Get The Party Started:Partygate.

It begins, as everything to do with this Tory party does, with lies. We hear a series of Tory MPs and ministers denying that any parties whatsoever took place during lockdown. But as we all know now lots and lots of parties took place at 10 Downing Street during lockdown. Channel 4's fourth wall breaking Partygate (written and directed by Joseph Bullman) looks at the fifteen parties mentioned, in quite a lot of detail, in Sue Gray's infamous, and excoriating, report.

The story begins in March 2020. Many European countries are going into lockdown but not, not yet, the UK. We see footage of the real Boris Johnson on television boasting about visiting hospitals and shaking hands with coronavirus patients. We later see him lying about making cardboard buses, failing to get Brexit done, failing to level up, ruining Christmas with his bungled handling of a festive lockdown, and - ultimately - lying about all the parties - and then lying about lying about the parties.

Johnson (who is voiced by John Culshaw here and shown either from behind or partially obscured) is the dark magus behind everything that happens in Partygate but the focus is less on him - and less on his awful cronies (we also see real life Oliver Dowden, Dominic Cummings, and Allegra Stratton while Lee Cain is played by Craig Parkinson, Martin Reynolds by Edwin Flay, Helen MacNamara by Charlotte Ritchie, and Carrie Symonds by Rebecca Humphries) and more on the horrendous, privileged, posh young men and women who make up Johnson's team.

Most of them come from Eton, the Vote Leave campaign, or the right wing pressure group Taxpayers' Alliance which gives you a measure of the personnel immediately. Josh Fitzmaurice (Hugh Skinner) is the worst kind of Johnson arselicker imaginable - leading the group in 'hip hip hooray's for the PM at any opportunity, Alice Lyons (Alice Orr-Ewing) is a common or garden social climber, and Rory Baskerville (Tom Durant Pritchard) is much the same but at least seems to have a slight conscience - as well as a dislike for Josh.

The two nearly come to blows during a heated altercation in which Rory thinks the government should be focusing on PPE and 'Test and Trace' but Josh, trying to please 'the boss', insists that the emphasis should be on the upcoming 'festival of Brexit'. Then there's two made up characters that Bullman has used to help tell the story (it's about the only bit that's not based on true events) - Grace Greenwood (Georgie Henley) and Annabel D'Acre (Ophelia Lovibond).

Grace (who becomes the narrator of the entire piece) is a faithful Tory and a new recruit. She's a huge admirer of Boris Johnson but she soon starts to have doubts about what she sees happening at Number Ten during a supposed lockdown. Annabel, and Lovibond is brilliant in the role - she seems to relish playing a completely unabashed bastard, is a more experienced campaigner and comes from a more privileged background. When Grace asks Annabel, while drinking in the garden of Number Ten, "are we still in a meeting", Annabel replies "yes". Clearly they're not.

Annabel believes rules are for the plebs and not for those who set them and, in that, she is a very accurate analogue for Boris Johnson and the entire Tory party - both then and now. We see gatherings elsewhere in the country being broken up by the police and we see Grace receiving an e-mail from Martin Reynolds (then the Principle Private Secretary to the PM) inviting her to drinks in the garden and telling her to "bring your own booze".

She was one of two hundred people invited to this supposed 'work event'. The party started at pretty much the exact same moment as the government press conference went out on television telling people that they must not, in any circumstances whatsoever, meet up for social reasons. Soon, there were many many more parties and soon they moved indoors.

When Grace and Annabel buy a suitcase full of wine from Tesco Express, Grace asks Annabel "are we having a party?" and Annabel replies "no, just socially distanced drinks". But the drinks were anything but socially distanced. At Boris Johnson's birthday party, Johnson chuckled to himself as he boasted of it being "the most unsocially distanced party in the UK".

There were people dancing on desks, people getting off with each other, and though not mentioned in Sue Gray's report it is widely believed there was a man and woman fucking each other at one of the parties. There was puking, a secret Santa, a wine fridge was sneaked in for "wine time Fridays", and Helen MacNamara - amazingly the Head of Ethics for Johnson's team (there's a job title that won't age well) - provided a karaoke machine.

The mantra was "what happens at Number Ten stays at Number Ten". Grace wonders "is there anything we DON'T have a party for?" and the answer appears to be 'no'. On one night alone there were THREE different parties happening. One of them - and this is guaranteed to raise your blood pressure - hosted by the Covid task force! Police were known to attend the parties but they didn't seem to take any action whatsoever at the time.

Anyone who dared to suggest that any of what was going was wrong was called disloyal and their career was threatened (very much in keeping with the whole Johnson ethos) so it's left to the poor cleaners (pretty much the only people you ever see wearing masks) and security guards to act as the country's moral conscience as they witness this abhorrent abuse of privilege and receive personal abuse by Johnson's team themselves.

Security guard Michael Port (Phil Davis) watches the parties, via CCTV, in horror. He considers whistle blowing but settles for sending a message asking that everybody vacate the building by 9pm each night. The message is, of course, completely ignored.

There are so many scenes that will anger and enrage you but there are also moving scenes too and none of them involve the Tory scum. We see news footage of a couple wearing Hazmat suits so they can meet with their grand-daughter, we hear interviews with people who lost family members during lockdown and were unable to even say goodbye to them in person (and had to do so over Zoom) because they stuck to the rules as well as with nurses who worked on Covid wards and, as such, were unable to see their own small children for months on end.

Then there are interviews with regular people who also broke the rules and found themselves receiving fines that sometimes went up to, and above, £14,000. When Johnson and his cronies, including Rishi Sunak, were finally brought to some kind of justice they were fined £50 each. The average fine for breaking lockdown rules was £6,000. Why were people who are much much richer, and committed far worse crimes, fined less than 1% of the amount ordinary citizens were fined? 

It's enough to make your blood boil. These people took us for fools. They set the rules that almost all of us obeyed and yet they felt no compunction whatsoever to follow the rules themselves. That's an outrage but more outrageous still is that these bastards are still in power. Some people, though probably - hopefully - not many, will go to the polls next year and vote for five more years of being ruled by a criminal gang. It's not enough that Boris Johnson has been removed from power. The whole rotten lot of them must go - and never ever return.