Kompromat Page 4

  Back in London, before he left for St Petersburg – how long ago it seemed! – Barnard had had a security briefing.

  ‘Get alongside Popov, if you can,’ the MI6 man had said. ‘This is a unique opportunity. You’re going to be in a totally informal setting. But watch out. Popov served for years as the head of the KGB in East Germany. Recruiting agents, running agents, that’s meat and drink to him. Once a spy-master, always a spy-master. He’ll never get that out of his system. He may try to recruit you. A British Cabinet minister would be a big fish to land. Be sure to keep us posted.’

  Popov didn’t beat about the bush. He was a busy man. He would be flying back to Moscow later that night.

  ‘May I call you Edward? You may call me Igor.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Barnard replied. ‘But I’d feel more comfortable sticking to Mr President. We British are pretty conscious of this sort of thing, and you are a Head of State after all.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Popov seemed mildly put out, but he rallied quickly. ‘Let me put something to you, Edward. When I’ve finished, you can say yes, you can say no or you can say maybe. But if I were you, I’d say yes.’

  For the next half-hour Barnard sat there as Popov outlined his proposal. Of course, he didn’t come to the punch line – the money shot, as it were – straight away. He put the whole thing in context.

  ‘Frankly, Edward, Russia at this point in time feels very aggrieved. I feel aggrieved. We went along with the break-up of the former Soviet Empire, and what did the West do? It tried to ram NATO down our throat. The European Union wooed Ukraine shamelessly. Did you ever look at the so-called EU–Ukraine Treaty? Garbage. Total garbage. For many Russians, Ukraine is still part of our motherland. Can we just sit there while they fire missiles at us from just across the border? But of course we don’t want a war. Not with anyone.’ Popov laughed. ‘Russia’s not rich enough to fight a war with the West. That’s right, isn’t it, Yuri?’

  Yuri Yasonov nodded. ‘That’s right, Mr President.’ Over years of working closely with President Popov, he had learned that it was always safer to say ‘yes’ when Popov was in full flow. You could try to row back later if you had to.

  ‘If we fought a war with the West, we’d be outgunned. That’s the reality,’ Popov continued. He drummed his fingers on the table to emphasize his next point. ‘America is sixteen times richer than we are in terms of GDP. We’re just a middle-ranking nation. And yet . . . and yet . . .’

  Barnard could see the man’s eyes misting over. What the hell was coming next, he wondered? Popov was working himself up towards the climax.

  ‘And yet, this is literally the largest country on earth. Even today in its diminished form, without its satellite states, Russia still covers one-sixth of the earth’s surface. You saw yesterday when you flew out here how vast this land is. Do you know there are nine time zones between here and Moscow? And think of the culture, the history, the literature, the music, the art and architecture. How the hell do they think they can treat us the way they do? For God’s sake this is Russia, the greatest country on earth! How dare they?’

  Popov was overcome by a sudden fit of coughing. ‘You take it from here, Yuri,’ he spluttered. ‘I’ve got to go anyway. Goodbye, Edward. I’m leaving you in good hands.’

  As Popov stood up, the ‘doughnut’ of security guards closed round him. An armoured car would be outside the hotel to convey him to the airport, Barnard was sure. Back in Moscow, the private lift which served the president’s office in the Kremlin was connected directly to an underground garage. But out here in the boondocks it was a different matter.

  Once Popov had gone, Yuri Yasonov took up where he had left off.

  ‘You should know, Mr Barnard, that I am speaking with the authority of the president when I say we believe there is a better way ahead for all of us. And at this particular moment in time, we believe that you personally have a key role to play.’

  Barnard frowned and gave a small shake of his head.

  Yasonov’s voice took on a firmer tone. ‘Let me be clear. For the last decade or more, you have been one of the leading lights of the so-called ‘‘Eurosceptic wing’’ of the Conservative Party. As I understand it, you have a lot of support among Conservative MPs. In spite of that, or possibly because of that, the UK prime minister Jeremy Hartley, has given you an important job in the British Cabinet.’

