Stanley Johnson - Kompromat

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 say 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.

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.’