Michael Heseltine, the famous knife-wielder of the Thatcher decade, once remarked: “He who wields the knife never wears the crown.” It’s a truth that Aiden Hoynes (David Tennant) fails to recognise. The liberal Hoynes resigns from a decisively conservative government in order to trigger a leadership battle that he hopes to win.

The coup fails after the terrifically slimy Bruce Babbish (Ed Stoppard), Hoynes’s best friend in Westminster, screws him over and supports the PM. Hoynes becomes a bitter stalking horse outside the government. The comparisons with Heseltine are irresistible. They’ve even turned Tennant’s hair blonde to make it more explicit.

That’s not the only reference to contemporary British politics: we also see the Balls-Cooper axis at the heart of the Labour party. Hoynes’s wife, Freya Gardner (Emily Watson) is a political high-flyer with deeply held – though less brash – ambitions of her own. She is quickly promoted to Work and Pensions Secretary after Hoynes resigns, in no small part an exercise in needling Hoynes.

Hoynes callously manipulates Gardner to the point of sexual abuse, but she recognises this manipulation early on. “Sometimes you have to do bad things to get into power, to do good things once you’re there,” Hoynes whispers in Gardner’s ear before a sex scene. What Hoynes really means, Gardner realises, is that she has to do bad things to get him into power. The sacrifices that she has made for husband’s career continue even though she is finally the one in the limelight. Predictably she starts to fight back – domestically and politically – becoming closer with Babbish and colluding in his plotting.

The programme is at its best when it portrays the sheer dullness of the backbench politican’s life. Ejected from ministerial politics, Hoynes clearly struggles to readjust to the slow mundanity of his constituency. So instead he plots the demise of the government from behind a computer screen in a generic suburban neighbourhood. Westminster-watchers will criticise the show for being too cynical; for characterising politics in terms of the infighting, duplicity and egoism that only rarely bubbles to the surface. That’s fine – it’s political drama, not documentary, after all.

10 Downing Street is the death star, the focal point of party machinations and the apex of its power. In one ridiculous scene Gardner arrives early for Cabinet. With time to kill, one supposes, she has a quick ponder and then decides to sit in the PM’s chair – just for kicks. Her reaction is positively orgasmic. There’s nothing profound about it; it’s just plain awkward, like watching Game of Thrones with your parents.

If The Politician’s Husband is something of a poor man’s Macbeth, then Hoynes is a poor man’s Iago. He’s a total shit, but he’s also really shit at being one. The result is a drama that manages to be utterly compelling on the first watch – more so than its BBC1 Thursday night rival Question Time at least – but which lacks the depth or sophistication that’ll make you buy this box set instead of, say, the Danish political drama Borgen.

Kirsty Wark is no stranger to interviews. Best known for presenting Newsnight and The Review Show, she’s grilled everyone from popstars to politicians, Madonna to Miliband, in a career spanning thirty seven years. So I was understandably nervous as I sat down at my kitchen table, with nothing more than some notes scrawled on a piece of paper for reference and my dodgy laptop microphone to record our conversation.

I was in need of some coaching. How does she get the best out of the people she interviews? By doing her homework. “Nothing would horrify me more than to go into an interview unprepared. At Newsnight, we do plan the interviews quite heavily, and we give a great deal of thought to their construction.” For Kirsty, this means a balance of questions, “both light and shade”. And if she doesn’t get what she wants, she’s not afraid to be persistent. She has come under fire in the past for her direct interview style.

When I ask Kirsty if she thinks the media has become more tough on politicians since she began her career, she agrees: “I think journalists tended to be much more deferential in the post-war years. But I worked with Robin Day on The World at One, and he was a great person to learn things from – like how to ask a deadly question with a smile on your face.” But that doesn’t mean journalists can’t be friends with politicians. “People are complex characters and the assumption that because you’re friendly with someone you hold the same political views as them is complete nonsense. I think politicians realise that once they’re in the studio, they get the same treatment as anyone else. People are quite realistic about these things.”

