The production unites two cultural trends. One is the current vogue among movie producers, TV com... Blunkett coverage...

The production unites two cultural trends. One is the current vogue among movie producers, TV commissioning editors and audiences for stories based on fact rather than fiction. You see this trend in the explosion of reality TV since the late 1990s, and in the multiplex success of documentary feature films like Touching The Void. And you see it in the current ubiquity of the docudrama. Writers have been dramatising historical events to great effect since Shakespeare, but never events which are so fresh in the collective memory. It was, let us recall, only in August last year that reports of the Blunkett affair first surfaced in the British press.

Docudrama is part of our contemporary fascination with real life. We know it isn’t quite real, but a hybrid form which utilises two very different modes of getting at the truth in its bid to reinforce the narrative power of each. Documentaries present themselves as a record. They document events, and when they’re done well we take them at their word.

Drama, on the other hand, wants to reveal the truth about what it felt like. Drama gets beneath the surface of events and into the lives and psychologies of its subjects. Great drama addresses the universal truths, transcending the specifics of particular historical events to make them resonate down the ages. Not just what happened, but why, and what it means for us today.

Put the docu together with the drama and we get creatively fired-up tales of real-life events – storytelling branded as Truth with a capital “T”, with the added bonus that it satisfies our hunger for romance, humour and tragedy. In docudrama the messiness of real life is given structure and narrative arc. Complexities and ambivalences are ironed out, the unadorned facts embroidered with the tricks of the writer’s craft. In the end docudrama is infotainment, though “with a point and a purpose”, as Alistair Beaton describes his account of a Labour minister’s attraction for the wealthy, American publisher of Britain’s leading right-wing weekly.

“There’s nothing wrong with entertaining while being serious,” he tells me. “It does no harm to ask questions about why this government is so in love with power and privilege and wealth and celebrity. Blunkett’s ability to fall for that kind of person is very similar to Blair’s love of nice big houses in Italy for the summer and sucking up to the rich, to celebrities. I think those are legitimate areas to examine and ask questions about, and to have a laugh about.

Responsible and intelligent or not, A Very Social Secretary wouldn’t be possible were it not for a second cultural trend – our heightened fascination with political sex scandals. It’s not that politicians didn’t have sex with people other than their wives (or with other people’s wives, as in this case) before the 1990s, just that our media didn’t dare, or care to report such transgressions as they were happening. Nor did our creative writers dramatise them, largely because the central characters were still walking around with some very expensive lawyers in tow. Those days are gone, it would seem. A Very Social Secretary marks a milestone in being the first sex scandal involving a serving cabinet minister to receive the full docudrama treatment on British TV.

Another distinctive feature of A Very Social Secretary is the visual handicap of its central character, and the question put by one of Blair’s advisers as the scandal deepens: “Can a blind man lose the plot?” Yes he can, clearly, just as recklessly as any not-blind man. Blunkett’s blindness makes him unique in British politics, but over the years since he first made his name as Sheffield council leader, he has rendered that fact irrelevant to any assessment of his political skills. Yes, we all know about the practicalities of guide dogs in the House of Commons and the methods he has developed to cope with his ministerial red boxes. He has encouraged unsentimental public understanding of the banal practicalities of visual impairment in a way that has never invited special consideration.

And he hasn’t had it, from Beaton or anyone else. On the contrary, his tough policies on terrorism, illegal immigrants, anti social neighbours and the like made him one of the most hated of home secretaries, not least by the Labour left from which he emerged in the 1980s. They still think of him as an authoritarian thug. Now we know that he’s a man of flesh-and-blood desires, partial to a bit of well-heeled hanky panky when the opportunity presents itself. In a society where disability often attracts misplaced and unwelcome pity, that’s refreshing. If Blunkett can bear to sit through this high-profile portrayal of his weakest moments, perhaps he should remember that he is, in a slightly roundabout way, being celebrated like few politicians before him. Cecil Parkinson will forever be remembered as a cad for dumping Sarah Keays and walking away from their child. Bill Clinton was mercilessly mocked for his self-serving denial of sexual relations with “that woman”. The late Robin Cook looked pathetic when the tabloids revealed how Alastair Campbell issued him with that famous ultimatum at Heathrow airport.

The worst you can say about Blunkett’s morality is that he was laid low by love, and then by a touchingly old-fashioned sense of fatherly obligation to his son. As Bob Dylan says , you can’t be wise and in love at the same time, and by God, Blunkett knows the truth in that. A Very Social Secretary can’t be anything but intrusive, yes, and voyeuristic, but it probably won’t harm his career. Just look at Clinton, who emerged from the Monica Lewinsky scandal as one of the most loved presidents in American history, and is still dining out on his lovable roguishness. A lot of people thought Blunkett’s chances of making it to No 10 were ruined by last year’s events. A Very Social Secretary makes irreverent but affectionate mythology of the man, and proves he’s still a contender for the top job should Gordon Brown be run over by a bus between now and the next election, and his relationship with Sally Anderson not become another resigning matter.

Beaton regards Blunkett as in many ways “a very remarkable man, a very admirable talent”. All the more reason, he thinks, why the MP is fair game for a political satirist. “He’s worth attacking. It’s not worth attacking buffoons. What’s interesting is people who have abilities, and who have power. How they exercise that power affects us all. This man was signing warrants to put people away in Belmarsh without trial at a time when he was leading a complicated double life and getting into difficulties about nannies and visas. That strikes me as of legitimate public interest.” That’s the real story here, and not the public rendering of a private drama.

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