Peter Judd

Who they are

A cabinet minister with a constituency, a factotum called Sebastian, and a history he would rather not have photographed. He is Slow Horses’s link between the Service and the political class that uses it: not a conspirator, an opportunist who is useful to conspirators.

What they want

Office, and to be seen wanting it in the right way. He will trade any favour for a future favour and calls the trade loyalty.

Book 1 — Slow Horses

• C09 — Hobden arrives after midnight with a story and a photograph of Judd giving a Nazi salute beside Nicholas Frost. Judd slaps him, calls him a has-been — then agrees to “see to it”, and tells Sebastian to make calls.
• C17 — Pays radio tribute to the dead Hobden and lets it be known he would take greater office.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C01 — Glimpsed on a bar television as the new Home Secretary while the slow horses insult him: the minister who now owns their fate.
• C06 — Summons Tearney and lets her work out that Sylvester Monteith’s Black Arrow was his tiger team, hired to prove institutional failure.
• C06 — Jokes about having the agents “put down”, then orders them sacked and the house closed that day: a demonstration of power, not a policy.
• C09 — In a Paddington square he tells Taverner she is in his pocket and gropes her; she gropes back, and he learns Tearney can end him.
• C14 — Takes her partial confession and sends Seb to collect her from the pub: the fixer as the mechanism.
• C16 — Takes her call reporting the worst case and sends Seb to kill Lamb; Seb dies in Lamb’s doorway.

He is never in the room: Black Arrow does the violence, Tearney signs the closure, Seb runs the errand. The one thing he spends is his fixer, and the book does not show him counting it.

Book 5 — London Rules

• C06 — Present only in passing, twice: one of the big beasts glimpsed in a members-only watering hole, “plotting their comebacks”, and “presently waiting out a hiccup in his career” while Gimball threatens the PM. He is not the Brexit campaigner here — that is Dennis Gimball — and he does not appear again.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C07 — Lunch at a members-only club off Wigmore Street: late, tearing up a card pressed on him, talking of a comeback built on college networks and offering Diana Taverner a warning about bad people on her patch.
• C07 — Over shepherd’s pie, the details: the Caerwyss Hall gathering, the royal he calls Number Seven, the catering boy who asked for fifty thousand pounds, and the nation state he referred the problem to, which supplied the professionals. The boy’s father was a dead Five officer named Harper.
• C10 — Named as having warned Taverner what Frank Harkness’s presence in the country meant.
• C11 — Named as chief executive of Bullingdon Fopp and a former Home Secretary, and as one of the party guests whose presence explains why Lucas Harper never went to the police.
• C12 — Named again as a former Home Secretary; Emma Flyte doubts his reach runs to a town the size of Pegsea.
• C14 — Tells Taverner the Welsh deaths did not happen — the boy has memory-wiped himself and his clients want the episode buried — then proposes a Service funded by private partners and independent of government, with himself as broker. She calls it a coup and leaves without another word.

Tells

Warmth as a tactic, then the kitchen door closing. The photograph is the whole of his character: a thing he did once, that he will kill to keep unremembered.

Open questions

What “see to it” bought, and whether the hit-and-run was the Service’s favour or Judd’s own. The novel leaves the chain of instruction deliberately vague.