Having run for a total of five seasons, with a sixth around the corner, Peaky Blinders has had a slew of villains for the Shelby family to face off yet none of them have ever seemed to match seasons 1 and 2’s Inspector Campbell. Sam Neill’s impeccable performance as the Inspector, and later Major, Campbell brought a frighteningly calm presence to the screen, having character progression of his own compared to the other villains he shared screen time with, Billy Kimber and Darby Sabini. While Campbell would meet his demise at the end of the second season, he’d successfully go down as perhaps the best of all the Peaky Blinders villains, with even the current Oswald Mosley failing to match his presence.
In the same way that Churchill’s role in Peaky Blinders is necessary to ground the show in reality and provide a moral grey area, Inspector Campbell was also a tool for achieving this. His presence was one of menace yet equally legitimacy, thanks to his employment by the Crown and affiliation with Churchill himself. Expanding this dynamic that Winston Churchill creates, the blending of politics and a true-to-life moral grey zone into an antagonist for the show allows the audience greater interaction with the show, forcing them to debate the moral inconsistencies of all the characters' actions, opposed to being told who to like and who not to.
Legally speaking, Campbell is the ‘good guy’ in the first two seasons of Peaky Blinders, working for the Crown and aiming to bring an end to criminal activity in Birmingham, all of which are, on paper, respectable goals. While Gina seems to be season 6’s threat, the looming power of the law over the heads of the protagonist ultimately added another layer of intrigue to the show's plot. In a real-life scenario, the audience would predominantly side with the law, wanting an end to criminality in their local area, however, the titular Peaky Blinders are the criminals in this show. The audience is therefore forced to engage with the show to a greater extent, having to review the actions of the characters more deliberately and grimace even more so when individuals such as Tommy do something particularly brutal.
With the later seasons, where the villains of the show are just as, if not more brutal and morally corrupt than the Shelby’s, no longer does the audience have to engage with the narrative in this way. Season 6 teases a return to greatness, however, no other Peaky Blinders villain is yet to match the power dynamic of Inspector Campbell, nor his legality which ultimately made his morally corrupt actions worse as a result. As a matter of fact, Oswald Mosley, the prevailing villain of season 5 and now season 6 is the epitome of evil, leaving absolutely no question to the viewer as to who is the good guy and who is bad in the dynamic between Oswald and Tommy.
While it seems a bit too late to bring a Campbell-level villain back into the show as it approaches its final season, it cannot go without saying that Campbell brought something to those earlier seasons that no other villain has achieved. Characters such as Mosley most certainly make for a menacing opponent, but one that ultimately seems two dimensional in his evil, opposed to the legitimized threat of Campbell. Season 6's true story creates a problem already, having used a historical figure, with Mosley as its villain, not only making it more predictable but making Mosley’s ideology viler in nature than had it been fictional, making him a bland and predictably villainous individual compared to Campbell.
Perhaps Campbell is best described as an antagonist opposed to a villain, due to his seemingly genuine desire to combat crime. The audience is therefore allowed to view him as a villain based on his actions, not his narrative status, a unique advantage he maintains to this day over the other Peaky Blinders villains. As Peaky Blinders spirals violently towards its end, and perhaps even Tommy Shelby’s fate sealed, the villains of the later seasons, including Mosley, still do not compare to Inspector Campbell’s presence in seasons 1 and 2.