Stanley Johnson: Kompromat

After all the excitement of that mad dash to Helsinki, Melissa Barnard decided to have a quiet weekend with her daughter, Fiona, and her partner, Michael Kennedy.

The Kennedys lived in a whitewashed fisherman’s house set above the harbour in a small village called Goleen on the South-West Coast of Ireland. On the Saturday before Easter they went to the pub for lunch.

It was a bright, sunny day, warm enough to eat outside. They were sitting there, at the table, while the seagulls swooped overhead, when a motor-boat came round the headland and made for the quay.

They recognized Jack Varese, of course. The whole world could recognize Jack Varese. The young woman with him, Melissa realized, was Rosie Craig.

Melissa rose. ‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed. ‘Can I introduce myself? I’m Melissa Barnard, Edward Barnard’s wife. This is my daughter, Fiona, and this is her partner, Michael Kennedy. What are you two doing here?’

‘The same as you, I imagine.’ Varese smiled. ‘Looking for a quiet weekend before World War III breaks out. Rosie’s father’s just been firing missiles at Syria, he’s thinking about bombing North Korea and we’re all wondering whether the Russians or the Chinese will retaliate. How’s Edward? I haven’t seen him since he got bitten by a spider in Australia. Has he recovered? Do you mind if we join you?’

‘Things were getting pretty hot in Washington,’ Rosie Craig explained as they sat there in the sun. ‘Quite apart from the geopolitics, I’m in the middle of a turf war with Bert Rumbold, so I said to Jack, “Let’s get the hell out of here”. We just flew over in Jack’s plane and parked it at Shannon. We’re staying at a hotel down the coast. They suggested we pop up here for lunch. Lent us the boat, so here we are!’

What a charming young woman, she was, Melissa thought. Yet there was an inner steel there too, by all accounts. Before coming to Washington, she had run a multi-billion dollar retail empire, and you needed more than a pretty face to do that.

Rosie Craig was fascinated to learn about Michael Kennedy’s work.

‘I grew up here,’ Kennedy explained. ‘Went to Trinity, Dublin, and then worked as an international maritime lawyer in London before coming back to Ireland.’ He waved his hand at the little harbour. ‘With the internet, you can work anywhere nowadays. This is heaven on earth. Mind you, I travel a lot. I’m going to be in Yellowknife next week. We’re trying to push through some new international rules to protect the Arctic. It’s a free-for-all at the moment and as the Arctic opens up with global warming, it’s going to get worse.’

Michael Kennedy couldn’t have found a better audience.

‘I’ve a personal stake in this,’ he told them. ‘Back in 1979, my father died in the Bantry Bay disaster, not far from here. An oil-tanker caught fire and exploded. He was on it. I was a kid at the time. Better rules could have prevented that accident. Forty years on, we still haven’t got the standards we need.’

Jack Varese chipped in. ‘Watch this space,’ he said. ‘Rosie’s going to win her battle back in Washington and a lot of the things you care about are going to happen.’

‘My father will listen to me.’ Rosie Craig replied. ‘I know that. But there are other ways of getting to him too.’

With that cryptic message, the golden couple jumped back into their boat and chuntered back up the coast.

‘Pity Rosie Craig didn’t run for office instead of her dad,’ Michael Kennedy said. He was clearly smitten. They all were.

Melissa followed through on Michael Kennedy’s line of thought.

‘Maybe she will run for office one day,’ she speculated. ‘If the US president for some reason has to stand down, doesn’t the vice-president succeed? That would leave a vacancy. Rosie could step in there as vice-president, then next time round she could stand in her own right. Finally, a woman president!’

‘But why would the president step down?’ Fiona Barnard asked. ‘He’s only just been elected.’

Mabel Killick, the prime minister, was sitting in her study in Number 10 Downing Street with her two closest aides, Giles Mortimer and Holly Percy. They had moved with her from the Home Office when she succeeded Jeremy Hartley as PM in the aftermath of the Referendum. What an extraordinary turn of events that had been, she reflected. First, David Boles, the justice minister, ruthlessly assassinates his Fellow Leave campaigner, Harry Stokes. Then, he plunges the dagger into his own breast, leaving Andromeda Ledbury as the only possible rival. Well, Mickey Selkirk soon did for Andromeda, the PM reflected. Maybe Andromeda had been too trusting. She had confided some of her most personal thoughts to that clever-clever duo, Molly and Tanya, from Selkirk News , only to see those thoughts splashed across the front page next day!

Bad luck, Andromeda, she thought. Best keep your gob shut. But good luck, too, since Andromeda’s withdrawal from the race meant she, Mabel Killick, veteran home secretary, was the last one standing when the music stopped.

Good old Mickey Selkirk, she thought, setting those two young newshounds on Andromeda like that. Hand on heart, she hadn’t had much to do with Selkirk before the Referendum. She hadn’t had much to do with the Leave campaign at all. She had been a Remainer then, a ‘shy’ Remainer as they called it. She hadn’t played a big part in the campaign. But she was an out-and-Out Brexiteer now. Last October, when she had only been prime minister for a few weeks, she had told the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and, by golly, was she going to deliver!

‘Quite soon it will be a year since we moved in here,’ she said to Giles Mortimer and Holly Percy. ‘We ought to have a celebration when the times comes.’

‘I’ll put the champagne in the fridge,’ Giles Mortimer said. He would be even more handsome, Mrs Killick thought, without that great black beard.

The two aides glanced at each other. The PM obviously had something on her mind.

In the good old days, you could fiddle around finding the cigarette packet, and a match or a lighter, then take a reflective puff or two, before coming to the point. But now they had banned smoking in offices and that applied to Number 10 as well. So Mrs Killick took the plunge without faffing around on the diving-board.

‘Remember that COBRA meeting I chaired?’ she began. ‘The one I set up to discuss the so-called Referendum dossier Edward Barnard brought back from Russia?’

The two aides nodded.

‘Of course we remember, Prime Minister,’ Giles Mortimer said. He glanced at his colleague. ‘As a matter of fact, Holly and I have sometimes wondered whatever happened to the enquiry you set up. I imagine Dame Jane Porter, the head of MI5, reported to you but we weren’t invited to that meeting, as I recall.’

There was a hint of reproof in Mortimer’s voice as though he felt disappointed, if not actually wounded, to have been excluded for such a key encounter.

‘You can’t be everywhere, Giles,’ the PM said sharply. ‘Though I know you think you ought to be. But you’re right,’ she continued, ‘Dame Janet did report to me. She said that the documents in the dossier were authentic . The narrative they portrayed was what actually happened: the run-up to the PM’s Bloomberg speech, the PM’s manuscript additions to the manifesto, late in the day, indicating his personal commitment to the Referendum. Those were all genuine, verifiable documents.’

‘What about the cash for policy aspect?’ Holly Percy asked. ‘I remember there was stuff in the dossier about huge cash transfers into Conservative Party funds in exchange for the Referendum commitment? Ten or twelve million pounds, as I recall. Were those documents genuine too? That was lethal, surely?’