I seriously suspect that Francis Urquhart is actually a Jacobite. It would make sense, after all, especially given his name (Highlands, but presumably with a nod towards Oxford's first Catholic don since the Reformation) and his little speech to right at the end of the series about how his family came south with James I and have been loyal to the Crown "since before your family [i.e. the King's] were even heard of". I also remember one of the Diana conspiracy theories (which of course To Play the King predates, in much the same way that that episode of The Lone Gunmen predated the crackpot 9/11 "truther" theories) which claimed that she was assassinated in order to prevent a restoration of the Stuart monarchy. All of which was presumably meant to make Urquhart seem even more evil, but which to me just makes him seem even more cool.
Because the great gamble of the role for the late Ian Richardson, who played the character to perfection, is that Urquhart is very cool. He's a liar, a thief, a philanderer, a murderer and, by the end of the second and third series in the House of Cards trilogy, a traitor and a war criminal. And yet at the same time he's both the quintessential gentleman villian and, no less, a fully three-dimensional monster on the Richard III model. His soliloquies and asides draw the viewer in, and for all his wickedness it's disturbingly easy to see things from his point of view and even root for him.
Another fascinating thing from today's point of view is that even the Tory politics of To Play the King are played "for real". For all that Urquhart's attitude to the King's liberal, "caring", proto-Blairite mush is very much raw, personal, political and technocratic, it's hard not to nod at everything both Urquhart and especially his chief adviser Sarah Harding have to say. Because the simply facts of the matter are that the welfare state is much too large, public spending is out of control and has been since the 1990s, our dealings with terrorists in Northern Ireland were utterly dishonourable, and there is a great deal to be said for cutting taxes, balancing budgets, restoring National Service, abolishing vagrancy, and so on.
I even found myself wondering how much of the Blair persona had actually grown out of Michael Kitchen's splendid performance as the King - who is really nothing like the Prince of Wales, and is instead a fully and cleverly imagined character in his own right. And given quite what a train-wreck the wretched Blair creature and his brutish henchmen made of this country in real life, it's hard not to think whimsically of a world with a few more Francis Urquharts in it.
At the same time though, for all the glories of the rest of it, To Play the King is almost worth watching just for the very last scene (which has the final credits rolling over it).
