Too in thrall to today’s dogmas: ITV1’s A Spy Among Friends reviewed

In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. The programme managed to shed new light on a familiar but still irresistible story by concentrating on Philby’s relationship with his old chum – and fellow Cambridge man – Nicholas Elliott. Elliott was sent in 1963 by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to question Philby in Beirut where Philby had become the Observer’s foreign correspondent after a long and successful career betraying his countrymen to the Soviets. Elliott did elicit some sort of confession, but a few days later, Philby absconded to Moscow. So had Elliott helped with the escape a) to save his friend; b) to spare British blushes by avoiding a public trial; or c) had he not had a hand in it at all?

Ultimately, Macintyre didn’t commit himself – presumably on the solid grounds that nobody really knows. There was, however, no mistaking his central point: that the unshakable class assumptions of the British establishment made them unable to believe ‘a chap like us’ could be a wrong ’un. Amplifying this point were some slightly half-hearted dramatic reconstructions in which Elliott and Philby demonstrated how posh they were.

Now the same book is given more full-throated dramatic treatment, and an all-star cast, in ITV1’s A Spy among Friends, also available on ITVX (although, in my experience, this is not so much a streaming service as an endlessly buffering one). So it is that here we have Damian Lewis as Elliott and Guy Pearce as Philby demonstrating how posh they were – in Sunday’s opener by such cunning methods as wearing cricket whites, exuding patrician unflappability and drinking pink gin in London clubs.