Kompromat Read online

  Harriet got results. She had seldom been on the losing side. She didn’t intend to be on the losing side now.

  There was so much to do and so little time to do it.

  The government had all the big guns. Tom Milbourne, the chancellor of the exchequer, was firing one broadside after another, using some convenient – and often heavily massaged – Treasury statistics. With Brexit, the chancellor argued, the economy would take a severe tumble. The National Health Service, staffed by foreign doctors and nurses, would collapse; crops would go unpicked in East Anglian fields owing to the sudden absence of migrant workers from the countries of Eastern Europe. One million Poles and half a million Romanians would vanish overnight. The country would go to pot.

  The Bank of England, though legally independent, joined in the fun, producing economic forecasts or ‘scenarios’ of the consequences of Brexit, each one more alarming than the last.

  This morning, when Harriet Marshall had her first meeting with Edward Barnard, now officially chairman of Leave, she showed no sign of being deterred by the size of the challenge they faced if they were to win on June 23rd.

  ‘Let’s give them a kick in the balls,’ Harriet said. ‘We’ll put out our own analyses proving that their analyses are wrong. We’ll say they are offering a diet of fear while we are offering a veritable smorgasbord of hope.’

  ‘Who’s going to crunch the numbers for us?’ Barnard asked. ‘We don’t have much money.’

  ‘We don’t need much money. We’ve got amazing technicians – top mathematicians and computer specialists – working on our database. We know precisely who to hit with direct door-to-door canvassing. And we’ll get the message out too via social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, that kind of thing. Did you know that Ron Craig has twenty million followers on Twitter? No wonder he’s leading the pack.’

  ‘I’ve met Ron Craig,’ Barnard said. ‘Last time I saw him was in a hospital in the Russian Far East. President Popov had shot him in the left buttock with a tranquillizing dart.’

  Melissa Barnard brought them coffee and stayed with them while Harriet rolled out a large calendar and spread it on the table.

  ‘I’ve blocked in at least two major speeches a week,’ Harriet said. ‘Not in London, of course. We’re not going to win in London, so there’s no point in wasting a lot of time and energy there. And Scotland’s not friendly territory. The SNP is likely to outplay the Labour Party there, but both will be voting Remain.’

  She got up, fumbling in her pocket for some drawing pins, and fixed a large map of the UK to the wall.

  ‘If we win at all, we’re going to win with English votes. People who like fish and chips, fly the flag of St George, go down to the pub for a pint on Sunday morning, and watch Coronation Street on telly.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Barnard murmured. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be much good at winning over that kind of voter.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Marshall returned to her seat. ‘We’ve plenty of rabble-rousers gagging to sign up to our speakers list. I’m told that Harry Stokes, the mayor of London, or former mayor I should say, is ready to join us. That’ll be a tremendous coup.’

  ‘Are you sure he’s made up his mind?’

  ‘Of course, I’m not sure. I don’t suppose he is either. But that won’t necessarily prevent him taking the plunge.’

  ‘That is good news.’

  Barnard felt suddenly much more cheerful. If Harry Stokes, the charismatic ex-mayor of London, decided to throw in his lot with the Leavers, that was very good news indeed. The mayor, whose ebullient exterior concealed a razor-sharp mind and a pronounced streak of political cunning, would be a tremendous catch. The best proof of that was the fact that he had won twice in the London mayoral elections. Given that London had voted overwhelmingly for the Labour Party in all recent General (as opposed to Mayoral) Elections, this was an incontestable example of Harry Stokes’ Heineken effect: the ability to reach parts of the electorate that others couldn’t reach.

  ‘Don’t get too excited.’ Harriet Marshall pricked the bubble with surgical skill. ‘Even with Harry Stokes leading the charge, it will be an uphill battle.’

  She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. ‘Have you looked at the bookies’ odds recently? The betting is overwhelming for Remain. Look, Paddy Power is offering 5 – 1 on a Remain victory. The gap’s as wide as that.’

  While Melissa fixed the coffee, Harriet looked at the calendar.

