Cromwell, the fixers’ fixer: a role model for our times | Martin Kettle

The hero of Wolf Hall was cold-blooded and ruthless, but he mastered statecraft and achieved results

Thomas Cromwell is the politician of the moment. We seem entranced by him. How cunning and deep he is. How clever and calculating. With what skill he acquires, husbands and uses his power. How precise he is in his judgment of when to speak and when to stay silent, when to watch and when to act, absolutely ruthlessly if need be.

We are a nation hooked on Cromwell, as a result of Hilary Mantel’s novels. And now perhaps in even greater numbers than before, thanks to the BBC’s dramatisation of Wolf Hall that began this week, whose centrepiece is Mark Rylance’s Cromwell: the outsider who mesmerisingly watches, plots and thinks his way into the heart of the English Tudor state.

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