Hook: In a random film-of-the-day scroll, I stumbled on a picture that at first glance looks like a typical early-80s British gangster flick: The Long Good Friday (1980), director John Mackenzie. Bob Hoskins as London crime boss Harold Shand, Helen Mirren as his mistress, a bomb in a Rolls-Royce, the IRA and bent coppers. But when I started digging, I discovered this isn't a "gangster movie" — it's a political document that predicted with pinpoint accuracy what would happen to London and all of Britain 30 years later: the Thatcherite Docklands boom, the Brighton bombing, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and even — if you look wider — Brexit.
The film's central conflict is simple to the point of horror, but there's one layer most viewers miss.
Harold Shand is a London crime boss who believes he controls everything: the police, politicians, the market. He wants to build a "new London" — turn the ruined Docklands into a financial center, attract American investors (read: the mob) and become a legitimate businessman. His project is basically Canary Wharf 15 years before it appeared. He's already imagining the Olympics on the Isle of Dogs (Docklands). He's already building a model on his yacht under Tower Bridge.
And here he makes one mistake that kills the whole project: he assumes any conflict in London is a conflict within his rules. Gangster rules. He thinks rivals are behind the attacks, and sends his crew to find out who "took someone else's territory." In the abattoir (in the famous abattoir scene) he hangs all the suspected London bosses on meat hooks in the slaughterhouse — and discovers that none of them knows anything.
This is the film's key metaphor: a smart, strong-willed, charismatic individual who cannot understand that his world has changed, because he only sees those who play by the same rules. Shand's world is the world of London crime, the world of "who controls whom," a world where everything is bought and sold. But the IRA is a different universe. Terrorism doesn't operate by the rules of criminal business. It doesn't "sell." It destroys.
Bob Hoskins plays this moment with such physical conviction that you can almost feel Shand slowly beginning to grasp the scale of his delusion. His famous line — "You don't crucify people. Not on Good Friday" — isn't just a punchline. It's the last frontier of normalcy, beyond which a new world begins. Shand lives in a world where Good Friday means "we don't do such things." But for the IRA, Good Friday isn't a prohibition. It's a choice of date.
"His problem is that he doesn't know what's happening to him, and doesn't even know that he doesn't know."
— Michael Wood, London Review of Books, 2015
The Long Good Friday was shot in spring 1979 — a month before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. This is no coincidence. Barrie Keeffe, the screenwriter, was a reporter from the East End, and he knew London not from films but from the streets. He knew what was coming.
Keeffe didn't predict Thatcher — he predicted the model Thatcher would turn into policy: privatization of space, destruction of old communities, replacing them with global capital. Harold Shand is literally the first Thatcherite antihero: free market, destruction of the social network, turning the Docklands into a commodity. But Shand is a gangster, and a gangster can't compete with the state. Thatcher could. And did.
In 1981, the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) was created — a quasi-governmental body that was given the right to rebuild 8.5 square miles of East London without regard to local councils. What did they do? Exactly what Shand dreamed of: privatized the space, attracted global capital, built Canary Wharf — a glass citadel that by 2012 surpassed the City in the number of financial jobs. But housing prices in the Docklands skyrocketed, and the old residents — dockers, their families — were "cleared." As Keeffe put it when he met with a Guardian journalist in 2015, returning to Katherine Docks after 35 years: "They went to Harlow, to Essex. Some of them were happy. But it wasn't London. It was a purge, really".
The place where in the film Shand dealt with his enemies in an industrial building in Wapping is now a luxury residential complex with a Savills agency on the ground floor. The place where Helen Mirren played the "gangster boss's girlfriend" on the riverbank, she bought herself — and there are signs on the fences: "Private road. CCTV monitored."
The most riveting detail in the film is its ending.
Shand, having killed all the traitors and decided he's back in control, leaves the Savoy Hotel. He gets in the car — and discovers IRA men are already waiting for him. He's held at gunpoint. In another car — his mistress, also captured. The camera shows a close-up of Shand's face for over two minutes: first a smile — he thinks he can negotiate. Then alarm. Then — emptiness. He begins to understand that his world is over.
The film came out in 1980. Four years later — October 12, 1984 — the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Thatcher's party conference was being held. Five people died, 31 were injured. Thatcher was unharmed — she came on stage 6.5 hours after the explosion and got a standing ovation. But the IRA sent a message: "Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war".
