The Candidate

Roberta Montgomery, known as Bobby, is a Conservative candidate in a local by-election and she has been receiving death threats and poison pen letters. Spender is put on her security, and the assignment is close protection rather than investigation, which he resents from the first briefing. Worse, he is put on it alongside Superintendent Yelland, the man who has made his life difficult since he arrived. Being made to work a delicate job with your own hostile superior is the episode's opening friction, and it never resolves.

The threat turns out to be mobile and real. Spender is run down by a lorry while pulling Bobby out of its path, and he takes the impact himself. Yelland's response is administrative and entirely unwelcome: Spender goes on the sick list and his car is taken away. The car matters more than a vehicle usually would. His whole method depends on moving around the city without being recognised as a police officer, and removing the keys is an instruction to stop working. He ignores it.

What he does next is the episode's central move. He gets himself work as a driver for Iain Rutherford, the owner of the lorry that put him in hospital. Rather than watch the threat from outside, he places himself inside the organisation connected to the attempt on Bobby's life. Driving for Rutherford brings him into contact with the people around the candidate, and it is while he is driving that he is caught up in a robbery. From that point the case stops being a bodyguard job: the lorry, the candidate and the theft belong to the same arrangement. The attempt on her life comes from inside her own circle rather than from any political opponent at a distance, which means the protection job was compromised from the start.

Amanda Redman is the first significant female guest of the run, and she plays a woman who is competent in public and compromised in private. The part works because both halves are credible. Spender becomes involved with her, and the series handles it as a professional failure rather than a romance: it is stated plainly as affecting his judgement, and it is used as a source of error. This is also the first time Spender is given a close protection operation, a format the show returns to at the start of the second series.

The weakness is how little of the resolution survives. The available accounts establish that the threat came from someone close to the candidate, but nobody names the person, the motive or the mechanism, and the robbery Spender is swept into while working for Rutherford is not explained at all. The episode earns its place on the infiltration and on Redman's performance. It is less clear on how the thing ended.