Jon S Baird’s miniseries opens in 1960s Westminster, where John Stonehouse (Matthew Macfadyen) is an up-and-comer in the Labour Party. “What do we know about him?” asks prime minister Harold Wilson (Kevin R McNally playing Wilson for the second time, perfectly, having portrayed him in the 2015 film Legend). “Working-class boy. Parents both trade unionists. Served in the RAF during the war.” Naturally, he’s made aviation minister – a role that takes him to Prague and into the arms of an obvious honey trap. “We would like you to become an unofficial representative of our country in Great Britain,” he’s told, in a smoke-filled Soviet interrogation room, as the film of his tryst is slid across the table. And so begins the decade-long unravelling of his life, a process that will end with him leaving his folded clothes and passport on a Florida beach and swimming out to sea.
Macfadyen is one of Britain’s finest actors, and his performance as Stonehouse rounds out a trilogy of depictions of men hanging by a thread. Beleaguered Tom Wambsgans in Succession, shifty Major Charles Ingram in Quiz, and now, the hammiest of the roles, the unprincipled former MP for Wednesbury. Macfadyen plays Stonehouse – who would assume the identity of a dead constituent after his disappearance – as a man already living out a synthetic version of life. If you can judge a person’s happiness from the sincerity of their laugh, then Stonehouse is in deep despair. “I don’t think he’s a wise man,” a foreign businessman tells the audience, via subtitles. “Haha,” chuckles Stonehouse in response. “Terrific!”