  ‘I don’t hold one of the “great offices of state”. Being head of DEFRA isn’t the same as being foreign secretary, home secretary or chancellor of the exchequer,’ Barnard countered a trifle nervously.

  ‘Don’t sell yourself short. Gennadiy Tikhonov, our ambassador in London, rates you very highly. As he puts it, you’re one of the players. What you do matters. It matters a lot.’

  Yasonov paused. ‘Please think very carefully before you answer my next question. In all your dealings with Jeremy Hartley, what was the single act, the single decision if you like, that most took you by surprise?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Barnard replied in a more assertive tone. ‘Wednesday January 23rd, 2013. The day Prime Minister Jeremy Hartley promised the country an In-Out Referendum on Europe. He was making a speech at the Bloomberg office in London. I listened to it on the radio. I couldn’t believe my ears. Speaking personally, I was over the moon. As Eurosceptics, we all were. We had been hoping for something like that – giving the country a say on the UK’s membership in the EU after forty years – but we never imagined we’d actually get it. A lot of us went out and got drunk.’

  ‘Why did the announcement of a Referendum take you by surprise?’

  ‘Politically speaking, it was quite unnecessary. The government wasn’t under any kind of threat. The prime minister wasn’t under any kind of pressure, and so at the time, however delighted I might have been in a personal sense, I simply couldn’t imagine why he had done it. Of course, Hartley made it clear later on in his speech that he would fight hard – “heart and soul” I think were the very words he used – to ensure that the UK stayed in the EU, but that wasn’t the point. The genie was out of the bottle.’

  Yuri Yasonov pushed a flash-drive across the table and after a pause Barnard surreptitiously pocketed it. ‘Take a look at this.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The eighteenth-century Kharitonenko Mansion at 14 Sofiyskaya Naberezhnaya, situated on the bank of the Neva River directly opposite the Kremlin, serves as the residence of the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Russia, properly known as the Russian Federation. It is probably one of the most important buildings in Moscow, not only because of its fine construction and setting, but also because of its beautifully crafted, ornate interior.

  A recent major overhaul and refurbishment had, so the UK security services hoped, removed the listening devices installed in the post-war years by successive Kremlin regimes. Unfortunately, the renovations had taken much longer than originally anticipated, the delay being due – in part at least – to fears that as the old bugs were being ripped out, new bugs were being installed, even though the workforce, comprising mainly ethnic minorities from Central Asia, operated at all times under close supervision. These fears were almost certainly justified. All ambassadors were officially warned before they moved in to assume that all their conversations in the Residence would be routinely bugged.

  They were also advised that the residence’s domestic staff – cooks, waiters, chauffeurs and so on – would most likely be in the direct pay of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Even those not actually on the FSB’s payroll were, it was to be assumed, able and willing to report to the Russian security services.

  Sir Andrew Boles, KBE, KCVO, the current ambassador, was not a man to be put off by minor inconveniences. He had served in Laos and Angola, as well as having spent a stint at the United Nations in New York.

  So when his old friend, Edward Barnard, MP, arrived for dinner one evening on his way back from the Russian Far East and the now famous tiger encounter, he greeted him with enthusiasm.

 
‘Great to see you, Edward! It’s been far too long. Julia’s out somewhere playing bridge, and the staff have a night off, but they’ve left dinner for us, I’m glad to say. Let’s go straight up to the small dining room.’

  Boles pointed at the ornate ceilings in the entrance hall, and the heavy wood-carvings on the stairs and walls; ideal places for eavesdropping devices of whatever sort.

  ‘Ah, the small dining room! Yes, of course!’ Barnard took the point quickly.

  The two men kept their conversation to the banal as they climbed the stairs to the first floor.

  ‘Pavel Ivanovich Kharitonenko, the man who built this house, was just a peasant when he started, you know,’ Boles explained. ‘But he became a great sugar magnate. The offices for his sugar factories were here and he decided to build a family mansion here as well.’

