Home Secretary Julia Montague

Julia Montague is Britain's Home Secretary, a hawkish, ambitious politician pushing a sweeping surveillance bill in the name of national security. Cool, controlled and quietly ruthless, she views the world as a set of calculations to be won. Assigned a new personal protection officer after a terror threat, she treats him at first as furniture, not a person.

Keeley Hawes plays Julia as a woman who has learned that showing nothing is its own kind of power, and the show keeps testing that armour against a bodyguard she can't quite categorise. The friction between her political ruthlessness and flashes of private vulnerability makes her genuinely unpredictable to watch.