Honourable Men

Nicholas Shaw, a government minister with a well-worn record of attacking the Met, gets photographed with his secretary in a situation that doesn't survive contact with the tabloids. The suspicion lands immediately on his protection officers, because somebody must have leaked his movements, and the CIB opens an enquiry, if only to clear themselves.

Clark gets the case and isn't fooled for a second. This feels less like police corruption and more like political infighting wearing a police badge, and as more revelations keep appearing in the press, he starts to suspect a deliberate smear campaign. Russell Lewis wrote it, Robert Bierman directed, and Paul Freeman, best known to a generation as Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, plays Shaw with the right mix of outrage and calculation.

The Whitehall texture is convincing. Matthew Marsh's Det. Sgt. Peter Woodward and Julian Wadham's Nigel Winter populate the murk, and Robin McCallum's Graves is there to remind Clark that his own advancement depends on how this lands. Siobhan Redmond's Connell works the case at ground level. The episode marks the season's turn toward Westminster, and the show's instincts about who controls information carry over cleanly from the station to the corridors. Hugh Ross's Commander Sullivan is now part of the regular furniture, keeping an eye on how the enquiry lands.

What makes the episode land is how weaponised the scandal is. Whether Shaw is guilty of anything beyond poor judgement barely matters; the pictures do the damage, and the machinery of the press does the rest. It's an episode about institutional vulnerability dressed up as a corruption case, and it knows the difference. The photographs themselves are never the mystery; the leak is. Clark spends the hour working out who had the access and the motive, and the answer, when it comes, points somewhere uncomfortable. The episode is at its best when it's about the mechanics of scandal, the timing, the placement, the way a story is fed to the papers in pieces.