  ‘We’ve got fewer than one hundred days left before Thursday June 23rd,’ she said. ‘And we’ve got to make sure that every one of them counts. Speeches, rallies, TV appearances. We’re going to be flat out.’

  ‘Our job is to change the odds, then?’ Barnard said.

  ‘Our job is to win the vote.’

  They worked on through the morning, pencilling in potential speakers on the spreadsheet and blocking off key dates on the calendar. At twelve noon, they took a break.

  Melissa returned with glasses, tonic water and a bottle of gin. She poured a stiff one for herself, then – glass in hand – cast an eye on the spreadsheet and calendar.

  ‘But how are you going to use Edward?’ she asked Harriet. ‘I don’t see a lot of days blocked off for him? He hasn’t given up a Cabinet job to stand idly by on the sidelines while others fight the battles.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Harriet Marshall tried to calm her down. ‘You won’t have to cook your husband three square meals a day. He’s going to have his work cut out, I can assure you, if we’re going to win this one. Without your husband this whole exercise is doomed to failure. The Leave campaign will go down in defeat. The tide is flowing too strongly against us. And the government will ride that tide. They will throw everything they have at us. They will find ways of using government resources even when the rules say they shouldn’t.’

  Melissa Barnard was following her closely. ‘So what do we do? How do we close the gap?’

  Harriet ran her hand over her forehand. ‘Melissa – may I call you Melissa?’

  ‘Go right ahead.’

  ‘Imagine, Melissa, that you’re a contestant on Mastermind. Say you’ve picked Harold Macmillan as your specialist subject and John Humphrys asks you to quote one of Macmillan’s most famous remarks. What do you say?’

  ‘That one’s easy,’ Melisa Barnard said. ‘ “You’ve never had it so good’’.’

  ‘Quite right, Melissa.’ Harriet turned to Edward Barnard. ‘And what would your choice be?’

  Barnard thought for a moment. Dear old Harold! He’d been up at Oxford in the 1980s, when Macmillan was chancellor of the university. He had seen the old boy one day, all togged up in his chancellor’s robes, presiding over the Annual Encaenia, Oxford’s grand prize-giving ceremony. Some young journalist had asked him – was it Jeremy Paxman? – what he thought was the most difficult thing about being prime minister. ‘Events, dear boy, events,’ the old man had replied.

  That’s what Edward Barnard said now. ‘Events, dear boy, events. That’s the point you’re making, isn’t it? We need something to happen. Something that changes the odds in our favour.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Harriet Marshall said. ‘And we can’t wait for events to happen by themselves. We don’t have time for that. We have to make them happen. A tide, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune!’

  As she spoke, Harriet looked quickly out of the window as though she was waiting for something. Edward Barnard followed the direction of her glance and saw a huge red bus with the words VOTE LEAVE: TAKE BACK CONTROL emblazoned on its side. The bus paused by the gate, as though to check that it had arrived at the right place, then it turned off the road to pull into the courtyard of Barnard’s Georgian manor. Half a dozen young men and women began to disembark.

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ Barnard exclaimed.

  Harriet Marshall pushed back her chair. ‘That’s the Vote Leave Battle Bus,’ she said. ‘Just starting its first pre-Referendum tour: Wiltshire, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset. I’d sa
y people in the South West Region are natural Outers, but it’s good place to test the water, sharpen the message. Do we care about the NHS? You bet we do! Look at the side of the bus. What does it say? £350 million a week goes to Brussels. Let’s spend that money on the NHS!’

  It was the first time Barnard had seen the Battle Bus. Good God, he thought, this is really going to happen!

  ‘What about that £350 million figure?’ ‘Melissa asked. ‘Is that accurate? I thought we got some of it back in the rebate. And are we really going to spend it all on the NHS which is what we seem to be saying? I’ll believe that when I see it!’

  An icy note crept into Harriet Marshall’s voice as she replied. ‘This is surely the moment to be focussing on the broad picture, not quibbling about the detail.’

  Barnard shot his wife a warning glance as though to say: don’t upset this young genius. We can’t afford to lose her. Not now. Not ever.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go outside and meet the team.’