“They’re ephemeral,” Kirsty says, as she tries to pinpoint the best interview of her career.  “You might do part of an interview well but not the other part. They come and go very quickly. And obviously the perception changes after a couple of weeks, months, years. My interview with Mrs. Thatcher seems like it was a hundred years ago, but it’s still talked about.” Yet recently she’s been branching out from the “instant gratification” of journalism. Her first novel is being published in 2014, and she’s already secured the publisher for her second. Did she find it a challenge to adapt to writing fiction? “It’s an unbelievably long process, which is really strange when you’re used to getting some kind of instantaneous hit. I’m usually work in teams, so to pore over something and be solitary was very different.”

When I touch upon her experience as a woman in broadcasting, she tells me she was lucky. “At the time I graduated there was a drive to get more women in the BBC. I don’t think I was held back because I was a woman.” She is quick to clarify her position: “I’m not belittling it. I certainly think it might be the case for other people.”

I move on to the inevitable question: what advice would she give to young people aspiring to be journalists? “Everyone can make films these days, even if it’s just on people’s phones. It’s not only the ability, but the ingenuity that people are looking for now. The thing I would advise is to have a passion for something and to have written about it, whether for your own benefit, or for a blog, or in Cherwell or anywhere. What you’re doing is combining an interest in communication with an absolute passion, and the ability to research it quite thoroughly.” And media studies? “It’s fine,” she says, “But it’s not the be all and end all. A lively mind is what Newsnight wants.” She tells me that her daughter has decided to do a journalism degree. “She doesn’t expect to have a lifelong career; she expects the struggle of the freelance,” Kirsty explains. “I’m saying to her: stay at university, do a postgrad, drink up as much education as you can.”

She has raced through all my questions with barely a moment’s hesitation. I clearly have a lot to learn. Kirsty says a cheerful goodbye and returns to her schedule. I breathe a sigh of relief and go and get a biscuit.

The summer of superheroes is about to get underway and Marvel has served up its first offering in the shape of Iron Man 3. Jam-packed with explosions, Starkisms and even a red, white and blue Iron Patriot, fans of the franchise will not be disappointed.

Following on from the events in last summer’s Avengers Assemble, the third Iron Man instalment shows a different side to the enigma that is Tony Stark. He’s become an isolated character, content to spend time playing with a ridiculous amount of technology in his basement armoury. Pepper is very much his priority in life, that’s for sure, but not everything is as rosy as it seems.

Enter Aldrich Killian played by Guy Pearce (The King’s Speech, Memento). At the start we have a flashback all the way back to 1999 which explains the origins of Stark’s relationship with Killian, who appears to be an over-eager, creepy Iron Man fan. Fast-forward and Killian’s had something of a makeover. Not only that, he’s keen to establish a name for himself in terrorism. Without ruining the plot too much, suffice to say Sir Ben Kingsley features as the idiotic frontman of Killian’s scheme, turning what at first seems a serious terrorist threat into a far less credible plotline. In fact, it begins to tip the balance from far-fetched but enjoyable into the realms of ridiculous and highly questionable.

Like Iron Man himself, this movie is far from perfect. There’s no denying that the cast is strong, there’s plenty of fast-paced action to keep it all moving, and Shane Black does a great job stepping in as director after Jon Favreau. But for all this, it seems to fall a bit short. While Stark’s limitations make him a less two-dimensional character, at forty-six it’s questionable whether it’s time for him to hang up the suit, or pass it on – something the film hints at with the introduction of young sidekick Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins).

As the first of what is set to be a deluge of superhero-based fare, there was also great anticipation surrounding Iron Man 3 as the movie which ushers in an age of the Marvel 3D spectacular. However, there are no real 3D moments that make it worthy of breaking out the plastic specs. The best moment involves a completely scientifically unsound scene involving Iron Man catching falling victims of an air crash, à la Barrel of Monkeys. And he saves them all, of course. Although entertaining, the predictability is exasperating – not to mention poor Gwyneth Paltrow, who doesn’t seem to be able to make it through a scene without being blown up.

