Kompromat

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The plane from Xian landed as dawn was breaking. As a last gesture of goodwill to a departing minister, the government had laid on a car. Barnard scanned the papers as they sped west along the M4. He frowned. The Observer’s ‘Poll of Polls’ had Leave at ten points behind.

Harriet Marshall, director of the Leave campaign, was already waiting when Barnard’s car rolled into the drive of Coleman Court: the splendid Georgian house which Barnard had bought on first being elected for the South Wiltshire constituency.

‘Ni hao!’ Harriet said. ‘The wanderer returns!’

‘Hello to you, too!’ Barnard smiled at the young woman who held the door open for him and then helped him with his bag. He congratulated himself, not for the first time, on the fact that the Leave campaign had managed to tempt Harriet to join them. The financial inducement had not been impressive – Harriet Marshall could have earned a much higher salary in the City.

Harriet was a profound thinker, a high-level chess player, and indeed, by general repute, probably the cleverest woman in years to have made her name in politics. Not as an MP, but as a Special Political Adviser or SPAD.

She was also a superb strategist, with an ability to create – and then capitalize on – opportunities long before most people even realized they existed.

But she was far from easy to work with. In fact, she was notoriously difficult. Harriet made it abundantly clear that she thought most MPs were time-servers, jobsworths, interested in their own career and not much else. Even ministers, from time to time, felt the lash of her tongue. From her point of view, the people who were the ‘extremists’ were the people who lived in the Westminster ‘bubble’, who believed – for example – in an immigration policy that guaranteed free movement rights, even for murderers.

Harriet got results. She had seldom been on the losing side. She didn’t intend to be on the losing side now.

There was so much to do and so little time to do it.

The government had all the big guns. Tom Milbourne, the chancellor of the exchequer, was firing one broadside after another, using some convenient – and often heavily massaged – Treasury statistics. With Brexit, the chancellor argued, the economy would take a severe tumble. The National Health Service, staffed by foreign doctors and nurses, would collapse; crops would go unpicked in East Anglian fields owing to the sudden absence of migrant workers from the countries of Eastern Europe. One million Poles and half a million Romanians would vanish overnight. The country would go to pot.

The Bank of England, though legally independent, joined in the fun, producing economic forecasts or ‘scenarios’ of the consequences of Brexit, each one more alarming than the last.

This morning, when Harriet Marshall had her first meeting with Edward Barnard, now officially chairman of Leave, she showed no sign of being deterred by the size of the challenge they faced if they were to win on June 23rd.

‘Let’s give them a kick in the balls,’ Harriet said. ‘We’ll put out our own analyses proving that their analyses are wrong. We’ll say they are offering a diet of fear while we are offering a veritable smorgasbord of hope.’

‘Who’s going to crunch the numbers for us?’ Barnard asked. ‘We don’t have much money.’

‘We don’t need much money. We’ve got amazing technicians – top mathematicians and computer specialists – working on our database. We know precisely who to hit with direct door-to-door canvassing. And we’ll get the message out too via social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, that kind of thing. Did you know that Ron Craig has twenty million followers on Twitter? No wonder he’s leading the pack.’

‘I’ve met Ron Craig,’ Barnard said. ‘Last time I saw him was in a hospital in the Russian Far East. President Popov had shot him in the left buttock with a tranquillizing dart.’

Melissa Barnard brought them coffee and stayed with them while Harriet rolled out a large calendar and spread it on the table.

‘I’ve blocked in at least two major speeches a week,’ Harriet said. ‘Not in London, of course. We’re not going to win in London, so there’s no point in wasting a lot of time and energy there. And Scotland’s not friendly territory. The SNP is likely to outplay the Labour Party there, but both will be voting Remain.’

She got up, fumbling in her pocket for some drawing pins, and fixed a large map of the UK to the wall.

