Defence of the Realm 1985

On a foggy night, a car carrying two men is chased by the police; the radio crackles with reports that the country is on high alert after a terrorist attack in Ankara. When the car is forced down a dead-end road, one of the men, Steven Dyce escapes over a high barbed-wire fence, but the other is captured, leaving a tense thread running through the night.

Dennis Markham, Ian Bannen, a prominent Member of Parliament, becomes the center of a growing media storm. A London paper alleges he was seen leaving a woman’s home on the night she is visited by a military attaché from East Germany. Is he a KGB agent? The question gnaws at his loyalty, and editors and reporters debate whether the story should run as the pressure of public scrutiny tightens around him.

Vernon Bayliss, Denholm Elliott, Nick Mullen, Gabriel Byrne, and Jack Macleod, Bill Paterson, work together at the Daily Despatch. Bayliss is summoned for a private meeting with Markham and explains a link to the German agent that Markham himself has not yet grasped. Meanwhile, Mullen interviews Nina Beckman, Greta Scacchi, Markham’s secretary, and then speaks to Markham’s wife, all while initially posing as a plainclothes officer. The newsroom buzzes as the story, later dubbed the “Markham Affair,” starts making waves across television and newspaper channels.

The pressure mounts as Markham is hounded by the press and ultimately forced to resign. Mullen continues his investigative work alongside Bayliss, who grows suspicious that Markham may have been framed. When Bayliss dies of a supposed heart attack on the same night his flat is ransacked, the mystery deepens. Mullen uncovers press-cuttings and a tape in Bayliss’s desk that hint at a motive far broader than a personal scandal, suggesting a conspiracy worth uncovering.

Driven by the growing clues, Mullen visits the young man who was arrested at the start of the film, explaining that his supposed accomplice is dead. This encounter leads him back to the site where the film began: a high-security, yet seemingly unmanned military base near Brandon, operated by the USAF. There, Mullen suspects a nuclear weapon capability tied to the American presence in the UK, and he senses that Markham’s motives might be tied to efforts to remove such dangers from the country. The theory points toward a deeper power struggle than a simple political salacious story.

With Nina’s help, Mullen presses on, even as a break-in at his own flat and persistent surveillance threaten to derail him. When he attempts to publish, his editor delivers the crushing news: the Official Secrets Act blocks the story, and the newspaper owner, Kingsbrook, intervenes personally to keep it from print. Kingsbrook, a figure reminiscent of a powerful wartime publisher, remains a looming question in the background: who controls the information, and who benefits from keeping it quiet?

The investigation takes another turn when Mullen discovers that the supposed KGB agent is, in fact, a British operative, and he demands to know who supplied that source. The man in question is Anthony Clegg, Oliver Ford Davies. Confronted in a gentleman’s club, Clegg is grabbed by two men and hauled away for questioning by senior officials. The scene ends with no clear explanation, and Mullen returns to a ransacked flat, where Nina arrives just as danger closes in. A bomb explodes, seemingly killing them both, and the room is plunged into smoke and silence.

Yet the fallout is not contained. Nina had already managed to post the incriminating evidence to Germany, allowing the world to glimpse a chain of actions that stretch beyond national borders. The story of the near-nuclear-disaster begins to spread across the European press, leaving viewers to wonder who knew what, and when, about the delicate balance between political intrigue and dangerous military secrecy. The film ends on a note of unresolved tension, with the truth out in the world but the very people who might have controlled it now a part of the same tangled web they sought to expose.