14 years after the film — April 10, 1998 — the Good Friday Agreement was signed — the agreement to end the conflict in Northern Ireland. Patrick Magee, the Brighton bomber, was released under this agreement in 1999. The agreement's name matches the day Shand utters his famous phrase. This isn't an easter egg — it's a coincidence that makes the film prophetic twice: both in the line of violence and in the line of peace.
38 years after the film — June 23, 2016 — Britain voted for Brexit. And here Shand's metaphor becomes complete. Colin Edwards, author of the Medium piece "What would Harry have made of Brexit?", puts it this way:
"Listening to Harry's excellent monologue down the Thames at the start is fascinating in a country that's voted for fakkin' Brexit. Yes, Harry is a right-wing, Thatcherite individualist but today he seems like a rampantly progressive, Euro-loving liberal. It feels kinda scary to now think of Harold Shand as positively 'quaint' compared to the right-wing, anti-Europe, Little Englander of today."
The film's music was written by Francis Monkman — keyboardist from the band Curved Air. The soundtrack is electronic, synthetic, heavy for its time (1980), with those very synthesizer patterns that seven years later would become the aural language of "Miami Vice" and Oliver Stone's "Wall Street." Monkman didn't know he was making a soundtrack for a film about Thatcherism — he was just making music that felt right. It felt right because Monkman was perceptive enough to hear what future London sounded like — a London where the roar of construction cranes in the Docklands would replace the roar of criminal showdowns.
The film was shot by Phil Méheux — a cinematographer who found a way to show London as simultaneously grimy and glamorous. Not black-and-white like noir. Not bright like a Hollywood thriller. But gray-glass — that very London that ten years later would become Canary Wharf.
The film contains three career prophecies worth mentioning separately.
Pierce Brosnan appeared in the film at age 25 — in the role of "First Irishman," one of the IRA men who kills Colin and at the end sits next to Shand in the car. Brosnan is one of those people who didn't know his role would have such meaning 12 years later when he became James Bond. But his face — young, cold, calm — already said: this man can kill and smile.
Helen Mirren played Victoria — Shand's mistress and business partner. Victoria is the only woman in the film who thinks on par with men and makes the right decisions. In 1980 this was rare. In 2006 Mirren would win an Oscar for playing the Queen — and become the queen of British cinema. But the seed of her greatness is right here, on this boat on the Thames, where she saves the situation when everyone around is losing their heads.
Bob Hoskins received a BAFTA nomination and an Evening Standard Film Award for the role of Harold Shand. This was his breakthrough role — before it he was a second-tier actor, after — a star. But the most striking thing: Shand is the perfect predecessor to his Eddie Valiant in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988), and later — North in "Mission: Impossible III" (2006). Hoskins knew how to play people who don't understand that the world around them has changed. He knew how to play "the end of an era" with such physical conviction that it wasn't painful, but beautiful.
Hoskins died April 29, 2014, at age 71. A year before that he saw London host the Olympics — the very event Harold Shand dreamed of holding in the Docklands.
The Long Good Friday isn't just a good thriller. It's an archaeological layer that captured the moment when London — and all of Britain — stood at a crossroads. Shand sees the future: global capital, the Docklands, glass skyscrapers, the Olympics. He's right. But he doesn't understand that the future isn't just his dream. It's also the bombs in Brighton, and the Good Friday Agreement, and 30 years of war in Northern Ireland, and Brexit.
The film became the most British gangster film of all time (21st place on the BFI Top 100 list, 19th place on the Empire list). It got 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert called it "an amazing piece of work." But its main virtue isn't critics' reviews. Its main virtue is that every time you rewatch it, you find a new layer of prophecy.
Harold Shand wanted to build a new London. He built it — and was destroyed by those he didn't see. But London grew. And in how it grew, there's both his dream and his death. Every skyscraper in Canary Wharf stands on concrete foundations and on blood — not criminal, but historical.
"Harold would be 80 now, wouldn't he? He'd wish he could be part of what London is, but he couldn't keep up. He'd ask himself the same thing I do. Who owns it all now anyway?"
— Barrie Keeffe, screenwriter, The Guardian, 2015
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