‘If we win at all, we’re going to win with English votes. People who like fish and chips, fly the flag of St George, go down to the pub for a pint on Sunday morning, and watch Coronation Street on telly.’

‘Oh dear,’ Barnard murmured. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be much good at winning over that kind of voter.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Marshall returned to her seat. ‘We’ve plenty of rabble-rousers gagging to sign up to our speakers list. I’m told that Harry Stokes, the mayor of London, or former mayor I should say, is ready to join us. That’ll be a tremendous coup.’

‘Are you sure he’s made up his mind?’

‘Of course, I’m not sure. I don’t suppose he is either. But that won’t necessarily prevent him taking the plunge.’

‘That is good news.’

Barnard felt suddenly much more cheerful. If Harry Stokes, the charismatic ex-mayor of London, decided to throw in his lot with the Leavers, that was very good news indeed. The mayor, whose ebullient exterior concealed a razor-sharp mind and a pronounced streak of political cunning, would be a tremendous catch. The best proof of that was the fact that he had won twice in the London mayoral elections. Given that London had voted overwhelmingly for the Labour Party in all recent General (as opposed to Mayoral) Elections, this was an incontestable example of Harry Stokes’ Heineken effect: the ability to reach parts of the electorate that others couldn’t reach.

‘Don’t get too excited.’ Harriet Marshall pricked the bubble with surgical skill. ‘Even with Harry Stokes leading the charge, it will be an uphill battle.’

She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. ‘Have you looked at the bookies’ odds recently? The betting is overwhelming for Remain. Look, Paddy Power is offering 5 – 1 on a Remain victory. The gap’s as wide as that.’

While Melissa fixed the coffee, Harriet looked at the calendar.

‘We’ve got fewer than one hundred days left before Thursday June 23rd,’ she said. ‘And we’ve got to make sure that every one of them counts. Speeches, rallies, TV appearances. We’re going to be flat out.’

‘Our job is to change the odds, then?’ Barnard said.

‘Our job is to win the vote.’

They worked on through the morning, pencilling in potential speakers on the spreadsheet and blocking off key dates on the calendar. At twelve noon, they took a break.

Melissa returned with glasses, tonic water and a bottle of gin. She poured a stiff one for herself, then – glass in hand – cast an eye on the spreadsheet and calendar.

‘But how are you going to use Edward?’ she asked Harriet. ‘I don’t see a lot of days blocked off for him? He hasn’t given up a Cabinet job to stand idly by on the sidelines while others fight the battles.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Harriet Marshall tried to calm her down. ‘You won’t have to cook your husband three square meals a day. He’s going to have his work cut out, I can assure you, if we’re going to win this one. Without your husband this whole exercise is doomed to failure. The Leave campaign will go down in defeat. The tide is flowing too strongly against us. And the government will ride that tide. They will throw everything they have at us. They will find ways of using government resources even when the rules say they shouldn’t.’

Melissa Barnard was following her closely. ‘So what do we do? How do we close the gap?’

Harriet ran her hand over her forehand. ‘Melissa – may I call you Melissa?’

‘Go right ahead.’

‘Imagine, Melissa, that you’re a contestant on Mastermind. Say you’ve picked Harold Macmillan as your specialist subject and John Humphrys asks you to quote one of Macmillan’s most famous remarks. What do you say?’

‘That one’s easy,’ Melisa Barnard said. ‘“You’ve never had it so good”.’

‘Quite right, Melissa.’ Harriet turned to Edward Barnard. ‘And what would your choice be?’

Barnard thought for a moment. Dear old Harold! He’d been up at Oxford in the 1980s, when Macmillan was chancellor of the university. He had seen the old boy one day, all togged up in his chancellor’s robes, presiding over the Annual Encaenia, Oxford’s grand prize-giving ceremony. Some young journalist had asked him – was it Jeremy Paxman? – what he thought was the most difficult thing about being prime minister. ‘Events, dear boy, events,’ the old man had replied.

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.