i deliberately kept margaret thatcher and keith joseph and james callaghan off stage because it... i feel like we were familiar with the ideology of left and right and the tensions between them, but we are less familiar with — i certainly was when i looked at that gothic palace and how impenetrable and intimidating it is, i did not know how it worked. i did not know how legislation passes through the house. i didn't know how a whip manipulates, encourages, persuades a member of parliament who does not want to vote a certain way to eventually walk through that particular lobby and i always think it is a bit of a gift to be a british playwright in particular because we are so old and our systems are so old they naturally they lean towards absurdity. you turned the arcane detail of westminster process into a successful play in this house, but then you did something also fascinating with a different sort of political complicated situation. you turned the brexit furore in the uk into a successful tv drama called the uncivil war. at the heart of that was not david cameron or borisjohnson