Freedom From Longing

Blair is the one in trouble this time. Palfrey's assistant gets recruited by another department to investigate a suspected Soviet agent, a Czech-born woman named Martina. There is one detail nobody mentions at the briefing: Blair and Martina once had an affair. Estelle Kohler plays her, and the history between the two of them sits in the room from her first scene. The master description puts it more bluntly: a beautiful foreign agent is determined to get her claws into Mr Palfrey, and the episode earns that description by keeping Martina's motives slippery. The assignment is professional on its face and personal underneath, and the whole hour plays on that gap.

Palfrey, watching from the side, does not trust the request. He believes the department asking for Blair's help has its own reasons, and those reasons are probably not Blair's welfare. Philip Broadley wrote the episode and Christopher Hodson directed it, and the show does what it does best, mixing Whitehall machinery with a personal history that keeps leaking through the paperwork. The title, Freedom From Longing, sounds like a slogan. Read it again and it starts to look like a confession.

Alec McCowen carries the centre as Palfrey, with Caroline Blakiston as the Coordinator, Clive Wood as Blair, Briony McRoberts as Caroline, Brian Deacon as Grant, Donald Douglas as Bunny Kingston, Tony Mathews as Laws, Chris Humphreys as Clark and Madeleine Christie as the Lady in Shop.

The episode is at its best when it lets the old affair do the work. Desire is a weak spot in any security service, and the show knows exactly how to press on it. Even the small parts get their moment; a name like Bunny Kingston is exactly the sort you hope to find in a cast list. And it confirms that even inside the rigid world of Westminster, desire and suspicion can derail any tidy investigation.