Tony Blair

Freshly elected as Prime Minister, Tony Blair arrives at Buckingham Palace radiating modernising energy and a certain impatience with royal ritual. He is young, popular, convinced of his own reforming mission, and not always sure how much deference the monarchy is actually owed. His early meetings with the Queen crackle with generational mismatch.

Bertie Carvel plays Blair with a politician's practiced warmth that never quite masks the calculation underneath — you can watch him read a room and adjust in real time. The show uses him to dramatise Britain's shifting relationship with tradition, and Carvel makes that tension personal: charming, faintly condescending, genuinely unsure how sincere he's being himself.