  As they climbed the grand staircase, Boles continued, ‘This mansion has hosted the British Embassy since 1931. Winston Churchill entertained Stalin here during the War. The Queen stayed here. And Princess Diana too.’

  ‘Ah, Princess Diana. What a wonderful woman. What a tragic end.’

  Barnard spoke loudly and clearly. If the FSB logged his visit as they certainly would, they would note the sympathy he had shown for the late Princess of Wales. Nothing wrong with that.

  The two men only got down to business when they reached their destination on the second floor. ‘Small dining room’ was a palpable misnomer, since the term was used to refer to a solid, cube-shaped construction, which sat incongruously in the middle of an otherwise empty reception room. The cube was clad in heavy, green material designed, so Barnard assumed, to foil any penetrating radiation.

  The ambassador swiped his card and the door swung open. It was, Barnard thought, a bit like a prison cell, and as sparsely equipped; the furniture consisted of a table, four chairs, a jug of water and some glasses.

  The room was well lit, but Barnard was intrigued to notice that there were no plugs or sockets of any kind. You can’t plant a bug in a socket, he thought, where there aren’t any sockets.

  ‘Do you want me to turn off my phone?’ he asked. Barnard knew that phones could be used as ‘microphones’ by distant listeners.

  ‘On or off, it doesn’t matter. You’re safe in here. You might as well be buried at the bottom of the ocean. The Americans call this a SCIF – a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility. That’s their jargon. We just call it our “safe room”. Of course, we’ve got a much bigger one at the Embassy in Smolenskaya Street. We use that for larger gatherings. This one’s just for my own personal use as ambassador.’

  If Barnard was intrigued, and possibly slightly alarmed, by the degree of precaution the ambassador seemed to be taking before talking to him, he gave no sign of it. He had known Boles a long time. Even though Boles had entered the diplomatic service while Barnard had gone into politics, the two men had often had occasion to meet, socially as well as professionally.

  ‘I need your help, Andrew,’ Barnard began. ‘As you probably know, I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time – almost on a one-to-one basis – with President Popov. I saw him at the Tiger Conference in St Petersburg where, I have to say, he performed brilliantly. I saw him again in the Ussuri forest on the tiger hunt, which ended, rather bizarrely with Popov firing a tranquillizing dart into Ron Craig’s backside.’

  Sir Andrew Boles uttered a short, explosive laugh. ‘Yes, we heard about that.’

  ‘Well, while Craig was recovering in hospital, Popov and I had a quiet dinner in the hotel. It wasn’t just the two of us because Yuri Yasonov was there.’

  ‘Ah, Yuri Yasonov. The power behind the throne.’ Boles commented. ‘One of the cleverest young men in Russia.’

  ‘He’s forty.’

  ‘I still call that young. I wouldn’t mind being forty again.’

  They got down to business.

  Barnard took the flash-drive out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of them. ‘I don’t want to be caught with this as I go through airport security, either here in Moscow or in London,’ he said. ‘So I’m just wondering if you could send it on to me in the diplomatic bag.’

  ‘Something hot then?’

  ‘So hot, I’m not sure how to handle it.’

  Boles picked up the flash-drive. ‘You’ve taken a look at this already, have you? Was that wise?’

  ‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t wise, but I couldn’t resist it. I stuck the stick in my laptop in my hotel room in Khabarovsk and ran quickly through the files.’

  ‘What do you think you have?’

  ‘Something pretty explosive, to say the least. There’s a cache of emails here, some with scanned documents attached. Most of the emails have either been sent to, or sent from, the Office of the prime minister in Number 10 Downing Street. They cover the period October 2012 to around August 2015.’

  ‘What’s so significant?’

  ‘The early part of 2013 was precisely when Jeremy Hartley was preparing his Bloomberg speech on Europe.’

  ‘Well, let’s take a look,’ Boles said.

  For the next hour, in the sanctuary of the safe house on the second floor of the Kharitonenko Mansion, Sir Andrew Boles and Edward Barnard MP ran through the documents on the flash-drive.

