Nicola Sturgeon joins Sky’s Russian attack simulation as deputy PM

Nicola Sturgeon has been cast as deputy prime minister in a televised simulation of a Russian attack on the UK, with Michael Gove playing the prime minister and Dame Penny Mordaunt as defence secretary. The four-part Sky series, The Wargame, is set six months in the future and will place real-life politicians, intelligence chiefs and military figures inside a sealed, COBR-style crisis room to respond minute by minute to a fictional assault on UK soil.

The project is less a TV novelty than a stress test of Britain’s civilian and political readiness. By putting Sturgeon, Gove and Mordaunt into the same high-pressure room, the format asks how cross-party leadership might function when decisions have to be made rapidly, publicly and under conditions that resemble nuclear-era contingency planning. Baroness Harriet Harman, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy are also part of the cast, giving the exercise an unusually broad political spread.

The rest of the lineup pushes the simulation further into Whitehall’s core machinery. General Sir Richard Barrons will play the chief of the defence staff, former UK ambassador Lord Darroch the national security adviser, and former intelligence officer Christopher Steele the intelligence chief. Anthony Scaramucci is in the cast as the US secretary of state, a detail that points to one of the most serious questions the programme is built to probe: whether Britain’s allies, especially the United States, could be relied upon in a crisis.

Sky is adapting the series from a five-part podcast made with Tortoise Media in June 2025, which imagined a Russian attack on the UK and examined national resilience at a time of mounting tensions with Russia. The earlier version also tested the credibility of Britain’s external support network, a theme that remains central as the TV format expands the scenario from audio debate into a minute-by-minute televised decision room.

The broadcaster says the series was developed with leading academics, military experts and defence specialists, and The Garden, part of ITV Studios, is producing it. That gives the project a built-in tension: if the simulation surfaces gaps in planning, communications or alliances, the value will lie not in spectacle but in whether viewers are shown anything substantive about how the UK would actually respond when crisis leaves the studio.