House of Cards - Episode 4

The Conservative leadership election is six days away, and Francis Urquhart has finally declared. His main rivals are Patrick Woolton and Michael Samuels, and he and Tim Stamper set about the smaller ones first. Ian Richardson and Colin Jeavons make a deliciously entertaining team, with immaculate timing.

Urquhart mentions Samuels, the health minister, and Stamper says he no longer goes to hospitals, having been beaten up by nurses. A visit to a wheelchair factory serves just as well, and a demonstration is arranged in which a minister runs down a protester in a wheelchair. One down. Next is Harold Earle, who once got into trouble with a rent boy on a train, though it was hushed up. A few photographs sent to Earle persuade him to step out of the race.

After the first ballot, nobody has a clear majority, and there will be a second. The recording from Brighton, made in Penny Guy's night with Woolton, is now brought out, and it is enough to push Woolton out. He announces his support for Urquhart, and tells his wife why. He thinks Samuels and Lord Billsborough engineered his downfall, so he dislikes Urquhart but detests Samuels. Urquhart is also the older man, and old men die sooner, so Woolton will be back before long.

With the structure starting to wobble, Urquhart has to go further to protect himself. Roger O'Neill is now a liability. Urquhart invites him to the country, gets him drunk and puts rat poison into his cocaine. While he does so, he speaks to camera in a soft, matter-of-fact voice, calling it an act of mercy. The speech is a memory of the real Roger, the burning boy in the green jersey with the legendary sidestep, and it is chilling.

But Mattie will not stop. Playing back her many tapes, she begins to put the pieces together and to believe the unbelievable. She finds Urquhart on the roof garden at the House of Commons, and their final meeting is a complete reversal of Michael Dobbs's novel, in which Urquhart takes his own life. Here he throws Mattie off the roof to her death, and an unseen hand picks up her tape recorder with his confession on it, so it is clear the story is not over.

Archive TV Musings found one small flaw, that every tape she plays seems to come up at exactly the right point. The reviewer called it a thoroughly modern drama and the strongest of the trilogy, and judged that only the clunky computers show its age. Richardson gives Urquhart a mocking and attractive manner, except when real anger shows through. Harker's Mattie is, at different moments, manipulated and a manipulator.

Urquhart wins the second ballot, and the serial ends with him being driven to Buckingham Palace to be invited to form a government.