This England: Critics mixed over Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of Boris Johnson

He noted how with work on the series having begun so early in the pandemic, it “culminates not with Partygate (which precipitated Boris Johnson’s political collapse) but with Dominic Cummings’ ophthalmological adventures to Barnard Castle”.”While This England may be less than necessary, it does offer more than a run-through of the early Covid timeline,” he went on. “Billed as ‘a fiction based on real events’, it combines an account of the government’s reactive, insufficient and often careless handling of the crisis with a strange, intriguing and speculative character study of Johnson.”