A Proper Function of Government

"A Proper Function of Government" runs two stories at once, and neither shortchanges the other. In Vienna, the SIS station reports that Dr Sir Donald Hopkins has turned up, the Cabinet Office's chief scientific advisor, supposedly on his fishing holiday in Scotland. Burnside smells a defector at once. Getting permission to do anything about it takes real wrangling, with the Foreign Office and with his own superiors, before two Sandbaggers can be sent in to bring the man home. The wrangling is half the point. In this world, getting permission is often harder than getting the job done.

Across the other side of the world, an East African dictator has killed a journalist. The journalist's accusation, that the dictator was an SIS agent, was wrong; the killing is real. Burnside wants the man dead, and he has history on his side: years earlier, this same regime was responsible for the death of one of his Sandbaggers, and he has not forgotten.

The clever bit is how the two halves feed each other. The Vienna operation is all caution and procedure, men watching a man; the dictator plot is the opposite, a slow burn toward an act of state violence. Both come down to the same question, which the show declines to answer: how much killing a government may do and still call itself civilised.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, Michael Ferguson directed. Roy Marsden anchors it as Burnside, with Richard Vernon's 'C', Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine, Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Geoffrey Wellingham and Jerome Willis's Matthew Peele around him. Laurence Payne plays Hopkins, Steven Grives Alan Denson, Elizabeth Bennett Diane Lawler, Barkley Johnson Brian Milton and Michael O'Hagan Stan.

The title is a small dry joke, and a good one. Assassination, done properly and at the right level, is presented as a proper function of government. And the episode trusts you to feel how wrong that is without being told.