Jeff Pope’s meticulous drama Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes would be a harrowing watch wherever you were in July 2005. But if you happened then to be living or working in London, I must warn you that it brings it all flooding back: the shock, the horror, the fear; the sudden mistrust we all carried with us whenever we travelled by Tube or bus. Those dread-filled weeks. The bombings on 7 July, in which 52 people died and more than 700 were injured. The failed bombings on 21 July (this time, only the terrorists’ detonators exploded). The shooting by the police of an innocent, young Brazilian electrician called Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground station on 22 July.
In the past, I haven’t always been kind about Pope’s work: The Reckoning, the 2023 drama he produced about Jimmy Savile, was, for me, loathsome. But Suspect is brilliantly done, a piece that smoothly dispenses with certain myths even as it delivers what will be new information to some. How attentive it is to all those who were involved. Until now, I was unaware of the quiet bravery of Lana Vandenberghe (Laura Aikman), a Canadian secretary at the Independent Police Complaints Commission, who acted as a whistleblower when it became apparent that what the public was being told about De Menezes’s death was contrary to the evidence the IPCC had gathered.
There are four parts, the first two of which are devoted to the bombings – a reminder of the highly febrile atmosphere in which the Metropolitan Police were working. So much is happening. In a tunnel, Cliff Todd (Daniel Mays), a forensic officer, is dealing with 40-degree heat and thousands of body parts. In Whitehall, politicians are holding Cobra meetings and panicking. At New Scotland Yard, Commissioner Ian Blair (Conleth Hill), Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick (Russell Tovey) and the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, Andy Hayman (Max Beesley), are running the biggest investigation of their lives. De Menezes is, at this point, a peripheral, happy-go-lucky figure; we see him working, we see him eating toast. He doesn’t know – he will never know – that he lives in the same building in Tulse Hill as Osman Hussain, one of the perpetrators of the failed attacks of 21 July.
Pope must have read hundreds of documents before he went to his desk. His minute-by-minute depiction, in the third episode, of how De Menezes came to be mistaken for Hussain, and of the lies that were told about this afterwards, is unmuddied, dramatic enough in itself to need no writerly embellishment; ditto his reconstruction, in the fourth episode, of the 2008 inquest into De Menezes’ death (though the sight of Alex Jennings as Michael Mansfield KC in a long grey wig does briefly threaten the solemnity).
But elsewhere, Pope can’t resist getting into character, making much of the difficult relationship between Blair and Paddick (the latter is appalled by Blair’s handling of events, the way he rushes to make statements before he’s in possession of the facts) – and here I wonder slightly at Paul Andrew Williams’s direction. Procedural obfuscation doesn’t always announce itself loudly, as if it was arriving at a party. Hill makes Blair not only seem like a fool, but a ridiculously camp one at that, his pomposity threatening to bust the buttons of his uniform at moments.
I much prefer the portrait of Cressida Dick (Emily Mortimer), the commander of the surveillance operation that led to the killing of De Menezes: her implacability, her sophistry, her refusal to admit to mistakes. In the end, though, this is the definition of an ensemble piece: James Nelson-Joyce, the star of the BBC’s This City Is Ours, plays a firearms officer, and has about three lines. I don’t know if the cast were motivated by any cause, but the result, generous and committed, not only pays tribute to De Menezes, and the shameful circumstances of his death; this is also “J’accuse”, on a scale both subtle and grand. No officer ever faced charges for his killing. The Metropolitan Police was merely fined £175,000 for breaching health and safety rules. Dick rose to become its commissioner. Blair (like Paddick) sits in the House of Lords, where the lunches are subsidised, and the recent past is a land only dimly recalled.
Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes
Disney+
[See also: Louis Theroux: The Settlers is a deathly warning]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall