Anatomy of a Scandal author Sarah Vaughan: ‘Our rule-breakers are predominantly Tories’

The Netflix drama Anatomy of a Scandal is supposed to be a serious thriller set in Westminster, but current events occasionally render it a comedy. One character solemnly declares towards the end: “People of privilege can no more break the law without consequence than anyone else.” Ha! Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak seem to have missed that particular memo.

It is a story of politicians at the highest level of government embroiled in some very nasty business. Rupert Friend stars as dashing minister James Whitehouse, who is exposed for having an affair with a parliamentary aide and then accused of raping her. His dutiful wife, played by Sienna Miller, resolves to stand by him. So does the Prime Minister, because he is protecting a murky secret of his own. Whitehouse and the PM forged their bond at Oxford University as members of the Libertines, a group of braying, white-tie toffs clearly based on the Bullingdon Club (former members: Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne).

Lying, cheating politicians are nothing new. But when it comes to television drama, they tend to come from the Conservative Party. Think back to House of Cards, or David Hare’s Roadkill. Anatomy of a Scandal’s author, Sarah Vaughan, is clear that the characters in this drama - based on her 2018 best-seller - could only be Tories.

“I do think if you look at the people who’ve been associated with entitlement in recent years, and in believing that rules are able to be broken - they are predominantly Tories,” she tells me.

“Matt Hancock [who conducted an office affair during lockdown], Damian Green [ordered to resign after misleading the public over porn found on his office computer], Rishi Sunak with the whole non-dom thing and having a green card, and of course the suitcases of booze at Partygate… they are all Conservatives. And there have been some sexual offences, like Charlie Elphicke [jailed for sexual assaulting two women].

“I do think there’s something about a particular kind of upper middle class, public school upbringing that means life has always gone according to your rules, so why should you have to have any empathy and why would you not feel you could carry on behaving like that?”

Vaughan is a former Guardian journalist turned successful author. Last year she secured a seven-figure book deal for her next two novels. Brought up in Devon, she studied at Oxford University and the same college, Brasenose, that David Cameron had attended a few years earlier. She never witnessed any Bullingdon antics herself - they were under the radar, where Anatomy of a Scandal’s Libertines seem to turn up everywhere in their tailcoats - but did encounter “a level of wealth I had never witnessed before”.

Fellow students would introduce themselves with their name and the fact they went to Eton. She says: “When I went to Oxford, I went on a full grant so I felt very much like a poor student. There were people who went to parties in West London at weekends and things like that. I’d only been to London twice.” Later, she was “haunted” by that infamous Bullingdon Club photograph featuring Cameron and Johnson: “It’s such a brilliant metaphor for what’s happening, on so many levels.”

In 2004, while political correspondent at The Guardian under her maiden name of Sarah Hall, she took a call from Boris Johnson. He had just been sacked from the Tory front bench after he was caught lying about his affair with Petronella Wyatt (he had dismissed the story as “an inverted pyramid of piffle”). He was, Vaughan recalls, blithely unbothered about the fact he had misled his party leader, Michael Howard.

That call stayed in Vaughan’s mind and helped to inform Anatomy of a Scandal. And, all these years later, Johnson’s relationship with the truth is still making the news.

“It wasn’t the fact that he’d had an affair - this was The Guardian, and we thought it was a bit mucky to write about that,” she recalls. “It was the fact that he’d lied.

“I’d been a political correspondent during the Blair years and the Iraq invasion, with the very clever decoding of semantics around weapons of mass destruction and the sexed-up dossier. We were all looking at how language was spun. But this was a totally different level. This was somebody who had no contrition about just saying, ‘We’re all chaps together…’ And that obviously really stuck with me.”

But it’s an uncomfortable fact for haters of ‘Tory toffs’ that the electorate voted for Boris Johnson, and for David Cameron. Vaughan muses on this, and describes it as “unfortunate”. “It would be really interesting to know - is there still a residual bit of us that feels we should be governed by somebody who has that innate self-confidence?”

Many of Anatomy of a Scandal’s little details are drawn from life. One line - “sex doesn’t kill a career these days” - was supplied to Vaughan by a female MP. A spin doctor’s strategy of “deflect and dismiss, but don’t deny” was taken from a Guardian article on how to handle a political crisis.

The drama has been adapted for Netflix by David E Kelley, who brought us Big Little Lies and The Undoing, and given a glossy upgrade. In the book, the Whitehouses lived in North Kensington, the West London enclave that was home to the Camerons and the Goves; on screen, they live an opulent lifestyle in Mayfair. With the possible exception of Samantha Cameron, there have been no Tory wives who look quite so beautifully turned out as Sienna Miller does here. Rupert Friend is better-looking than politicians of any stripe.

“There is an extent to which the Netflix series has maxed everything up,” says Vaughan. “Part of it is that we want to watch beautiful-looking people. But I was really clear that James had to be lovely-looking, he had to have that charisma and he had to be somebody that young.” That was crucial to the rape case, which is a he-said-she-said scenario: “I was really struck researching it when [someone said], ‘We want to believe a good-looking, middle-class, professional man.’ We do make so many judgments on how somebody looks, and we do give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Standing by your man is also a Tory trait, she thinks. The wife of David Warburton, the Conservative MP recently suspended following allegations that he sexually assaulted women and took cocaine, is said to be giving him her support. Matt Hancock’s wife has maintained a dignified silence despite being deserted in very public circumstances. “It does seem to be a Tory thing, doesn’t it?” says Vaughan. She contrasts these women with Margaret Cook, who wrote an excoriating memoir about her philandering husband and then Foreign Secretary, Robin.

While some parts of the Netflix show deploy what Vaughan tactfully describes as “dramatic licence” - reporters don’t really mob the accused outside their home in the midst of a court case, nor do lobby journalists chase MPs’ wives through the corridors of Westminster - she insists that the courtroom scenes are bang on. “I think anyone watching it involved in the law would think, ‘Yeah, you’ve absolutely nailed that.’”

The ending, though, which suggests that these entitled politicians may get their comeuppance and the Government will fall? That, says, Vaughan, is “a bit of wishful thinking”.