I’m trying to organise an event in Westminster with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott and it’s proving a bit of a nightmare. So many obstacles have been thrown in our way that we’re beginning to think it might be jinxed. But we aren’t about to give up.

The original idea was for the two of us to have a conversation on stage in front of a live audience about Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. These are the messages – more than 100,000 in total, between the then health secretary and various politicians, civil servants and advisers – that he shared with Isabel when she was employed to ghost-write The Pandemic Diaries, Hancock’s memoir about the crisis. Convinced these messages contained important information about the government’s handling of the pandemic that was in the public interest, Isabel passed them to the Telegraph and they became the basis for some hair-raising news stories about Hancock and his colleagues.

In an effort to make the event a bit more fun, we arranged for a couple of actors to read out some of the more embarrassing WhatsApp exchanges. Tim Hudson, who appeared in Who’s The Daddy?, mine and Lloyd Evans’s play set at The Spectator in 2003-04, agreed to reprise his role as Boris, and Laurence Fox, the leader of the Reclaim party, said he’d be happy to play Hancock. So far, so good. We had a promising evening of entertainment on our hands.

Then the trouble started. When Isabel and I started promoting the event on social media, we got a lot of unpleasant responses. People accused us of being ‘grifters’ – in their eyes, we were trying to profit from the misery the government had inflicted on the population during the pandemic. I hadn’t anticipated that, mainly because I thought the chances of us making any money were slim. We had booked the 250-seater auditorium at the Emmanuel Centre, a beautiful building in Westminster, at a cost of £4,200, which meant we’d have to sell 168 £25 tickets just to cover the venue hire – and then we’d have to pay the actors, the booker, a camera crew, a designer. All in all, we’d have to sell 246 tickets just to break even – some grift! Admittedly, we were also selling tickets to a drinks reception beforehand and a dinner afterwards, but those would be held at a nearby restaurant so any profits would be minimal.

The first person to drop out was Tim Hudson, whose agent got in touch to say he’d been offered another job by the BBC on the same evening. Was that the real reason, or had he had second thoughts after seeing the tsunami of hate on Twitter? Understandable if so, given how woke the acting world is, but still. Not great. Then the Emmanuel Centre said it wouldn’t be able to host the event after all. Turned out someone from Hancock’s office had been in touch and said that if it staged this scandalous jamboree it would be ‘profiting from stolen goods’. According to Isabel, he’d used the same argument in an effort to get the Telegraph not to run any stories based on the WhatsApp messages, but it didn’t wash because he’d shared them with her, as well as other people. Nevertheless, it worked on the Emmanuel Centre, which didn’t want the aggravation.

Then another setback – Laurence Fox dropped out. I called him to find out why and he said it was partly because I’d run a piece on my news publishing site (not by me) that was critical of his friend Calvin Robinson. The writer of that piece, Ian Rons, took issue with a monologue of Calvin’s on GB News about the war in Ukraine in which Ian felt he had been insufficiently supportive of the Ukrainian side. Ian is very passionate about that issue, so he really let fly. Calvin wasn’t happy and, out of loyalty to him, Laurence decided to withdraw from the event. Again, understandable, but it left Isabel and me in the lurch.

Thankfully, with a bit of scrabbling around we’ve managed to patch things up. The owner of the Hippodrome, Simon Thomas, has generously stepped in and said he’ll host the event, albeit three days after it was originally planned. That meant we had to offer a refund to people who’d bought tickets, but so far only about a dozen have taken us up on that. Meanwhile, we’re going to squeeze in an interview between Isabel and me in an events space at the restaurant where we’re holding the drinks and the dinner. We’re confident we’ll be able to hire two new actors by then – but if anyone reading this fancies themselves as a Hancock or Boris impersonator, contact me at realtobyyoung@gmail.com. The show must go on!