Mr Blunkett has told Channel 4 that he will take legal action over the film if it could affect the welfare of his two-year-old son with Mrs Quinn.

But Stephen Pollard, the biographer whose revelations embarrassed Mr Blunkett when he was the Home Secretary, told The Times that the drama was an accurate portrayal of the minister.

A Very Social Secretary, which opens the broadcaster’s new digital channel, More 4, next week, stars Bernard Hill as Mr Blunkett, Victoria Hamilton as Mrs Quinn and Robert Lindsay as Tony Blair.

It is likely to damage relations between the Government and Channel 4, which is lobbying for £100 million in additional funding.

Peter Dale, Controller of More 4, said the film exposed a Government that had “curtailed our liberties more than any administration since Cromwell tried to ban Christmas”.

The film, written by the satirist Alistair Beaton, depicts Mr Blunkett and Mr Blair using the September 11 attacks to erode civil liberties. Mr Blair and his wife, Cherie, are shown luxuriating in Prince Girolamo Strozzi’s villa in Tuscany and asking where their next freebie holiday is coming from.

But the most withering portrayals are those of the doomed lovers. Mrs Quinn, the American publisher of The Spectator, is presented as a glamorous but stone-hearted vixen who uses Mr Blunkett as a sperm donor and then dumps him.

She and Boris Johnson, the magazine’s Editor, conspire to trap the “simple Northern lad” in a high-society web which he is incapable of negotiating. Mr Johnson, the Tory MP for Henley, and a pregnant Mrs Quinn even swap odds on who the father of her child might be.

Hill’s Mr Blunkett casually signs Belmarsh detention orders while arranging assignations with Mrs Quinn over the phone. He is infatuated and leaps for joy when the paternity tests come back in his favour.

The fictional Mr Blunkett is persuaded to send the e-mail that speeds up the visa application for Mrs Quinn’s nanny because he believes that it is the only way she will let him see his son.

At Alastair Campbell’s behest he has to quit. Mr Blunkett is shown drinking wine alone after his resignation but makes a spectacular return to the front bench.

Mr Pollard, whose book exposed Mr Blunkett’s criticisms of Cabinet colleagues, said: “I was taken aback at how accurate Bernard Hill’s portrayal is. He genuinely thought Kimberly loved him and they would be together. Unfortunately for her she is shown as the bitch from hell.

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