Major Chester Campbell

Major Campbell arrives in Birmingham as a police inspector sent from Belfast with orders to crush the Peaky Blinders and recover stolen guns. He is devout, humourless, and convinced of his own righteousness, treating the city's criminals and its working class alike with contempt. Behind his official mandate sits a personal hatred of Tommy Shelby.

Sam Neill plays him as ideology made flesh: a man who believes his cruelty is virtue, delivered in flat, patient sentences that never need to raise their volume. The show gives him real institutional power rather than mere menace, so his scenes with Tommy become a duel between two kinds of ruthlessness, one lawful and one not.