"Hostage" and the Fantasy of Virtuous Weakness

Comparing the way Britain's cultural classes sees the world vs other countries on the geopolitical front line

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I have just finished watching Hostage, Netflix’s latest attempt at a British political thriller. At a moment when war has returned to Europe and tensions in Asia are sharpening, the series feels curiously out of time. It promises high drama - a prime minister under siege, a family crisis, a conspiracy at the heart of government - but beneath the surface it plays out as a morality tale about Britain’s armed forces and the supposed virtue of military weakness.

*HOSTAGE SPOILER ALERT*

The premise is straightforward. Suranne Jones (normally a fabulous actress) plays Abigail Dalton, a prime minister whose husband is kidnapped abroad. The ransom is not money but her resignation. As Dalton scrambles to contain the crisis, she discovers that senior generals and officials are colluding with the kidnappers. Their grievance? She has slashed the defence budget. In one pivotal scene, Dalton accuses her nemesis, General Livingston, of wanting to increase defence spending to “two or three per cent” and so reverse her cuts; not only that, but he wants to “safeguard the Armed Forces for the next twenty five years” - proof, in her eyes, that he is a “traitor” to his country.

A viewer with even one lazy eye on the current world situation might have blinked at that. Russian aggression in Europe, Chinese pressure on Taiwan, and Iranian adventurism in the Middle East are not hidden away.

Not are these issues happening in a far away world; these are problems that have a real impact here. Indeed, Russia has repeatedly threatened Britain, and its saboteurs are waging a greyzone war against NATO, including the UK. Russia’s actions are economically significant too - remember the gas price hike after the invasion of Ukraine? And if China blockades Taiwan, the impact on the world economy will be devastating.

Yet somehow, the writer of Hostage, Matt Charman, has chosen to ignore the realities of the world outside.

Hostage never even entertains the notion that the generals might have a case. Instead, they are painted as villains, reactionary plotters ready to topple democracy to claw back their lost billions. Dalton, by contrast, is cast as a resilient, principled, and vindicated heroine. The lesson is clear enough: cutting the military is virtuous; those who demand strength are dangerous.

Charman hammers the point home by setting defence cuts against calls for more NHS funding, a tidy signal of where he thinks Britain’s priorities should lie. But the world has changed. Labour has already pledged to raise defence spending to 5%. By Charman’s logic, today’s Labour government is already the evil junta.

This inversion makes the show feel oddly hollow. Hostage is not really about external threats at all. It is not about Russia, China or even terrorism. The danger to Britain, in its telling, comes from within - from overmighty soldiers who cannot stomach a reduced budget and whop want a safeguarded Armed Forces. Domestic military ambition, rather than foreign aggression, is the menace.

But watching the series in 2025, that message feels like a relic. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the debate across the West has been transformed. NATO’s spending targets are no longer seen as accounting tricks; they are measures of seriousness. Germany has announced a Zeitenwende (an historical turning point) for rearming Germany, Japan is doubling its defence budget, and the United States talks again of great-power rivalry as the organising principle of foreign policy.

In that context, a British drama in which the great peril is “too much military” looks like an artefact from another age. Either Charman is naive in the extreme, or he has a serious axe to grind against the British military, one that Netflix has kindly allowed him to wield.

What struck me most was how narrow the show’s imagination is. It never grapples with the possibility that cutting defence might itself invite danger, that weakness might be the very condition aggressors exploit. Instead, it flatters its audience into believing that safety lies in shrinking the armed forces, and that those who object are zealots or would-be dictators. The world outside the soundstage - Ukraine, Gaza, the Taiwan Strait - vanishes from view.

To be fair, thrillers have always relied on conspiracies and coups to keep the drama moving. But Hostage wears its moral certainty heavily. There are no hard choices here, no real ambiguities. Generals are bad; politicians cutting the military budget are good. Having sat through it, I was left with the sense not of a thriller wrestling with present dangers but of a time capsule from the 2010s, when austerity and war-weariness allowed the comforting fantasy that safety could be bought by spending less.

And that, in the end, is why Hostage hasn’t aged well just months after its release. The real world has moved on, and has become more dangerous, not less.

The notion that Britain’s gravest risk comes from its own military (who have never in modern times even come close to a coup, unlike much of the rest of the world) rather than from Moscow or Beijing is a conceit too clever by half. Watching it today, Hostage feels less like a warning and more like a fantasy of virtuous weakness. It is a story already overtaken by events.

On the Front Lines: How Other Countries’ Media See the World

If Britain’s dramas look inward, others look outward. The difference is telling.

Take Norway. A decade ago, Norwegian broadcasters released Occupied (Okkupert), a series that imagines a “soft” Russian takeover. The trigger is not military spending but