Stanley Johnson: Kompromat

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.

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.

‘What on earth has happened, darling? The press has gone mad trying to get hold of you. Apparently you’ve resigned.’

Barnard gave her a kiss, then hugged her tight. For years Melissa had been his rock and comfort. He needed her now. More than ever.

‘Yes, that is so. I should have done it long ago. In spite of what the prime minister said about me being free to campaign on the Leave side, my hands were tied. Official government policy is to Remain but now that I’ve left Office, I can do what I like.’

Barnard carried a large cardboard box from the car into the hall. The box contained personal papers from his office, framed photos of his wife and their two, now grown-up, children, and other small items of sentimental value, such as a porcelain polar bear from a famous Danish pottery, which he’d once been presented with when he addressed a conference in Copenhagen.

‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day.’

The Rt. Hon. Mabel Killick, who had been the United Kingdom’s home secretary for the unusually long period of seven years, decided to chair the meeting of the specially convened COBRA Security subcommittee herself. The name COBRA had, as a matter of fact, nothing to do with poisonous snakes. It actually stood, rather prosaically, for Cabinet Office Meeting Room A. Nonetheless, Mrs Killick enjoyed the connotation. Though cool, calm and collected for most of the day, the home secretary, if roused, was ready to strike and strike hard.

In summoning the meeting at short notice, Mrs Killick had given some firm instructions to Giles Mortimer, her chief aide, as to the cast of characters she expected to see.

‘We don’t want the full Monty,’ she warned. ‘Keep it down if you can. I’d like to see Jane Porter from 5 and Mark Cooper from 6 if they are available at short notice.’

When Mrs Killick spoke about ‘5’ and ‘6’, she was referring to MI5, the government department responsible for counter-intelligence operations (homeland security) and to MI6, Britain’s own espionage agency, the UK’s equivalent of the CIA. Until recently, MI5 and MI6 were officially non-existent and couldn’t be referred to. People who worked for them had cover jobs. If asked what they actually did, they were trained to give non-committal replies. ‘Oh, you know, this and that, one thing or another, here and there…’

In the last few years the agencies had come in out of the cold. There was no need any longer for the quiet ‘Psst!’ of recruiters on darkened streets and the whispered enticement: ‘Fancy a job as a spy?’ They even had websites. With the current wave of cyber-attacks, technically competent graduates were being enticed by attractive salaries and job conditions to join the fray on a new and challenging field of combat, the cyber battlefield.

Giles Mortimer smoothed his dark, bushy beard. In the early days of his career, well-meaning superiors had suggested that it might be a good idea to prune the luxurious growth, or even get rid of it altogether. But Mortimer had resisted all such entreaties.

‘People with beards are not all terrorists,’ he would reply. That was when he was being polite.

Actually, strictly speaking, Mortimer was the home secretary’s joint-chief of staff, since he shared the honour with Holly Percy. Together they made a formidable team. They were, so the press surmised, ‘fiercely protective’ of their boss and she in turn was devoted to them.

‘We had better have Sir Oliver Holmes, too, hadn’t we?’ Holly Percy said.

Sir Oliver Holmes was chief of the Metropolitan Police and therefore the man responsible for investigating, within his area of jurisdiction, crimes of every sort, including cyber-crimes. Tall, fit, and good-humoured, Holmes was within a year of retirement. It would be his job to pass incriminating evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service which would in turn have to decide how best justice could be served.

The home secretary saw Holly Percy’s point at once. ‘Yes, of course. There may be a criminal investigation; in fact I’d say there’s bound to be a criminal investigation. We don’t want ministers to get wind of this enquiry and start destroying evidence.’

Of course, both Giles Mortimer and Holly Percy knew which ‘ministers’ she was referring to.

Giles Mortimer had one last suggestion. ‘Why don’t we ask Edward Barnard to open the batting, even though he’s resigned from the Cabinet? We’ve had the ambassador’s report from Moscow. We have all had a summary of the material on the flash-drive. But surely Barnard can give us the flavour of the matter, not to speak of filling us in on his contact with President Popov.’

Mabel Killick sniffed derisively. ‘I think Barnard’s been doing a bit of off-piste skiing. But, yes, I agree it will be useful to have him.’

The special meeting of the Cobra Security sub-committee was set for 11:00a.m. and it began precisely on time.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Mrs Killick began, ‘I want to explain why I have called you together this morning. The reason is simple: as the minister responsible for all Home Office business, including security and terrorism, I suspect that we have experienced, and are possibly still experiencing, a major breach of security as far as communications in and out of Number 10 Downing Street are concerned. Of course, that is of great concern to me. It has happened and is possibly still happening on my watch.

‘But the issue we have to consider today has even wider implications than any breach of security that may already have occurred. Each of you has in front of you a bound dossier, in which my people have reproduced some of the most important and significant communications from what I am going to from now on refer to as the “Referendum dossier”. Each of these volumes is numbered. Please be good enough to leave the bound folders on the table when you leave this room.’

The home secretary permitted herself a little joke. ‘I have counted them all out, and I shall count them back in.’

Mabel Killick paused to give her next words the emphasis they deserved. ‘I cannot stress how essential it is that you should treat this material with the greatest discretion.’

She turned to the commissioner of police, sitting beside her. ‘Sir Oliver, perhaps you could take a moment to explain what we are dealing with in legal terms, in other words going beyond the security issues.’

‘Thank you, Home Secretary.’

As the highest ranking police officer in the country, Sir Oliver Holmes was proud to wear on his epaulettes the insignia of rank – the crown above a Bath star, above crossed tipstaves within a wreath. As much at home on a police horse as he was in a police car, he had placed his cap, with its chequered peak and distinctive silver braids, on the table in front of him when he sat down, and now he pushed it to one side.

‘My job, as you know, ladies and gentlemen,’ Sir Oliver began, ‘is to fight crime whenever and wherever it occurs. It is my duty to tell each and every one of you today that if you were to divulge to a third party information about what you read here today, or about the discussion which will shortly take place, you could be charged with aiding and abetting the commission of a serious crime, or with helping to conceal or cover up that crime, or assisting others to do so. I have absolutely no wish, as I come to the end of my career, to go out with a bang, but I have to remind you that when I took the Oath of Office on being appointed Commissioner of Police, I swore that I would discharge my duties – and I quote “without favour or affection, malice or ill will”.