Claire Foy brings complexity to a disgraced duchess in A Very British Scandal

It seems remarkable, given the vital ingredients, that the story of the duchess of Argyll has evaded screens until now. The various accounts of the Profumo affair, the Bloomsbury Group and Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire suggest a strong appetite for depictions of aristos engaged in extramarital flings. A Very British Scandal documents the second marriage of British socialite and fabled beauty Margaret Campbell (a rich, complex performance from Claire Foy) to the sozzled, secretly skint Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll (Paul Bettany), culminating in a 1963 divorce during which details of Margaret’s infidelities — but not her husband’s — cascaded from the court and into tabloid newspapers.

At the centre of the duke’s case was a Polaroid of his wife giving oral pleasure to a “headless man”, whose face was conveniently cut off by the camera, plus a list of 88 men with whom he claimed she had been having sex. In a lengthy summing up, the judge branded Margaret a “highly sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a basic sexual appetite”.

The series comes from the team behind A Very English Scandal, the 2018 account of Jeremy Thorpe MP and his plot to kill his lover, Norman Scott, with which it shares themes of sex and shame, if not the same ribald tone. It would have been easy to turn this story into a gratuitous Sixties shag-fest. But while the camera adores Foy, who is luminescent in pearls, mink stoles and pillar-box red lipstick, the focus is less on the details of her affairs than the bitter power games between duke and duchess. We watch as their early affection is suffocated by mutual greed — he wants her money and she wants his title and his Scottish pile — and Ian’s alcoholism and amphetamine addiction. This is a powerful portrait of a toxic marriage.

Writer Sarah Phelps (Dublin Murders, The Pale Horse) doesn’t shrink from Margaret’s duplicity — early on we see her forging a letter from Ian’s ex-wife casting doubt on the paternity of his two sons — though her account is studiously three-dimensional, revealing the duchess’s resilience, her defiant spirit and caustic wit. Hungover and feeling emasculated by his wife’s financial clout, Ian complains she has his balls in her handbag. “It’s not like they’d take up much room,” she shoots back.

Most of all, A Very British Scandal is about a woman being cruelly dragged through the mud and the unchallenged misogyny and double standards stretching from the judiciary to the media to members of the Campbells’ own household, including the duke’s Mrs Danvers-esque secretary, Yvonne. Labelled “the dirty Duchess”, Margaret had her flaws but was more sinned against than sinning, a victim of revenge porn long before the term had been invented. Confiding in her friend Peter Combe, Margaret makes clear she has no illusions about what is required in front of the judge: “I have to be sorry,” she says. “Because the law doesn’t like women who aren’t sorry.”

★★★★☆

On BBC1 on December 26 at 9pm