Operation Kingmaker

'C' is stepping down for health reasons, and suddenly everyone in the building is a talent scout. The rumour mill settles on John Tower Gibbs, a one-time senior SIS officer who has spent recent years working at the Foreign Office. Burnside and Gibbs go back a long way, and none of it is friendly: years earlier, as a Sandbagger, Burnside investigated Gibbs while he was Head of Station abroad. Neither man has forgiven the other. The smart money says the job will go to Gibbs, which is exactly what makes him unacceptable to Burnside.

So Burnside decides to play kingmaker. His candidate is Matthew Peele, the Deputy Chief. Burnside judges him more suitable for the top job and, not coincidentally, easier to live with than the alternative. He sets about steering Wellingham's influence towards Peele. And Wellingham lets him try, the way a chess player lets an opponent move first. Gently, completely, he demonstrates that he still outclasses his former son-in-law at office politics. Burnside may know every back alley in Europe. His father-in-law has spent a lifetime in those corridors, and that turns out to matter rather more.

Written by Ian MacKintosh and directed by Alan Grint, first shown on 3 March 1980. Roy Marsden carries it as Burnside, with Dennis Burgess's Tower Gibbs, Jerome Willis's Matthew Peele and Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Geoffrey Wellingham. Ray Lonnen, Michael Cashman, Elizabeth Bennett, Jana Shelden, Bob Sherman and Peter Laird complete the cast.

There's barely a gun in it. The whole hour is fought with inferences and lunch invitations, and it's all the tenser for that. The best moment is watching Burnside, who can run a network in his sleep, be quietly outmanoeuvred at home. You'd think he'd know better. It's a two-hander about pride, really: a son-in-law who thinks he has learned the family business, and a father-in-law who knows he hasn't. That's the fun of it.