Stanley Johnson: Kompromat

Mabel Killick kicked her shoes off (why did the press have such a fixation about her shoes?) and tucked her long, shapely legs beneath her on the sofa.

‘Please don’t imagine I wasn’t aware of the implications,’ she said. ‘But remember the timing too. We were days away from one of the most important votes in this country’s history.’

‘Prime Minister, I think you should be very careful about how you handle this one. You could lay yourself open to all kinds of accusations.’ If Giles Mortimer sounded portentous, he meant to. ‘From what you have just said, it sounds as though you were complicit in covering up a crime, or at the very least in failing to report your suspicions.’

Mabel Killick sighed.

‘I had it out with Jeremy Hartley the day after the vote,’ she said. ‘He had gone out into Downing Street that morning to announce to all the journalists that he had lost and that he was going to step down. But as you recall, he was pretty vague about the timing. It sounded as though he wanted to stay on at least until the party conference in October. So I said to myself: “This won’t do. This won’t do at all”. I asked to see him urgently at No. 10. Remember, I knew about the Referendum dossier, but the PM didn’t know I knew. We met privately in this very room. I told him that the experts were convinced that every single document in the dossier was genuine, and that included the additions in his own handwriting to the draft of his Bloomberg speech, back in January 2013, when he wrote: “That is why I am in favour of a Referendum”.’

‘What about the money?’ Mortimer asked. ‘What did he say about the money?’

‘I told him we hadn’t been able to trace the £10 million or £12 million paid by persons unknown in exchange for this Referendum commitment. We suspected it came from Russia but we couldn’t be sure. But the fact we couldn’t trace it didn’t mean the transaction never occurred. We were confident the Crown Prosecution Service would take the same view.’

‘Oh my God!’ Holly Percy exclaimed. ‘That must have been some meeting. There’s Hartley trying to adjust to the most humiliating defeat in his political career and you’re sitting there, threatening to put him behind bars. What did he say? Did he make a clean breast of it?’

‘On the contrary, he insisted he never asked anyone for money and no money was ever paid,’ he said. ‘The record of those financial exchanges was a crucial part of the Referendum dossier, but they were faked, in the sense that even though the correspondence bore his signature, no money ever changed hands.’

For the next few minutes, Mabel Killick explained to her two aides Jeremy Harley’s motivation as far as she understood it: how at heart he had always been a Leaver, how he needed to persuade Edward Barnard to lead the Leave campaign, and how the dossier was a crucial part of that.

‘As I say, Hartley strenuously denied receiving any money for the Conservative Party,’ Mrs Killick continued, ‘but he undoubtedly passed the dossier to the Russians so that they in turn could give it to Barnard. A brilliant move, actually, in terms of human psychology. Hartley read his man perfectly and recruited him without Barnard ever realizing what was happening. If Hartley hadn’t gone in to politics, he could have joined MI6.’

‘Not too late, I imagine,’ Giles Mortimer said. ‘I hear he’s looking for a job.’

They all laughed. ‘Let’s have some champagne now, anyway,’ the PM said.

Holly Percy’s eye fell on the PM’s copy of the Brexit dossier. ‘I’m not sure you ought still to have that, Prime Minister. That’s a numbered copy. We all turned our copies in after that COBRA meeting. That’s the instruction you gave us at the time.’

Holly put out a hand to pick up the file. ‘Please leave it, Holly. I think I’ll take it home tonight and store it in my scarf drawer. Might come in handy one day.’

There was mischievous look in the PM’s eye which Holly Percy had never noticed before.

‘Imagine our negotiations with our EU partners go terribly wrong,’ the prime minister speculated, ‘and we don’t get the deal we’re hoping for. Imagine that we face the prospect of being confronted by tariff and non-tariff barriers on all sides and at every turn. Imagine that the City of London is going into meltdown as key firms shift to Brussels, Frankfurt or Paris with all the implications that has for the tax base. Imagine that the United Kingdom itself looks like going down the drain because the Scots prefer to stay in Europe and maybe Northern Ireland prefers to throw its lot in with the South, rather than face all the turmoil a new hard border between Northern Ireland and Eire would create.’

Her two aides nodded their heads in unison. ‘Yes, Prime Minister, we are imagining all that.’

‘Well, then?’ the PM challenged, ‘what would we do?’

Giles Mortimer fell back on the standard response, beloved of politicians throughout the ages.

‘Well, obviously, we’re not going to answer hypothetical questions.’

‘Oh, come now, Giles,’ the PM reprimanded him. ‘You’re not on University Challenge . Do you need a few minutes to think about it? Shall I go and put the kettle on?’

The PM’s sarcasm was palpable.

Giles Mortimer was beginning to see what the prime minister was getting at.

‘What you’re saying, Prime Minister, is that it’s possible this whole Brexit business may be a total cock-up and there really isn’t any good option out there for us, there are no broad sunlit uplands waiting for us, and if that situation does arise, say eighteen months from now, we must just conceivably want to reconsider our decision to leave the European Union.’

Mabel Killick nodded. ‘Something along those lines, perhaps.’

Mortimer shook his head. ‘But that won’t work, Prime Minister, I can assure you. Parliament will never vote to withdraw our application to leave the European Union without a mandate, without the clear instruction of the people, and that would mean a second Referendum. And you’ve already ruled out a second Referendum. Categorically.’

Mabel Killick was not out to be deterred.

‘Just imagine,’ she said, ‘that the Electoral Commission had sight of that Brexit dossier. Over in the United States half a dozen Committees of Enquiry are looking into possible interference with the electoral process in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. If the Americans can raise all these issues, then why can’t we? I am sure the Electoral Commission, once fully apprised of the situation, would feel it had to look into the conduct of last year’s Referendum, and then who knows what might happen? Or what about some brilliantly enterprising individual, like Tina Moller, for instance, who won such a victory in the Supreme Court last year over Article 50? Damn nuisance, from our point of view. But you have to hand it to her – she had us running for cover. Imagine the situation if the redoubtable Tina Moller gets hold of that Referendum dossier and goes back to the Supreme Court to ask them to declare the first Referendum null and void.

‘Which way do you think the Supreme Court would rule? Don’t you think they might order, not a second Referendum, but a re-run of the first ? I’d put money on it.’

The two aides were gobsmacked. They had long admired Mabel Killick’s nifty footwork, with or without the kitten heels. But this was something else again.

Holly Percy raised the obvious objection. ‘But how on earth would the Electoral Commission or some Tina Moller figure ever get to hear about the existence of the dossier? After all, there’s only one copy left in circulation and you’re taking it home with you, to hide in it your scarf drawer.’