This is by no means a bad movie; it’s just not quite living up to the hype. The third instalment is a difficult one to deliver for any blockbuster factory, and this is no exception. There’s always the risk with overworking a popular genre that it becomes worn out for good. Let’s just hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for Marvel’s finest.

3 stars

It is a wonderful irony that the great cultural artefacts of litera­ture, architecture, art et al, which were frequently created by radical or liberal men and women with subversive intent, are most zealously defended in later ages by conserva­tives.

Benjamin Disraeli is the man who said “A society is judged not by what it creates, but by what it preserves”. But he also made the remark: “Change is constant, change is inevitable.” Politicians should seek to manage and channel this change in the di­rection of the public interest, while preserving ordered society from dis­integration. It is this pragmatic and open approach towards change that distinguishes the conservative from the merely reactionary.

Culture here means both the shared characteristics and practices of a group or groups; and the intel­lectual and aesthetic manifestations of attempts to understand, work upon and celebrate the human con­dition.

People are brought and remain to­gether because of shared beliefs, concerns and yearnings, but it is only when these values are enshrined in a ‘culture’ that these people become a society.

A culture is, as Oakeshott would have put it, “crystallised knowledge” – the accumulated results of a socie­ty’s attempt to understand the world around it, in an accessible form.

It must be the belief of any con­servative that a society is neither the sum of state institutions nor of en­tirely independent individuals, but is a community of individuals held together through shared values that find expression in a culture. These values will almost always be disput­ed or in doubt; in fact the strongest societies are those where this is pre­cisely the case.

Debate and competing cultural viewpoints enrich both the culture of a society and the society’s under­standing of itself. It is doubt, not cer­tainty, that leads to the most vibrant culture.

Some values do persist across so­cieties, transmitted through history via culture – this is one reason for the importance of the narrative Great Canon School of cultural study, in which we see radical changes in western cul­ture balanced against the preserva­tion and refine­ment of what has gone be­fore.

Edmund Burke, surveying the de­struction wrought by revolution, once wrote that society is “a partner­ship…between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”

The obligation of every living generation in this partnership is to preserve and add to their inherited culture, so that it may be passed on to the next strengthened.

What are at first cultural change agents, such as fiction with a radi­cal political agenda, become assimilated into the shared culture when the lessons which they seek to teach are accept­ed and blended with traditional val­ues.

In an episode of The O’Reilly Show on Fox News late last year the allegedly ‘traditionalist’ commentator Bill O’Reilly made an unfavourable comparison between Psy of ‘Gang­nam Style’ fame and Elvis Presley, unaware that in the mid-50s con­servative commentators would have hotly denounced the King’s music for its African-American influences and uninhibited carnality. What was once risqué or even taboo soon becomes part of the backdrop on which new artists base their view of society.

As an avowed pop culture junkie (give me Van Morrison or Mark Kermode over John Keats or William Hazlitt any day) I would argue that ‘low’ has just as much a place as ‘high’ in our under­standing of culture. The snobbery that excludes, say, the music of Katy Perry or the writ­ing of a maga­zine like GQ from cultural preservation is the same as that which, six or seven dec­ades ago, refused to acknowledge cinema as a legitimate art form.

Traditionally, ‘high’ culture does very often have a greater artistic val­ue than ‘low’ culture: far be it from me to claim that there is greater mu­sical sophistication or more intel­lectual endeavour in Teenage Dream than in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

Conservatives should seek the truth expressed about society in all cultural products. The fusion of mor­al wholesomeness with liberated sexuality found in Miss Perry’s music is good shorthand for the ideal form of twenty-first century sexual moral­ity.

Conservatism should value cul­ture so highly because it is what makes a collection of people a soci­ety, and also because it holds up a mirror to people from different ages so that they can see themselves more clearly.

For instance Henry IV Parts I and II do not just tell us about the relation­ship between a father and a son in early modern England, but universal truths about fathers and sons.

Not only is there no society with­out culture, but no understanding of oneself or other people without cul­ture. And since conservatism boils down to the two goals of preserving a stable, dynamic society; and giving liberty and dignity to individuals, there can be no conservatism with­out culture.