  From time to time, Barnard – who had the advantage of having already reviewed the material at his leisure – permitted himself a comment.

  ‘Remember how long it took for Hartley’s Bloomberg speech to materialize. Look, here’s a memo – dated November 2012 – from the PM’s Private Office to the foreign secretary’s Private Office. See what Humphrey Smallwood says, and Humphrey, as we all know, as head of the Private Office, doesn’t speak without the authority of the PM: ‘‘The PM is not, absolutely not, repeat not, inclined to include any kind of a commitment to holding a Referendum in his Europe speech’’.’ Barnard continued: ‘So one deadline passes, then another. Then suddenly, at the beginning of January 2013, things change.’

  He flipped quickly through a series of emails. ‘It’s not always clear who is writing to whom about what at this point. But what is clear is that something is going on. There are frequent references to “PM’s telecon with our friends”, whoever “our friends” are. Even though the language is usually very circumspect, there are a couple of emails here, which, in my humble opinion, are quite conclusive. Look at this one.’

  Barnard read out the text as it appeared on the screen in front of them: ‘Please note that this email is sent to Fred Malkin, Conservative Party chairman. “PM is prepared to settle for latest proposal, so we will aim to include appropriate reference in Bloomberg speech. Our friends are talking in terms of £10 million, possibly £12 million”.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Ambassador Boles was beginning to take in the full implications of the material on the flash-drive.

  ‘Look at this,’ Barnard went on. ‘Here’s the penultimate draft of the Bloomberg speech. It’s dated January the 14th. Still nothing about a Referendum. Now here’s the scanned version of the final draft with some manuscript additions. Can you read the handwriting? See what it says. “That is why I’m in favour of a Referendum”. That’s Hartley’s own addition to the draft speech. And in his very own hand. The text as delivered contains precisely the words Hartley personally added.’

  Barnard flipped though a few more slides, then shut the computer down. The screen in front of them went blank.

  ‘The rest is, as they say, history. Once the Bloomberg speech was made, an irrevocable step had been taken. Fifteen months later – in May 2015 – there would be a general election. The Conservative manifesto commitment on the Referendum was even more explicit, as I recall, than the Bloomberg commitment. It committed the Conservative Party, as it sought support in the country, to call an In-Out Referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union by 2017.’

  ‘So, no wriggle room there, then,’ Boles commented. ‘Let’s not beat around the bush. You’re suggesting that someone offered the Con
servative Party a sordid deal. Ten or twelve million pounds up front in exchange for a Referendum commitment in the manifesto. This is “cash for policy” on a grand scale. Why ever would the PM want to take the risk?’

  ‘Was it such a risk?’ Barnard countered. ‘I think Hartley calculated the Referendum commitment would help the Conservatives, but he never imagined they would get an overall majority at the next election. If the coalition with the Lib Dems continued, as he presumed it would, when the time came he could rely on them to kill the Referendum idea stone-cold dead. So basically it was money for jam. But then, when the Conservatives to everyone’s surprise won an overall majority, Hartley was stuck with the Referendum commitment and he had to deliver.’

  The two men sat in silence as they thought about what had just been said.

  The next day, back in London, Edward Barnard stopped briefly at his office to clear his desk and dictate his letter of resignation:

  Dear Prime Minister,

  With the Referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union now only weeks away, active campaigning about to begin and with the government and you personally being firmly committed to Remain in the EU, I feel I have no alternative but to offer my resignation as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

  I know you have granted Cabinet members on the Leave side permission to stay in their jobs and even to campaign actively against the government’s policy of staying in Europe, but this is not for me. I am a supporter of the Leave camp, and I do not see how it is possible to ride these two horses at once.

  I have much enjoyed serving as a member of the government.

  Yours, Edward Barnard

  He drove down to his Wiltshire constituency later that day. His mobile phone rang incessantly. Finally he turned it off altogether.

  His wife heard the car as the tyres crunched on the gravel. She came out to greet him.