Harry Palfrey

Harry Palfrey slips through the corridors of Whitehall as a lawyer and fixer, the kind of man who is always present at meetings about intelligence but never quite responsible for what happens in them. Amiable, evasive, endlessly accommodating to whoever holds power, he greases the machinery that lets men like Roper operate unbothered.

Neil Morrissey plays him with a genial, put-upon slipperiness that makes bureaucratic complicity feel almost cosy — you like him before you clock what he actually enables. The role is small but exact: Palfrey is the show's quiet reminder that institutional evil rarely wears a villain's face, just a civil servant's smile.