  That evening, after dinner, Barnard remembered the video. He found it in his briefcase, where he had put it on leaving Xi’an, and handed it to his wife.

  ‘Pop it in for me, darling, please. I never know which button to press.’

  Melissa Barnard inserted the disc into the player and they sat down to watch.

  Barnard recognized the presenter immediately: Professor Wong, the old man who had shown both him and Minister Yu around the site less than twenty-four hours earlier. The camera followed Wong as he walked along the rows of Terracotta Army images, zooming in from time to time on some significant detail.

  The video lasted for fifteen minutes. As the voice of the narrator faded, a message appeared on the screen. A huge headline proclaimed:

  ‘BREAKING NEWS. UK MINISTER FOUND IN COMPROMISING SITUATION.’

  ‘What on earth?’ Barnard spluttered into his drink. On the screen he watched the two blonde, Russian women get into the elevator with him in the Kempinski Hotel (he could almost smell the perfume, even now). He saw them enter the room with him, and then cavort on the bed . . .

  ‘I don’t think I want to watch this,’ Melissa Barnard said. ‘Please turn it off. I’m going to bed.’

  As his wife stormed out of the room, Barnard picked up the phone and dialled a number.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mark Cooper, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, answered on the first ring.

  ‘Oh, hello, Edward. I was expecting to hear from you, though not perhaps quite this late. I hear you had some interesting meetings in Xian with our friend Zhang Fu-Sheng.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘Hang up for a moment. I’ll call you back on another line. I have the number. It’s come up on my screen.’

  I’ll bet it has, Barnard thought. He was fairly sure that Cooper, when he called back, would switch through to the CX system, which the MI6 boffins claimed provided state-of-the-art security against electronic eavesdropping.

  Moments later, Cooper rang back. ‘Ah, that’s better.’

  The two men didn’t need to talk long. They were both professionals.

  ‘We’ll send a bike to pick the disk up first thing,’ Cooper said, rounding the conversation off. ‘Around 7:00a.m. Are you at home? How are the azaleas?’

  ‘Everything in the garden is lovely,’ Barnard replied. ‘Best time of year.’

  Except everything in the garden wasn’t lovely. Barnard knew he faced a grilling. He tried to reconstruct precisely what had happened that evening in St Petersburg? He remembered being in the bar at the Kempinski. He remembered talking to the two Russian women in the lift. But after that?

  Just because they were both members of Whites didn’t mean that Cooper wouldn’t put him on the rack.

  And, later that day that was precisely what Cooper did. He wasn’t some political appointee. He had worked his way up through the ranks during his career in the Secret Intelligence Service. He’d applied a few thumbscrews in his time. Metaphorically at least.

  There were four of them in the interrogation room. Mark Cooper had brought along his deputy, James Armitage, to enjoy the fun. Shirley Wilson, head of SIS’s China Desk, had been hurriedly briefed. So had Roger Wales, head of the Russia Desk.

  ‘You’ve all seen the material, haven’t you?’ Cooper began. ‘But it may be helpful to take another look now. Our technicians downstairs are looking at the original, but we’ve run off a copy for the purposes of today’s proceedings. I can assure you that copy will be destroyed when we’re through.’

  He turned to Shirley Wilson. ‘I’m sorry if you found some of the acts and actions depicted on the video to be distasteful and upsetting? I should have sent out a spoiler alert.’

  ‘Why just me, Mark? Are you telling me you chaps can handle that kind of stuff, but I can’t?’

  Cooper took the point. It had taken MI5 quite a while to put both male and female employees on an equal footing but they had got there in the end. Or hoped they had.

  ‘Point taken. Anyway, well, why don’t you kick off, Shirley?’

  ‘Okay, I will.’ Shirley Wilson turned to Barnard. She didn’t particularly like Barnard or the class he came from and she didn’t take the trouble to deny it.

  ‘So did you fuck those two Russian tarts, Mr Barnard?’

  Of course, Shirley Wilson was only following the standard interrogation manual. Throw them off balance, make them angry. You couldn’t strike them – not any longer. Not officially anyway. But there were other ways of hitting them where it hurts.

