On a recent February morning, I woke up to find I was wrong. Not a particularly uncommon experience in itself, but unusual to discover that on this occasion I was being publicly accused of it by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. “Michael Sheen has said that ‘the people of Port Talbot have been let down’,” Kemi Badenoch wrote in the Daily Mail. “But he is wrong.”
It was a big day. I spent all of last year directing a three-part drama series for the BBC called The Way, which was to air that night. It begins in my hometown of Port Talbot, where a strike at the local steelworks becomes the spark that ignites a violent descent into national chaos. Clearly, Ms Badenoch had been given a sneak peek of the series before forming quite a strong opinion on it. But no: reading her article, Ms Badenoch admits that she hadn’t watched it at all. Why let a total lack of information prevent a full-throated denouncement, eh? Presumably, she also assumes that we managed to write, film and edit the entire series after Tata Steel announced the imminent loss of some 2,500 jobs at the steelworks mere weeks ago.
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