Stanley Johnson: Kompromat

‘I take that oath very seriously. So I want to tell you all, without beating about the bush, that we will probably be seeking search warrants as we pursue this case and those warrants may very well include the office or premises of the prime minister himself, as well as those of the chancellor of the exchequer and other concerned parties.’

Sir Oliver wondered, as he pressed on, whether he was laying it on a bit thick. Was anyone, he asked himself, really going to rush out of the room to warn Jeremy Hartley, the prime minister, and Tom Milbourne, the chancellor, to burn any incriminating documents as soon as possible?

Well, yes, he immediately reconsidered, it was precisely what they might very well do, unless he gave them the sternest possible warning.

How far, he wondered, had the stain and stench of corruption actually spread, if corruption was what they were dealing with? Were some of these actually in the room today implicated? He couldn’t rule that out. Indeed, at this point in the proceedings he couldn’t rule anything out.

‘Let me be clear,’ Sir Oliver laid it out for them in no uncertain terms. ‘If the authenticity of the material in front of you is conclusively established, then frankly we will be confronted with a scandal of massive proportions, a scandal which could – and I believe should – rock the government to its very foundation.’

Sir Oliver looked pointedly at the home secretary. ‘I imagine we would need a clean sweep at the highest levels of government, Home Secretary. Others would have to step in.’

‘The election lights on Fortinbras,’ Barnard murmured to himself. There were some lines from Hamlet he always remembered.

‘Good heavens, Commissioner, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Mrs Killick said.

She finally to Edward Barnard. Though he was no longer a member of the Cabinet, everyone in the room recognized the central role he had played in the current crisis.

For the next few minutes Edward Barnard summarized, as concisely as he could, the events of the previous few days: the World Tiger Summit in St Petersburg, the trip to the Russian Far East, the dinner in Khabarovsk with President Popov and Yuri Yasonov.

When Barnard had finished, it was MI5’s turn.

‘From the Russian point of view,’ Jane Porter began, ‘this must look like a win-win situation. They hand the tape to Edward Barnard, knowing that if it becomes public the prime minister is finished. And if Jeremy Hartley goes down the drain, his cause goes down the drain too. He is committed, politically and personally, to achieve victory for the Remain camp in the Referendum. If he is out on his ear and possibly heading for jail, and if these documents become public, the prospects of Remain winning the vote will suddenly look much thinner than they do today. Precisely the objective the Russians are aiming at. They are fed up with the EU. They would like to get rid of it. Brexit is off to a good start.’

‘So what do we do?’ Mabel Killick was beginning to sound impatient. ‘Do we just sit on this Referendum dossier and hope it doesn’t emerge before the next election? Do we pretend to the PM that we know nothing and suspect nothing?’

Sir Oliver Holmes stood up suddenly. He picked up his chequered cap and solemnly placed it on his head.

‘There is no way I could be party to that kind of proceeding. With respect, Madam Chair, you have only one possible course of action. And that is to investigate the documents as quickly and as thoroughly as you can. If those documents show, upon examination, that the prime minister has instigated or cooperated in illegal acts, then you have no alternative except to institute proceedings. That is my view now, and it will remain my view to my dying day.’

To say Sir Oliver Holmes stormed out of Room A of the Cabinet office would be an overstatement. But he certainly swept out majestically. The doorman saluted. What was going on in there, he wondered?

In the end, the meeting sided with Sir Oliver. His opinion, so strongly voiced, carried the day, even though he wasn’t present.

Mabel Killick summed up. ‘There will be no minutes of this meeting. I will not be reporting to the PM or anyone else. If the matter comes up, the agreed answer must be that the subcommittee met informally to discuss various logistical questions. That should be quite enough. As to the substance, I take it we are all agreed that that there will be an enquiry and I shall hold myself responsible, together with Sir Oliver Holmes, for seeing that such an enquiry is properly carried out and its conclusions are fully ventilated.’

The home secretary then walked briskly out of the room with her two aides.

The others followed her, looking around for their drivers as they emerged into the street.

Edward Barnard, who no longer had a driver, felt a momentary pang. He missed being a minister of the Crown and a member of the Cabinet. He had liked the feeling of being important even if, in reality, he wasn’t very important. Who was it who said: ‘nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all’? Whoever it was, was spot on.

When he got home, Melissa had a large drink waiting for him.

‘Cheer up, darling. You’re the leader now, leader of the Leavers. People are going to expect great things of you. At the moment, the government has everything in its favour. They’ve got the funding; they’ve got the BBC; the polls give them a clear lead. What are you going to do, Edward? You haven’t got much time to pull the rabbit out of the hat.’

Edward Barnard felt suddenly confident. More confident than he had felt in a long time, even when he was swaggering around with his ministerial red box.

‘I’ll take the dogs out before I come up,’ he said, as he reached for the whisky decanter.

Jang Ling-Go, director of Forestry and Wildlife in China’s Heilongjiang Province, was in a foul mood. He had just received an email from his superiors in Beijing which had completely spoilt his morning.

The email read as follows: ‘President Liu Wang-Ji returned recently from a trip to St Petersburg where he was attending the World Tiger Summit as the guest of Russian president, Igor Popov. President Popov belittled China’s conservation programme as regards Amur tigers, stating that Amur tigers crossing the Ussuri River from Russia into China were being hunted and killed. President Popov, in a separate bilateral meeting with Chinese President Liu Wang-Ji, pointed out that whereas over 450 Amur tigers were now living in Russia, part of Amur-Heilong eco-region, fewer than twenty Amur tigers are to be found on the Chinese side of the Ussuri. Please report urgently on measures taken within your area of responsibility to safeguard Amur tigers, including the fight against poaching and illegal killing of tigers.’

Jang Ling-Go didn’t have to read between the lines. The message was clear enough. China’s international prestige was at stake. President Liu Wang-Ji clearly felt he had lost face – and in a very public way – and he wanted something done about it.

One of the reasons for the director of forestry’s foul mood was that he felt Beijing’s criticism was unjust. Yes, President Popov was right to point out that there were far more tigers on the Russian side of the border than on the Chinese side; and yes he was right to say that the Chinese had – in the past – made a habit of killing tigers which came their way, trading their parts on the black market for huge sums of money. But things surely had changed. His department was urging farmers and villages in the region to protect and not persecute tigers. His department wasn’t always successful, of course. He had to admit that.

And this morning’s news didn’t improve the situation. A report had just come in that a tiger had apparently forded the river and killed livestock at a forest farm on the Chinese side of the border. Pugmarks found at the site of the skill suggested that the culprit was a large, male tiger. The villagers were roused and seeking vengeance.