A Very British Coup, episodes 2 and 3 (Independent Television Service, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9:40 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched episodes two and three of the unexpectedly interesting British TV miniseries A Very British Coup, a 1988 production based on a 1982 novel by Chris Mullin that turned up on YouTube. Scripted by Alan Plater and directed by Mick Jackson – whose 1992 U.S. film The Bodyguard was a near-total disaster, A Very British Coup was actually quite well-made (though I suspect Jackson recognized the power of the story he was dealing with and for the most part left it alone and didn’t try to trick it up the way he did The Bodyguard) and had a provocative, if rather dated, premise. The British government and the country’s unelected class establishment that really runs things is in a tizzy because the voters have just not only elected the Labour Party in power but have done so in a landslide, and the new Prime Minister is Harry Perkins (Ray McAnally), a former steelworker and labor leader from Sheffield who disdains the trappings of the office and is determined that he, unlike previous Labour P.M.’s, will not be swayed, bought off or allowed to be blocked on implementation of a full socialist program.

In the first episode – which Charles and I watched on Amazon Prime expecting a link that was commercial-free, which it wasn’t (in fact they were showing most of the same putrid commercials that had bored us during the Winter Olympics) – Perkins puts in a hugely expensive program that threatens to bankrupt the government. He sends his Foreign Secretary, Tom Newsome (Jim Carter), off on a secret mission and, while his more moderate Chancellor of the Exchequer (Britain’s equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury), Lawrence Wainwright (Geoffrey Beevers), has negotiated a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on condition that Britain scale back Perkins’ redistributionist agenda, Newsome has met in secret with representatives of the Russian Central Bank and has got the Soviet Union to bail out at least nominally capitalist Britain. The second episode includes the exposure of Newsome’s extramarital affair with a woman named Madeleine, which causes Perkins to accept his resignation because “you were a damned fool, and I don’t want damned fools in my Cabinet.” Later he returns home to his wife Annette (Caroline John),, only to find her dead in their bathroom, an apparent suicide. (One truly feels sorry for the guy despite the fact that he ran into this mess because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.)

But the main intrigue centers around Perkins’ desire to make Britain a truly non-aligned nation in the Cold War, which includes closing down all United States military bases in Britain, dismantling Britain’s nuclear arsenal and withdrawing Britain from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This aspect of the story, like the use of the Russians as a sort of deus ex machina who step in at the last minute to save Perkins’ skin, seems very dated now that the Soviet Union is history (Mullin made two terrible calls: he imagined that Britain’s current Queen would have croaked, which she hasn’t – throughout the story the monarch is referred to as a man, though Mullin and/or Plater doesn’t specify which man – and that the Soviet Union would still be a going concern, which it hasn’t been for over 30 years) and NATO in general and the U.S.-Britain alliance in particular are stronger than ever thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s callous invasion of Ukraine. Actually, one writer who did predict the fall of the Soviet Union and its replacement by a Putin-style dictator with no responsibility to a Politburo or anyone or anything else was John Mantley in his 1956 science-fiction thriller The 27th Day – though the script for the 1957 movie version, albeit by Mantley himself, ignored this.

Getting back to A Very British Coup, the story proceeds with the actual rulers of British society – media owner Sir George Fison (Philip Madoc), BBC Board of Governors member Alford (Jeremy Young), and various people in both the British and American governments, including the U.S. President (Philip O’Brien), Secretary of State (Shane Rimmer) and CIA director (Dennis Creaghan) – looking for dirt on Harry Perkins. In episode two, they successfully bribe Arthur Smith (Berwick Kaler), head of the power workers’ union, to oppose Perkins’ desire to shut down all Britain’s nuclear power plants. Smith and his cronies claim the government is shutting down all power plants, and when Perkins insists that Britain will switch to renewable energy and they all will get jobs, Smith angrily declares, “Britain’s workers will not stake their future on a batch of windmills.” Though much of A Very British Coup seems dated, this one rings true; one of the claims that have bedeviled U.S. Left politics for decades now is the opposition of working people to measures to protect the climate by phasing out fossil fuels and substitiont renewables. It’s the big issue that turned West Virginia from a solidly Democratic to a solidly Republican state, and it screwed Hillary Clinton when she went there and loudly proclaimed that West Virginia’s coal miners wouldn’t have their jobs very much longer. They immediately and angrily tuned her out and didn’t stop long enough to hear her say the switch to renewables would get them better jobs that would not only pay them more but be cleaner and safer.

In A Very British Coup the Right-wingers who really hold all the power demand that Perkins call out the British military and use them as strike-breakers against the striking power workers, who have plunged the country into blackouts and chaos (in one particular scene a blackout hits a nighttime soccer game and ends it early), only Perkins, a former trade unionist who opposed Conservative governments when they tried to do that, isn’t willing to break a strike and figures out a way to get the power workers back on the job without that. In episode three the conspirators find some dirt they can throw on Harry Perkins: it seems that years before Perkins met a woman named Helen Spencer (Kika Markham) at a labor conference and started an affair with her. The affair was short-lived, and after it ended Helen married a man named Jarvis and the two of them started a socially responsible investment company. Perkins had the Jarvises handle the big Russian loan and paid them the usual fee for doing so – only the conspirators out to get him forge certificates from Swiss bank accounts making it look like Perkins got a personal bribe of 300,000 pounds from the Jarvises in exchange for giving them the job of handling the loan.

The conspirators also arrange for the death of Sir Montague Kowalski (Oscar Quitak), whose car is detoured and run over by a train on his way to Perkins’ big disarmament policy conference, Perkins having learned that nuclear warheads have to be rebuilt every 2 ½ to four years and hit on the idea of dismantling them without rebuilding them. In the end the conspirators demand that Perkins resign due to “ill health” – needless to say, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with his health – and they write out a speech on his teleprompter, but he double-crosses them and instead delivers a speech of his own in which he dissolves Parliament and calls for a new election. The outcome of that election is very much in doubt – polls show the more moderate Wainwright favored over Perkins two to one – but Mullin wrote a sequel in 2019 called The Friends of Harry Perkins, and one can at least admire Perkins’ guts in getting out of his political and personal dilemmas without guile or subterfuge. I was dreading what A Very British Coup would look like given how badly its director, Mick Jackson, screwed up The Bodyguard, but in the end it turned out to be a quite capable political satire, dated in some respects but all too au courant in others.