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?’
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.’