  Barnard was beginning to wonder whether he should have insisted on having a lawyer present. ‘Just a friendly chat,’ Mark Cooper had promised, ‘once we’ve had a chance to look at what you’ve given us.’

  Before he had a chance to reply to Shirley Wilson, Roger Wales chipped in. ‘This was classic Kompromat stuff, Mr Barnard. Ministers who go to Russia surely know the drill: don’t talk to strange blonde women in hotel lobbies. Don’t go upstairs with them. Above all, don’t go to bed with them. Why the hell did you do it? Were you drunk?’

  ‘I guess I must have been.’ Barnard sounded defeated. Totally defeated. Suddenly his world had been turned upside down. He wondered if Melissa would leave him. ‘The truth of the matter,’ he continued, ‘is that I don’t actually remember what happened. I admit I’d drunk a certain amount at the dinner in the Winter Palace. This is Russia, remember. And it was a festive occasion. Drinking is what you do, unless you want to give offence to your hosts. Then we came back to the bar in the Kempinski. Did someone slip something in my drink at some point? Perhaps. I remember being in the lift with the two women. I remember punching the button for the eighth floor. But after that my memory is blank, I’m afraid, totally blank. I admit it looks like it could be me on the bed there, though you can’t see my face.’

  Mark Cooper let it run on. The way he saw it, Barnard deserved to suffer, for being careless, if for nothing else. But he realized that it was time to call a halt. They’d all had their bit of fun. It wasn’t every day you had ministers, or former ministers, in the dock wondering where the next blow was coming from.

  ‘I’m going to get the technicians in here now. I’ve just heard they’ve finished their analysis of the video.’

  He pressed a buzzer beneath the table and two young men, one bearded, the other clean-shaven, entered the room.

  ‘Gentlemen, don’t keep us waiting. Are these tapes fake or not? If they are fake, fabricated or whatever, can we prove it? If the man in question looks like Mr Barnard, talks like Mr Barnard and fucks like Mr Barnard, can we plausibly say this is not Mr Barnard? If we can’t say – and say convincingly – that it’s not Mr Barnard, then the tapes can show up anytime, anywhere with devastating effect.’

  ‘I’m sure that my wife could be of some help,’ Barnard interjected, in a still small voice. ‘When Melissa had calmed down, eventually, she told me that she realized all along it couldn’t be me
. ‘‘Wow, Edward.’’ she said. ‘‘I’d love to think you could do all that, but I know you can’t!’’ ’

  It was a feeble joke but it served to defuse the tension. On the crucial issue, the verdict of the young technicians was clear. The tapes were fake.

  James the Beard explained: ‘The images of the two Russian ladies are genuine, no doubt about that. The image of Mr Barnard in the lift is genuine, though he is – it must be said – looking a bit worse for wear. The three of them appear to walk seamlessly into the room. But they don’t actually enter the room. Mr Barnard enters the room by himself.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure of that?’

  ‘We got in touch with Moscow as soon as those tapes came in to us. Our people there know the Kempinski well, and it’s not the first time they’ve asked our contacts for some CCTV output from the hotel. On this particular occasion, we knew the day Barnard had been there, we knew the time, we knew the hotel floor, and the number of the room: the CCTV clips they sent over to us earlier today tell the whole story. Barnard gets out at the 8th floor, but the two Russian ladies go on up to the 12th floor, the penthouse suite.’

  ‘And?’ Mark Cooper pressed him. ‘What next?’

  ‘There is no next,’ the other young man chipped in. ‘Mr Barnard goes to bed alone and wakes up alone. There are no shenanigans of any kind.’

  Edward Barnard felt so relieved he could have cried. Disaster had for a time loomed, but now help was at hand. ‘So who’s the chap in bed with the two Russian ladies, pretending to be me?’

  ‘He’s not pretending to be you, Edward, for heaven’s sake. He’s doing whatever he’s doing, then someone takes that image and makes out it’s you.’ Mark Cooper sounded irritated. Didn’t these politicians understand what they were dealing with? They used to say the camera didn’t lie. Balderdash. The camera lied all the time. You could scramble the pixels just like you could scramble eggs.