of politicians whose loyalty was forged in an elite university society not unlike the Bullingdon Club.

It stars Sienna Miller as Sophie Whitehouse, whose gilded life as the wife of a Home Office minister, played by Rupert Friend, comes crashing down when he is exposed for having an affair with a parliamentary aide and later accused of rape.

Friend’s character, James Whitehouse, is a close friend of the prime minister, and the pair are revealed to be hiding secrets from their days in a “white tie” university club known as the Libertines.

News of his infidelity prompts headlines such as “Top Tory cheats with aide”. The prime minister is told by his spin doctor to distance himself from James Whitehouse “because the behaviour of entitled toffs is something the public no longer finds cute”.

The six-part drama is based on the novel of the same name by Sarah Vaughan, a former political correspondent for The Guardian.

Art imitating life

The drama was launched at a Netflix event this week where SJ Clarkson, the director, was cautious about discussing the inspiration for her on-screen depiction of “debauched boys with champagne and money”.

“Is it based on anything? It’s based on a book,” she said.

However, Miller was more direct: “It deals with privilege in a way that we are seeing unravel daily in our government. It really is very close to the bone.

“It’s art imitating life. It’s exciting. We do live in a country that’s not really a meritocracy a lot of the time; where if you had access to education of a certain standard and calibre, and go through the motions, you have aspirations of being in government.

“And we’re seeing it – they [members of the Government] are all friends. I mean, make up your own minds. Watch it and then read the newspapers and see what you think.”

Miller said that the drama is also the study of a marriage, and of how a woman reacts to news that the man she thought she knew has been unfaithful.

Spotlight on affairs too close to home

The media spotlight is turned on Sophie Whitehouse's character and Miller said she knew how that felt. In 2005, Jude Law, Miller’s fiance at the time, was caught cheating on her with his children’s nanny and made a public apology.

“I got sent the script in episodes, read the first one and couldn’t stop reading all of them. I was excited to play somebody who deals with not dissimilar things that I very publicly dealt with, and [who] responds in different ways,” she said.

“What would a rational person’s response be to some terrible behaviour? It felt meta and weird and uncomfortable.”

The original novel was published in 2018 and became an instant bestseller. Vaughan has said that it was inspired in part by Boris Johnson’s affair with Petronella Wyatt, which led to him being sacked from the Conservative frontbench in 2004.

“To me, Anatomy is really about entitlement and the scandal of entitlement,” Vaughan recently told The Guardian.

She said that Mr Johnson is “not in any way James”, adding: “I obviously don’t think he’s guilty of any sort of sexual offence. It was his approach to the truth that interested me.”

‘Provoking wild arguments across dinner tables’

Anatomy of a Scandal will launch on Netflix on April 15. Miller said that the rape allegation is portrayed with nuance: “James is the product of a system and he doesn’t believe he’s done anything wrong. He’s always been told ‘yes’, he’s always been privileged, he’s always been entitled.

“When does he know if ‘no means no’ if he’s never been taught this?”

Miller said that the fictional rape case was “really polarising” and she hoped it would provoke “wild arguments across dinner tables… it’s complicated and people feel differently about it and that is how you start to inspire interesting conversations about change”.